How fuel efficiency could get us into trouble…

Ha ha ha - just when you think you’ve got it figured out…

From The Progressive:

The Myth of the Efficient Car
By Alec Dubro, February 2, 2009

Let’s get something straight about green industry: in its basic form it means we all have to buy new stuff … lots of it. As an industrial policy that will create jobs and increase spending, it’s pretty sound. As an environmental policy, it’s largely a fraud.

Nowhere is it more disingenuous than the pursuit of the fuel-efficient car. In their effort to stave off collapse of their industry, auto executives have continually cited their efforts are building the high-efficiency cars of the future. The problem is, there are no cars of the future, and the looming catastrophe of global pollution, including climate change, will never be solved by building more cars – efficient or otherwise.

We’d desperately like to believe that there is a way to preserve our car-centered civilization, while simultaneously placating the gods of atmospheric warming. Even the president-elect believes it, and Obama made fuel-efficient cars a central part of his energy policy. He promised a $7,000 tax credit to hybrid car buyers, aiming for a million plug-in hybrids, getting 150 mpg, by 2015. He wants to put an additional million completely plug-in vehicles by the same year. And he’s willing to federal funds up for research, or at least he was before we lost all our money.

Even on its face, this seems like a tepid response to climate change. At the moment there are upward of 250,000,000 registered vehicles in the United States – more than there are licensed drivers. Converting one percent or so of them to greater fuel efficiency is not likely to do very much in the time needed to act. Nevertheless, the hope is that introduction of a new generation of electric and semi-electric will eventually lead to a replacement of our entire fleet of gas-guzzlers. Maybe. But the bigger problem is that increasing fuel efficiency has never led to an overall reduction in pollutants. In fact, efficiency has always led to more production and consumption.

But there’s an even more profound problem with building more efficient cars. In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons discovered an efficiency paradox: the more efficient you make machines, the more energy they use. Why? Because the more efficient they are, the better they are, the cheaper they are and more people buy them, and the more they’ll use them. Now, that’s good for manufacturers and maybe good for consumers, but if the problem is energy consumption or pollution, it’s not good.

The so-called Jevons Paradox was resurrected in the 1980s by a variety of environmentalists and is occasionally referred to as the Khazoom-Brookes postulate or the more explicative rebound effect. It’s been neatly summarized as, “those energy efficiency improvements that, on the broadest considerations, are economically justified at the microlevel lead to higher levels of energy consumption at the macro level.” Or, in short, you make money on each transaction and lose it in volume.

The rebound effect is not an immutable scientific law, but it’s a widely observed phenomenon and has held true in the most energy-intensive consumer activities. The most commonly cited example is in lighting. As the Encyclopedia of Earth puts it, “For instance, if a 18W compact fluorescent bulb replaces a 75W incandescent bulb, the energy saving should be 76%. However, it seldom is. Consumers, realizing that the lighting now costs less per hour to run, are often less concerned with switching it off; in fact, they may intentionally leave it on all night.” I know I have at times.

The same effect has occurred with cars. Automobiles have become more efficient over the years. Led by the Japanese, carmakers have increased the fuel to weight ration, decreased damaging vibration and vastly increased reliability. In the 1950s, a car that lived to drive 100,000 miles was a rarity; today they routinely last 150,000. The result? Increasing fuel consumption. And not just because more people in the developing world are buying cars, either. People everywhere are buying more of the better, cheaper more efficient cars and – here’s the problem – driving them more. And that was even so when gas peaked there at $8 a gallon in Europe.

The real problem is, though, cars don’t move people, cars move cars. The average car or light truck is two tons or so: 4000-plus pounds to move 200 pounds of people. OK, everybody out of the SUVs and F-150s and into a nice, green Prius. However, the curb weight of an unladen Prius is 2765 pounds, which means a ton and a half around to get you and a bag of groceries home. Not good.

Environmentalists like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and green business advocate Paul Hawken have generated a lot of press with a proposed 100 mpg lightweight, plastic composite called the hypercar. But all the drawings of the hypercar very much resemble…a car. Tires, windows, bodywork, engine and drive train. Even if everything is paper-thin – something the public won’t easily warm to –you’re still driving five times body weight around.

Even if we were able to produce a 100 mpg, zero pollution vehicle, we’d still need to maintain the infrastructure of roads, bridges, and energy distribution. That means steel, concrete, asphalt and plastics. Just concrete production alone generates as much as 10 percent of all greenhouse gas. In 2007, the U.S. produced 95 million tons of cement by burning fossil fuels and, according to the EPA, is the third largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. (Scientific America, August 7, 2008) The production of asphalt – a petroleum product – also creates carbon. As does the production of motor oil, tires, and on and on.

And there’s another intractable problem: the very thing that makes tires so useful – comfort, stability, adhesion – also produces immense rolling friction. In order for us to makes cars that are maneuverable and relatively safe, they have to grip the road, which takes buckets of energy to overcome. One reason trains are able to transport people using far less energy per passenger mile is that there are fewer wheels per person and steel wheels have much less rolling friction.

Without divine intervention – which seems to be the basis for most energy reduction schemes – there is simply no way to maintain both the atmosphere and personal transportation. Even if the population were frozen at its present level, even if economic growth stopped the sheer number of people wanting – and under the present regime, need – personal transportation makes any plan to reduce car pollution by increasing efficiency is futile. The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

It would be better to do this in a measured and humane way, easing both automobile workers and users into a post-car world. It needs a societal consensus, requiring major shifts of goals and expectations, and few of us will take these steps on our own. But this change will eventually happen to us whether we like it or not, perhaps in time to stave off climactic disaster.

There are already attempts at designing a post-car future. City planners have been pushing the “20-minute neighborhood,” where home, work, shopping and recreation are all within a 20 minute walk. Places like Portland, Oregon, are encouraging this kind of development with planning codes and tax breaks. These more compact, walkable neighborhoods would seem to point us in the right direction, but so far they’re extremely limited. Most people prefer car culture. And that includes Europe, and certainly Asia, as well. Unless the various governments enact explicit and enforceable sprawl restrictions, growth will trump any specific increases in efficiencies.

The one step we ought to take right now is to withdraw our support – financial, political and emotional – from the pursuit of an energy-efficient car. We’d have better luck creating a perpetual motion machine.

Alec Dubro is a veteran Washington DC-based writer specializing in labor and nonprofits. He also publishes The Washington Pox (www.dcpox.com).

Real corn performs better than GM corn in response to climate change

Check out this article from the Organic Consumer’s Association for more details:

Organic Farming Beats Genetically Engineered Corn as Response to Rising Global Temperatures

* Food security and global warming: Monsanto versus organic
By Meredith Niles
Grist Magazine, January 14, 2009
Straight to the Source

Web Note: Here is a link to the abstract of the study if you just want a quick overview. The text of the actual study requires a subscription. Sorry for the confusion.

This week Science published research (sub. req’d) detailing the vast, global food-security implications of warming temperatures. The colored graphics are nothing short of terrifying when you realize the blotches of red and orange covering the better part of the globe indicate significantly warmer summers in coming decades.

The implications of the article are clear — we need to be utilizing agricultural methods and crops that can withstand the potential myriad impacts of global climate change, especially warmer temperatures. The article significantly notes, “The probability exceeds 90 percent that by the end of the century, the summer average temperature will exceed the hottest summer on record throughout the tropics and subtropics. Because these regions are home to about half of the world’s population, the human consequences of global climate change could be enormous.”

Whether you believe global warming is part of a “natural cycle” or a man-made phenomenon is irrelevant. The bottom line is that our earth is rapidly warming, and this is going to drastically affect our food supply. We must undertake both the enormous task of reducing our carbon emissions now to avert the worst, while at the same time adapting our society to the vast and multitudinous effects of unavoidable global climate change. Failing to do either will, as the Science article indicates, have dire effects on a large portion of our world’s population.

Determining the best course of action for ensuring food security in the face of global climate change remains a challenging task. Recognizing that climate change is slated to affect developing countries and small-scale farmers the most is a crucial point. Such understanding enables people to realize that viable solutions must be accessible, affordable, and relevant to the billions of small-scale farmers in the developing world. Unfortunately, it appears that some of the solutions on the table fail to meet these criteria.

Last week, Monsanto made a big public relations splash by filing documents with the FDA regarding a drought-tolerant GM corn variety it is developing with a German company, BASF. Monsanto claims that in field trials, the corn got 6-10 percent higher yields in drought-prone areas last year, but the release is extremely short on details. Regardless of the reality, Monsanto is presenting the corn as a way to help improve on-farm productivity in other parts of the world, notably Africa.

Yet, absent from the media hype were the many technical and social problems with Monsanto’s corn.

A little over a year ago, the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics held a conference specific to drought and drought-tolerant crops. As a follow up, the Australian government’s Grains Research and Development Corporation published a piece detailing the research shared and lessons learned from the conference. One topic addressed was the potential of GM drought-tolerant varieties. In the analysis stated, “The most notable and problematic (effect) is the tendency of drought-tolerant GM lines to not perform as well under favourable conditions. This appears to be the case for CIMMYT’s GM wheat and Monsanto’s GM corn. The flaw is a profound one. It amounts to shifting the yield losses experienced in dry seasons onto the good years.” In essence, farmers might get a small bump in yield during droughts, but will suffer yield losses when conditions are favorable. Considering that climate scientists continually point to increased erratic weather patterns as a symptom of global warming, this reality is clearly disastrous. Surely there must be better solutions that increase production under all weather conditions

One promising solution appeared in an article published in BioScience in 2005. The authors outlined the Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial, a long-term comparison of organic and conventional farming systems conducted between 1981 and 2002. Significantly, the trials found that organic production yielded equivalently to conventional systems after a transition period. Yet even more importantly, Rodale found that in drought conditions in which rainfall was 30 percent less than normal, organic systems yielded 28 to 34 percent higher than conventional systems. Rodale equates the yield gain to increased water retention as a result of higher soil organic carbon. Water volumes percolating through the various systems were 15-20 percent higher in the organic systems as compared with the conventional systems over the 12 year period.  Read the rest…

It’s now illegal to idle outside of schools in NYC

Submitted by Elizabeth Carter on Thu, 2009-01-29 14:29.

On Wednesday, the New York City Council passed a bill making it illegal to idle outside a school for more than a minute. In an effort to cut pollution and ease the asthma epidemic (a major public health issue for the city’s school-aged children), the fine for violating this measure would be $100.

Previously, idling outside of schools and elsewhere was limited to three minutes, mostly enforced by the Department of Environmental Protection and applied to diesel-powered commercial vehicles instead of passenger cars. Council members noted that even though this law and other anti-idling regulations have been in effect for years, enforcement has been inconsistent and lax.

The new rule reduces the amount of idling time permitted in a school zone to one minute and includes a companion measure that provides the NYPD, the Parks Department, the Sanitation Department and the Department of Environmental Protection with the explicit authority to impose fines. Mayor Bloomberg plans to sign both bills, which will take effect after 90 days.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn noted that the bill simply requires parents to turn their engines off while waiting for their children. In addition, citywide anti-idling laws will likely be enforced to a greater degree as a result of these measures.

Photography of Edward Burtynsky

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ has amazing photography depicting ways we have changed the world’s landscape.  I seriously suggest checking out his work. Here are some examples:

now’s a good time for installing solar panels and wind turbines

From the Wall Street Journal:

1/4/09 12:28 PM
How to Save on Home Heating and Electricity - WSJ.com
By MARTIN VAUGHAN

Thinking about energy upgrades for your home in 2009? The good news is that the array of federal and state incentives to make your home more energy efficient has never been greater. The bad news, of course, is that strapped consumers in a weak economy may not have a lot of cash or home equity to use to leverage the credits.
The past year’s volatility in energy prices turned a lot of attention to alternative sources of home heating and electricity. To help spur interest in alternative energy, Congress extended and expanded federal tax benefits in October, with several new provisions set to take effect Jan. 1.

With a recession under way, many companies marketing alternative-energy systems or home-efficiency improvements aren’t seeing a rise in demand for their offerings. “A lot of consumers are sitting on their wallets and waiting to see how things pan out. Whether it’s Christmas presents or energy retrofits, there’s not a lot of money being spent,” says Steven Nadel, executive director of the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. But the extra tax savings make it worthwhile for energy-conscious homeowners to take a closer look, especially given continued uncertainty in natural-gas and heating-oil prices. Some states have sweetened the pot with rebates for energy- efficient heating and cooling systems. And with planning, taxpayers may be able to carry over some of the credits.

Solar Power
The most generous of the new provisions is a tax credit for installing home solar- power systems. Until now, the federal tax credit for residential solar systems was capped at $2,000. Starting Jan. 1, homeowners can claim a full 30% of their installation costs for new residential solar-power systems, with no cost cap. If you live in a state with a rebate program, such as California, Connecticut, New York or New Jersey, the state will kick in thousands of dollars more toward your installation cost.

According to Barry Cinnamon, CEO of solar-system installer Akeena Solar Inc., a three-kilowatt rooftop system in California would cost in the neighborhood of $24,000. State rebates would total $5,000, plus a 30% tax credit on the remaining $19,000 would get the upfront cost down to $13,300, he says. “Now you’re into a 6½-year payback period [for energy savings to pay off the system's cost], even if electricity costs don’t go up,” says Mr. Cinnamon. “The economics have never been better.” But, he adds, “Commercial and residential customers don’t have the money to borrow right now.”

Read the rest here.

Passive heating of homes

Here is an article from the NY Times about passive solar heating.

December 27, 2008
The Energy Challenge
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.

Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”

There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.

The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world.

The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.

Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.

The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.

“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.

Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Read more »

gulf states looking for green options

From the NY Times:

January 13, 2009
Gulf Oil States Seeking a Lead in Clean Energy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.

Gasoline sells for 45 cents a gallon. There is little public transportation and no recycling. Residents drive between air-conditioned apartments and air-conditioned malls, which are lighted 24/7.

Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. Read more »

More on NYC watershed

I think the more aware we are of this situation the better.  I suggest everyone contact the mayor, etc and let everybody know that we want the watershed protected.

From Pro Publica:

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica - August 6, 2008 7:30 am EST

Fractured Relations - New York City Sees Drilling as Threat to Its Water Supply

New York City officials have demanded a ban on natural gas drilling near upstate reservoirs because they fear the drilling could contaminate the city’s drinking water.

The Ashokan Reservoir is part of the city’s Catskill water supply system. (Credit: Jim McKnight/AP Photo)

They’ve asked the state Department of Environmental Protection to establish a one-mile protective perimeter around each of the city’s six major Catskill reservoirs and connecting infrastructure — a buffer that would put at least half a million acres off-limits to drilling. They also want to wrest more regulatory control from Albany.

New York is one of just four major cities in the United States with a special permit allowing its drinking water to go unfiltered, and that pristine water comes from a network of reservoirs and rivers in five upstate counties. If the special permit was revoked, the city would have to build a treatment facility that could cost nearly $10 billion, said Walter Mugden, a senior official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That’s roughly what the state estimated it would earn from gas development over the next decade.

In a letter [1] (PDF) from the city Department of Environmental Protection to state officials, obtained by ProPublica, commissioner Emily Lloyd said she was not satisfied with the state’s assurances that the environment would be protected from drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a layer of rock that dives up to 9,000 feet below much of the Appalachian east, including south central New York state and the 2000-square-mile watershed.

The letter doesn’t offer any specifics on how drilling might taint the city’s water or explain the basis for the one-mile buffer, but it made clear that as guardians of New York’s water, city officials view drilling as a serious threat to the tap water supply for nine million downstate residents. It could involve thousands of gas wells producing billions of gallons of toxic wastewater.

“If you are ranking areas of concern that need extremely careful protection [the New York watershed] would have to be at the top of anybody’s list,” Mugden said. “More than half the state…depends on that watershed on a daily basis.”

Commissioner Emily Lloyd expressed her dissatisfaction with state officials’ assurances that the city’s watershed would be protected from drilling in the Marcellus Shale in a letter obtained by ProPublica. (Credit: Edward Reed)

Lloyd asked that a state, city and federal working group be formed to reassess regulations in the watershed and to recognize it “as a unique resource requiring special protection.” She called for the city to be given a say in the state’s permit review process, and for the public to be allowed to comment on each well’s permit, something that is not guaranteed now.

The Marcellus Shale is among several large new gas reserves in the United States that have become economically viable in a time of record oil and gas prices. Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State University, believes it could meet all the nation’s natural gas needs for two years. The Department of Environmental Conservation, which oversees exploration, has estimated that Marcellus development could add as much as a billion dollars a year to the state’s anemic economy.

Still, the environmental consequences of developing Marcellus wells on a large scale could be severe. Getting the gas involves a process called hydrofracking [2], or shooting millions of gallons of water and drilling chemicals at explosive pressure deep underground to break up the rock, and drilling the Marcellus would require more water than most other types of drilling. The identity of the chemicals, which are sometimes toxic, is protected as a trade secret, making it difficult to assess how wastewater can be safely treated and discharged. Drilling in other states has resulted in more than a thousand wastewater spills that have affected drinking water.

An investigation last month [3] by ProPublica and WNYC public radio found that New York state had not adequately assessed the environmental risks and did not have a complete regulatory structure in place to determine where the immense amounts of water used would come from, or how it would be disposed of after it was used. It found that New York state did not know the chemical contents of the drilling fluids that industry would use, and was not aware of the level of contamination in other states.

Last week Gov. David Paterson ordered the DEC [4] to update the 16-year-old environmental impact assessment it was relying on and pledged to require the industry to disclose the chemicals it uses. But he did not promise to stop drilling from going forward in the meantime.

Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said the city’s worries are unfounded because the wastewater will be managed and is regulated under state law. “I don’t see this hypothetical risk to New York’s drinking water as realistic at all,” he said.

The city was not brought into the gas drilling conversation until mid-July, even though state officials had been working on the issue for seven months. The city sent a letter to state officials raising concerns about a new well-spacing bill that was before the governor, and Lloyd requested special consideration for the watershed a few days later.

Both the state and the city have tried to keep their negotiations private. A DEC spokesman said the agency works closely with the city, and the city responded in kind.

“DEC has given us every assurance we have asked for,” Lloyd said through a spokesperson Friday, “…that the environmental review will be very stringent, that we will be at the table throughout the process, and that protecting water quality is their first priority as well as ours.”

Councilman James Gennaro, chairman of the city’s Environmental Protection committee, is calling for a moratorium on drilling in the Catskill watershed. (Credit: John Smock/AP Photo)

James Gennaro, a New York City councilman and chairman of the city’s committee for environmental protection, wants the city to go further. He is calling for a complete moratorium on drilling anywhere in the Catskill watershed, which provides 90 percent of New York City’s water and also makes up the heart of the Marcellus deposit. He said he will ask the EPA to conduct its own study of the threat drilling poses to the city’s drinking water.

“I just don’t think it’s a proper activity for an area which is the city of New York’s most precious capital asset,” he said. “I think it poses a risk. I think they are going to say quite candidly that it is a problem. Let the federal government go on record.”

The face-off pits the city’s interests against the broader economic needs of the state, so its solution may not be simple, according to Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gas leases are selling for as much as $3,000 an acre in parts of the state with stagnant economies.

The historic upstate-downstate friction can be attributed at least in part to the controversy over New York City’s acquisition of the watershed lands in the early 1900s, Goldstein said. “Those were pure eminent domain takings; thousands of residents were moved, towns were relocated, cemeteries dug up and bodies reinterred. Obviously some tensions have remained.”

Goldstein said New York City may have the law on its side, because public health code gives it the power to set and enforce any pollution controls in the watershed. But unilateral action would be a last resort. Instead, the city is more likely to search for a cooperative solution that leaves the door ajar for upstate economic growth while still saving the city’s water.

“You could say that from a legal standpoint they have authority,” Goldstein said. “How and whether they might choose to use it is another question.”

Genetically modified pig… mmmm

This gourmet.com article has a great article about genetically modified meat:

Barry Estabrook
Politics of the Plate: Are You a Pig? Or are You a Mouse?
12.02.08

Sometime soon, possibly early next year, America’s factory farms could begin producing a new hog breed that will have to answer, “neither,” or perhaps more accurately, “both.”

L ate last month the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) closed the comment period on guidelines that will pave the way for agribusiness to introduce genetically engineered (GE) animals into the nation’s food supply. According the Toronto Star, the so-called Enviropig, developed by Cecil Forsberg, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, may be one of the first bioengineered critters to stride from the laboratory to the barnyard.

Although Enviropigs look no different that the Yorkshires from which they were derived, they carry a mouse gene that makes them produce feces that are less environmentally damaging than those excreted by a normal pig. This is a potential boon for factory hog producers, who face the perennial problem of dealing with hundreds of tons of waste.

Forsberg says that the mouse DNA allows his brave new oinkers’ digestive systems to produce an enzyme that processes plant phosphorous more efficiently, leaving 60 percent less of the chemical (which produces toxic algal blooms in waterways) in their waste. The newspaper states that he has already submitted “reams of research” to the FDA. His chemical analysis shows that the composition of meat from an Enviropig is the same as that of ordinary pork, and none of the mouse genetic material is found in cuts such as the ham, chop, loin, or shoulder.

Under orders from the outgoing administration, the FDA is hellbent on pushing GE foods onto our dinner plates, despite recent studies that have raised serious concerns about potential harmful effects from eating them, and warnings from groups such as the Center for Food Safety about the total lack of long-term information on GE food in the diets of humans or animals.

Forsberg is more worried about consumer acceptance than bureaucratic approval. “The big question used to be ‘Can we do it?’” he told the newspaper. “Now, it is ‘If we produce it, will they eat it?’”

The FDA is doing its best to eliminate that problem. The proposed guidelines stipulate that retailers will not be required to label GE meat. So the answer to Forsberg’s question is “They will eat it if they don’t know what it is.”

GE mouse chops, anyone?
The Right Way to Farm Fish

Australis Aquaculture achieved seafood’s trifecta of sustainability this week. The Australian company earned a “Best Choice” ranking in the Blue Ocean Institute’s Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood for its farmed barramundi, a white-fleshed Australian species that it raises in Massachusetts.

The company had already earned the same status in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch guide and Environmental Defense’s Seafood Selector.

“Australis’ farming operation in the U. S. appears to have minimal impact on the surrounding environment, efficient conversion of ‘food to fish’ and an innovative closed re-circulating system that recycles water, prevents fish escapes and disease, and reduces waste. Plus, chemicals like antibiotics and hormones are never used,” Blue Ocean’s Alan Duckworth said in a release.

I wonder if the news reached the folks over at the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board? Last week, they caved in to industry pressure by approving regulations that would allow open-water salmon farms to be certified as “USDA Organic.”

Farmed salmon score a reverse trifecta, ranking at the very bottom of sustainability lists and possessing none of the positive attributes Duckworth cites. Someone needs to point out to the USDA that there are good ways to farm fish. Open-water salmon operations are not one of them.

Farewell, My Subaru

Lewis went to school with this guy.