Lucky White Girl

Rich countries to poor countries: Don't try to become wealthy like us, stay where you are & we'll pay you to deal with the effects

I was reading the paper this morning, saw something stupid on the back page of the Opinion section, assumed it was some US-centric conservative talking and didn't think anything of it until I saw it was wasn't written by some US-centric conservative but Bono! Yes, that Bono of U2 fame.  Generally, a good guy, right?  Well, he sure dropped the ball on this one:

In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now.

One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.)

So the "developed" (i.e. rich) world says to the poorer countries, don't try to become wealthy like us, instead stay poor, let us keep consuming more than our fair share of the world's resources and we'll pay you to deal with the effects of that imbalance.

Um, yeah, see, this is a perfect example of two things:

1. This is why, as a general rule, we shouldn't trust people from the top to make good decisions for the people on the bottom.  Even with the best of intentions, they don't understand the system as well.  

and

2.  Whenever the solution to the problem looks like an easy way out, not challenging the status quo or requiring us to rethink our standard way of operating in the world, that's a signal that we should look again and see if this is really a good solution to the problem.  Bono's idea doesn't require Westerners to change the way we (20% of the world) consume a disporportionate share (80%) of the world's resources and that's a problem.  The point is not to find ways to prop up an unfair system.  The point is to change the unfair system that is harming most of the world's people and the planet itself in order to benefit a tiny minority.

The system we have now is not working and nothing short of a complete overhaul of it is going to help.  Be suspicious of any solution that seems cheap, quick or easy.

No tomatoes in January, no oranges in July: Some thoughts on U.S. agriculture

Like lots of my friends, I've fallen victim to this little game on Facebook called "Farmville".  It's one of those virtual worlds, in this, a farm.  You plant seeds and in a certain period of time you get to harvest the crop.  You can building a whole farm with cows and chickens and barns and houses.  There's no point to it other than to keep you coming back to play the game (if you don't harvest your crops in a certain time frame, they wilt and you lose the "investment") but lots of us find these sorts of things addictive and I'm apparently one of them!

I was thinking about something though today as I planted pumpkin seeds on my little virtual farm.  When you buy the seeds, it will tell you how many coins you need to buy them, how much you'll get from the harvest and when they'll be ready.  Some take only a few hours, others take days.  You also have to earn a certain amount of experience in order to buy certain kinds of seeds.  Today I finally earned enough experience to buy pumpkin seeds and I noticed the time frame for harvest is 8 hours.  Having grown pumpkins before in real life, I know that they're a slow crop.  I think they take at least 3 months to mature. 

I thought the Farmville game would be cooler if the harvest times were based on real life, which made me think that the game has all sorts of possibilities to make actual political statements on food policy.  It could make wheat, soybeans and corn really cheap for example and inflate the profit margins on them because the US government gives subsidies for growing those things (if you're a big enough operation) while other fruits and vegetables like eggplant and squash --things that aren't turned into processed "foodstuffs"-- languish. 

What would be even cooler is if it took your geographical location and put that into the equation too, making the orange trees grow well in Florida but whither and die up north.  You could try to plant a cherry tree in south Florida for example but it wouldn't grow as well and you'd make less profit from it (probably would lose coins overall).

Think how useful this would be for teaching people about their local food-sheds!  I'm amazed at how many people will buy tomatoes in January in the U.S. because they don't know that tomatoes are a summer fruit and what they're buying at that time of year comes from the southern hemisphere, having traveled thousands of miles, and burned up who knows how much fossil fuel to get halfway across the world to their dinner table in Michigan where they'll bite into it and think 'this thing is tasteless".

Thinking of it that way, I realize the Farmville game already is political.  It reinforces the notion that our food comes mostly from happy cows on small family farms that grow a variety of crops like the ones we're building in our virtual worlds.  In reality U.S. agriculture is nothing like that.  It's mostly giant agri-businesses who plant thousands of acres in a single mono-crop (usually corn, soybeans or wheat) and grow cows on feedlots that never eat a blade of grass much less romp happily through green pastures.  The farms like the ones on Farmville are a tiny minority these days and most are struggling to survive.

Eating is one of the most basic things of life and it's interesting when you think about it, to realize how far we've gotten from something so basic as knowing where our food comes from (or even what "food" is for that matter: is food something like cheese or is it a Cheeszit?).  Most of these ideas of course are more developed in Michael Pollan's great book The Omnivore's Dilemma.  I think it's one of the most influential books I've ever read.  If you haven't read it, you should.  Or take a short-cut and see the film Food Inc.

I'm still playing Farmville on Facebook but more and more it makes me think about the differences between the game and the reality we've created for ourselves in real life.  Definitely something to think about.

The problem with humans

If you had to narrow it down, the problem with human beings is this: we are notoriously short-sighted in our thinking.  We just can't think in large enough spans of time.  Ask us to think about any given concept over the span of oh, say, 50 years from now is a stretch.  100 is really asking a lot.  500?  Forget it.  At the same time our technological know-how has sky-rocketed so now we can do things, design things, build things, implement things --BIG things-- that certainly have those sorts of life-spans with the potential to still be affecting the world far off in the future. A friend of mine adds, "we can also break things, move things, change things on a big/long scale. Mountaintops.  Underwater background noise.  The ozone layer. Bazillions of barrels of oil."

And nuclear waste. Know what the half life of uranium 235 (the stuff in spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors) is? 704 million years. Here's a good fact sheet on it from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.  Know how many nuclear reactors the world has?  Over 400 in operation. 

What do we going to do with all this stuff?  According to Environment Canada, “true walkaway disposal methods are unlikely to be possible, given the long time periods (a minimum of 250,000 years) for which the longer-lived radionuclides would have to be isolated from the soil, air, and water." Source: Canada vs. the OECD: An Environmental Comparison.  Lord, have mercy!

All this I've said before. But another aspect of it struck me the other day.  George Lakoff --you know that guy who's so good at explaining the differences in how liberals and conservatives think and wrote that book, Don't think of an Elephant-- recently wrote a guest post on 538.com.  It's a great post, you should go read the whole thing; he's talking about "seven crucial intellectual moves that [he] believe[s] are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute" but for now check out #6: systemic causation and systemic risk.  He says:

Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences

They don't think about systemic causes (if they did, they'd be called "liberals") but what are the two most pressing problems facing our generation right now?  The global economic meltdown and global warming!   These things are systemic.  You can't think of them as a product of any one process; by their very nature they are systemic problems.  Lakoff says this causes some serious conundrums for conservatives but there's also this: what if --just what if-- having to deal with these two huge, systemic problems gets us humans to finally start thinking about the consequences of our actions in a larger time frame?  What if these two crises fundamentally change the way we think?  Wow!  How cool would that be?  That is, if we survive.

Chemical food is not cheap

I found this article on Alternet today that echoes something I've been thinking about lately: how to describe non-organic food in a way that more accurately captures what it is.  The word "conventional" as Will Allen states, brings to mind "safety" and "normalcy" --two things that couldn't be further from the reality of the agribusiness method of producing food.  So I've started calling non-organic foods, chemical foods.  Why?  Allen explains:

Is food called "conventional" grown and processed with chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic manipulation? Yes it is...

Clearly, something in our food system has gone terribly amiss since a majority of the food is loaded with poisonous pesticides, laced with antibiotics and hormones and infused with genetically modified growth hormones or genes from rats, bacteria, viruses and antibiotics and then -- through some bizarre logic -- labeled "conventional...

Corporations call chemical food "conventional" to conceal the fact that the food they produce is grown with the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

The rest of his article explains the various subsidies that US agribusiness has won in order to make chemical food "cheap".  At least in the checkout line.

The Grand Delusion

James Howard Kunstler has a thought-provoking editorial in Sunday's Washington Post about how delusional we (USians) are being when we keep talking about looking for "solutions" to the energy crisis (hybrid cars; other potential Iraqs awaiting invasion) without admitting that the way we've structured our society over the past 50 years has been --will be-- our biggest downfall. 

While it'll probably be argued that he's oversimplifying the global food crisis a bit, his main point should cause quite a bit of soul-searching amongst those who plan to be around on this planet over the next few decades.  In the short term: without cars or airplanes, he asks us to imagine how important our passenger rail system --yeah remember that?!-- will become in the near future.  I imagine long-distance travel becoming nearly as difficult as in horse-n-buggy days!  Definitely something to think about!  Let's hope others in this city are listening too.

"Green" nuclear power?

I found this on a list of the world's 7 creepiest places.  At a time when nuclear power is being presented by many as a "green" alternative to fossil fuels, we'd do well to remember what happened in Chernobyl to make it so infamous. 

Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ukraine

Walk through the abandoned town of Pripyat in the Ukraine, and you'll find a large-scale crime scene abandoned in a hurry: A nursery full of children's shoes, and apartment complexes with the morning newspaper, dated April 28, 1986, open on the breakfast table. Two days before, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, minutes away, melted down, but it took 48 hours for the authorities to alert locals and clear them out of the world's biggest nuclear disaster site. Now that radiation levels are safe for short-term exposure, Chernobyl's nuclear complex has become an unlikely tourist attraction since opening to visitors in 2002. The power complex is at the center of the 20-mile-radius "Exclusion Zone," a regrown area of forests now populated by wolves and bears. Reactor #4 is the star of this sad show, today sheathed in a concrete and lead sarcophagus 200 feet high.

Quake renews fears about nuclear power in Japan

Back in 1999 I was fresh out of college and spending some time up in Chicago where I was suddenly introduced to a new issue: nuclear power.  My home state of Florida only has about four nuclear power plants I believe, but Illinois has more nuclear power plants than any other state: 14 (they have more but some are not currently in operation).  So nuclear power is a big subject up there.  I didn't know much about it so I decided to go to a very unusual event: a week-long nuclear power education camp.  That's right!  It was like a summer camp for anti-nuke activists and ten years later I can still say it was one of the most educational and useful things I have ever done. 

The camp was sponsored by a group called The Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) based out of Chicago.  These people take even a summer camp for activists very seriously.  I felt like I was back in college as I attended in-depth workshops on nearly every aspect of nuclear power taught by world renowned nuclear phsyicists.  By the end of the day my brain was swollen with all the technicalities of the issue.  It was complicated and fascinating at the same time. 

Ever since, even though my life path has led me down very different roads than anti-nuke activism I have always kept one eye on what's happening in the way of nuclear power.  I know for example that Clinton and Obama both support increased use of nuclear energy even though we still don't have a safe way to store the waste materials (materials which by the way have a half life of several thousand years!). 

I also am concerned with what the recent earthquake in Japan means for the safety of that county's residents.  At first officials played down the damage caused by the quake to several regional nuclear power plants.  Today it has come out that they under-estimated the damage and have order the plant to be closed.  Also, a fault line may run right underneath it.  Japan has 55 nuclear reactors and a long history of coverups and accidents. 

To me, nuclear power is the quintessential issue that illustrates the greatest short-coming of the human race: our short-sightedness.  Combined with our impressive technological know-how this failure to see the wide-angle view of things means we're like children playing with matches.  It's only a matter of time.

change a lightbulb, change the world

As you may have heard 2007 is predicted to be the warmest year ever.  While that's partly due to another El Niño, it's also partly due to greenhouse gas emissions.  Even the head-in-the-sand wingnuts who continue to doubt that human activities can have a negative impact on the global environment are becoming fewer and fewer.  It's getting harder to deny global warming.  We all need to pitch in.

So I'm going to try to make a few small changes myself.  Here's what I'm doing.  I spent $20 yesterday in order to a.) not have to change a lightbulb anytime in the near future b.) reduce my overall energy consumption thereby c.) lowering my powerbill and d.) helping in a small but significant way to save the planet.

Best $20 I ever spent!  I got a six pack of those compact fluorescent lightbulbs for $15 and a smaller one for the porch.  And I didn't have to go to Wal-Mart to get them either!  Nearly every light in my house now is a compact fluorescent.  Only the dining room light that has a light fixutre with those little candle shaped light bulbs and the bathroom lights are still the old fashioned kind. 

What motivated me?  This editorial from the BBC. Dr. Prescott of banthebulb.org says:

"[Traditional incandescent bulbs] waste so much energy that if they were invented today, it is highly unlikely they would be allowed onto the market...

It has been estimated that if every household in the US replaced just three of its incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving designs and used them for five hours per day, it would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 23 million tonnes, reduce electricity demand by the equivalent of 11 coal-fired power stations and save $1.8bn

Wow.  That's incredible.  So why haven't you switched yet?  C'mon, they're not that expensive anymore.  And you can avoid having to get up on a ladder to change your porch light for another seven to eight years!  I feel badly it's taken me this long to have gotten around to it.  You should do this too!  I'll even come over and do it for you if you want!*  No charge!   No more excuses.   If the weather this year doesn't convince you I don't know what will!

* if you live in Gainesville, FL