Oh GOD! Why is HE here?? Is he BACK?? Who would want to listen to HIM?
Today, that bastion of Liberal NewsSpeak, the New York Times, ran a story about how even the crazy conservationists were saying that, you know, maybe this whole oil spill thing might actually be able totally overblown and hey, maybe we can get this thing cleaned up after all!
The Gulf of Mexico Foundation, basically in the same tree-hugging love fest as GreenPeace, had this to say, as quoted in the NYT:
“The sky is not falling. We’ve certainly stepped in a hole and we’re going to have to work ourselves out of it, but it isn’t the end of the Gulf of Mexico.”
A realistic, but positive take on the whole kerfuffle!
The Times didn’t bother to mention that the group in question was directly connected to the offshore drilling industry, including the people who made the rig that caught on fire and started pouring out oil. But, since Transocean, the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon rig (which rents the rigs to BP), is the paragon of virtue, we can only assume that their people are on point and that the Times was right to take them exactly at their word and not disclose anything more about them then that they were a “conservation organization”. That is what we are assuming. Settle down, you wild eyed Talking Points Memo hand-wringers. (more…)
Very briefly up for air, we are at LtAG. Three bits of ominous news for you today from the (slightly unintentional) food front.
1. Winning the Why Am I Not Surprised Award, undercover animal rights activists landed jobs at an Iowa chicken factory and released footage of male chicks being dumped, alive, into an industrial grinder. After all, who needs 200 million roosters running around? Look, if we could breed only female birds we would, but we can’t, so we’ll just keep grinding up these male birds. Crystalline logic. P.S. our eggs are 100% local!
don’t drink me plz
2. A Florida man was horrified when he took a big gulp from a can of Pepsi and discovered that all kinds of foul-tasting gunk was inside. He tried to empty the can and shook it until something that looked like “pink linguini” came out, then called the FDA. The FDA’s analysis? Somehow there had been a disemboweled frog inside the closed can of Pepsi. Mmmmmm. The Choice of a New Generation.
3. And far and away my favorite story, likewise not that surprising – just when we thought health care protests couldn’t get uglier, a rally supporting Obama’s healthcare reform turned into a rumble when it encountered our dear friends on the deather fringe, some words were exchanged, some fisticuffs were exchanged, and a dude’s finger got bitten off by what we can only assume was someone who took the notion of “rabid extremism” a little literally. Yeah, uh, I hear that under Obamacare the government is going to make decisions on what fingers you get to keep. No to Body Part Rationing! Free Grandma! On the plus side, he certainly showed the government that no east-coast liberal is going to tell him to stop eating meat! We The People will eat whatever and whoever we damn well please because this is America, not the Third Reich!
First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”
This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…
A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:
The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse. (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)
Oh children. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants around here with business, campaigning, and general tomfoolery, which I hope explains why we haven’t posted anything in a week and probably will be a bit thin on the ground for a while longer. But in a spirit of reconciling our sorry selves with you, dear reader, here are a couple news articles that one could read in any variety of ways – anything from elation to jelly-booted terror.
Fast-Food School Vicinity Ban: Prudent or Tantalizing?
So New York City councilmember Eric Gioia is trying to get a bill passed in the city that would prohibit the opening of new fast food establishments within 0.1 miles of a school. Now, granted that’s only two blocks in New York speak, which is no great preventative measure if you ask me, but there’s a bigger question at hand. I support in theory any acknowledgment by the city that fast food is a factor of childhood unhealthiness and unknown chemical imbalances later in life, and I respect the effort. But kids that want something are remarkably committed to getting it. Cigarettes, booze, energy drinks, you name it – prohibiting it may have the reverse effect of making it even more desirable than it already is. I used to babysit a kid who was incredibly lazy EXCEPT when going dramatically out of his way to acquire something his parents wouldn’t let him have. If enough noise is made out of this bill if it gets passed (and rest assured, the non-issue-obsessed e-media being what it is, noise will be made), expect to see a sharp increase in the amount of fast food consumed by rebellious high-schoolers at lunch.
So what can be done? Either try to keep kids indoors for lunch (which, I know from experience, will produce an epic shit-monsoon that no school wants to deal with), or go ahead and pass the ban and make fast food less convenient and hope to Moses, Mary, and Mohammed that they just don’t find out about it. So, I guess: shhhhhhhhh. Wait. I screwed it up already. Sigh.
This is why you're fat (double cheeseburgers with chicken nuggets for buns).
Monsanto and Your Future, or, “Really, FDA?”
Sing, Muse, of Michael Taylor! Of the Monsanto exec who at any given moment is either employed by the US government in a capacity of regulating the dangerous practices of the agribusiness industry, or (if it’s tuesday, thursday, or sunday), is in the agribusiness industry writing deregulatory proposals to be approved by the FDA. One of the architects of Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (the same one that some studies and European governments have suggested contribute to health irregularities and weirdly early puberty in milk-guzzling kids), he was also one of the FDA authorities who approved that very wonder cocktail under Clinton.
And now! After another corporate foray, Taylor is back in the FD, back in the FD, back in the FDA. Appointed by Obama’s administration. Cool.
Now, all the environmentalist listserves that grace my email have gone into varying shades of apoplexy over this, demanding immediate censure of anything with two thumbs and a government paycheck. IF there is a silver lining or an alternative spin to this, it is that despite the long history of cronyism and impending mollycoddling of Monsanto and the other three Horseman of the Apocalypse, Taylor has in fact been pretty tough on food sanitation issues and will probably do more to crack down on such dangerous embarrassments as the peanut-contamination fracas earlier this year. I guess he’s of the “tough love” school of regulating his buddies, like the coach that wants you to succeed but isn’t afraid to make you run a few extra laps (for the record, that may be the first sports analogy I’ve ever successfully used). But if regulation of dirty agrifactories is achieved mainly by redirecting funds and manpower from the watchdogging of the special-interests science that leads to things like rBGH, as is, well, likely – then we’re no less screwed than we already were. And I’d really like to be less screwed than we already are.
A few people I have spoken with recently are pretty staunchly against the new energy and climate change bill that squeaked by the house last night. The bill is too weak, it has too many riders, and passing a bad bill is worse then passing no bill at all — these are the things that some on the environmental side of things are saying. (I don’t get to talk to the “Global Warming is a myth and this is an excuse to tax the American worker into obsolescence because the Dem’s hate America people” all that much, so I don’t feel the need to argue with them.) Another objection, expressed by CheriRobertson on my last not-very-well-thought-out post is that no one has read the damn thing and that its criminal to vote on legislation that you don’t understand.
Ok, lots of fair points here. I still support the Waxman-Markey bill, and here is why:
It fundamentally changes the way the American Government deals with the problems of Climate Change and our effect on the planet. My beef from the beginning has been that there is no system for me to be protected if someone wants to endanger me and mine by pumping bad things into the air. A cap and trade system creates a method – however flawed – to allow the gummit to get insist that people don’t get to endanger me and make money off it free and clear. They at least have to pay for screwing my world up.
From a fundamentally Libertarian perspective, I think that is the job of Government: to protect me from very real and very prominent threats that the Free Market brings to bear on my world.
Now, would I rather the original bill passed? Sure. I would much rather have the EPA be the body that regulates which gases are a danger to us. I would much rather not have the hat tips that are plugged into the bill for the rust belt, for the oil producing companies, for “clean coal”. But at the end of the day, this bill really IS a new legislative way of thinking about the environment, and for it to pass means that there are a lot of people on board who feel the necessity of action.
I think that it’s a republican talking point that “no one in either party has read the bill”. That is simply not the case. First of all, someone had to write the damn thing, so there are at least a few folks who know whats in there. Secondly, though, and much more importantly, a vast vast majority of the changes are going to be softening and definitions and clarifications on what was left out of the original draft. Was the thing perfect? No. But it’s also disingenuous to say that you need to read it all to understand it: the law makers had plenty of time to read the first 1200 pages, and not many of them did. The 300 pages of provisions and changes will now be poured over by anyone who cares, and the Senate will draft a new bill that puts the pieces of the house bill that don’t make sense to the test. The gist of the bill, that companies who pollute the earth will be held fundamentally accountable in the only way that matters to them (financially) remains strong — regardless of the number of pages, and the fact that John Bohner can take an hour to read rhetorical loops in the writing. A defeat of this bill, even it’s watered down form, is a defeat for the concept, and that’s not something we can afford to allow to happen.
There was a lot of political wrangling to get this bill to pass to be a law. (and yes, I AM amused that Nanci Pelosi thought Dove Bars would help. You don’t think that’s funny? Come on… you don’t think it’s amusing to think that congresspeople vote with their tastebuds? Oh… ok, yes it’s a little scary… but if we can’t laugh at it, then the world gets awful depressing.) Lots of Dems voted against it because they were scared to tag their name to something and take the political risk, only to have it fail in the Senate. And lots of people still view this thing as a big ball of taxes designed to hurt their way of life. But I think that the political climate isn’t going to be this forgiving for many many years to come, and if we don’t do this now, we may miss our chance for this scale of change. I feel the same way about health care: it’s now or not for a long time.
It may be that, 20 years from now, I will be cursing this thing for being too weak and watered down. But there are some really amazing parts of this bill and I love it even despite it’s flaws. Plus, there are, like, 800 Million dollars for green jobs training and stuff in there. I’m working in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn these days: trust me when I say that there aren’t a lot more jobs places like that can loose, so it’s only going to help out. I wish the Republicans had come up with a counter solution to get the job market back on line: their idea of more capitalism – providing a series of grants to people who come up with good ideas – is so small potatoes that it boggles the mind. The Republican party’s stance of Nothing is Happening, lets all Stick Our Heads in the Sand and Invoke the American Worker isn’t valid anymore. They have done nothing for the American Worker for enough years that suddenly raising the middle class and the small business owner as “at risk” rings hollow and even pathetic.
The other week, I posted a few thingsabout Ethanol: how the lobby was holding up the Waxman Bill, etc. As per my usual, it was one part educated conjecture, one part politics, one part research a six parts B.S. (essentially, the patented LtAG 9 part system!)
After Mark made the fair point that numbers might be a good thing, I tried… but lets be honest — I don’t know much about “science”. On the other hand, I know people who know things. Some of them even know a lot of things.
One of those people, a Mr. James C, was kind enough to tell me a little ’bout Ethanol, and about why we shouldn’t let that ship sail off to the proverbial land of the elves just yet. (Yeah, that was a LoTR reference. So what?)
James works for a company makes enzymes for the corn ethanol industry, so he has a dog in this fight. However, he also has “knowledge” of “science” stuff, so we have to suspect that he knows what he be talking bout. The following is all his words, and let me tell you: they make sense.
“I have come to believe that while corn is not the ideal crop, it is the currently the only means to reduce emissions in cars on the road today. Even when we look slightly into the future, technology is still lacking. While electric cars will become more of a reality in the future, the battery technology is not here yet and they will likely be expensive when it is. Also, we have to think about where the electricity is coming from (ie, coal is worse that solar but solar costs a lot). Funding into fuel cells has been cut by the DOE as it’s not really a feasible technology. Algal biodiesel likely will never happen (it’d be great if it does but there are too many hurdles such as how to collect it). (Editors Note: Crap! We were really jazzed about that!) Finally, we can make more efficient cars, but they will still need liquid fuel likely in conjunction with electricity (hybrid electric). (more…)
Today’s story comes to you from the heart of the most beleaguered and yet hard core of the environmental supporters list. Outsiders for generations, these champions of green are finally getting some traction: that’s right, I’m talking about Nike, Johnson & Johnson, and other BF corporate leaders.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is taking heat from Johnson & Johnson, Nike and other corporate members over its opposition to global warming legislation pending in the House. In a letter to the Chamber, Johnson & Johnson has asked the Chamber to refrain from making comments on climate change unless they “reflect the full range of views, especially those of Chamber members advocating for congressional action.”
Two theories on why these companies, rarely big on Government regulation, might do something like this: (more…)
As we all know, Capitalism breaks everything I love.
More evidence: Dark Days for Environmentalism. It turns out that, in these grim economic times, people are not down for the high initial investment costs of installing green energy devices in their homes. This should surprise no one, but some of the numbers in that article are very depressing.
Factories building parts for these industries have announced a wave of layoffs in recent weeks, and trade groups are projecting 30 to 50 percent declines this year in installation of new equipment, barring more help from the government.
Prices for turbines and solar panels, which soared when the boom began a few years ago, are falling. Communities that were patting themselves on the back just last year for attracting a wind or solar plant are now coping with cutbacks.
The places that we think the stimulus package might actually be effective are places like this: Large gobs of cash would help the start up costs of building big wind turbines and the like. Defraying that initial cost lets the companies who make ‘em keep chucking them out, it lets people keep those jobs, and it means that the entire system doesn’t grind to a halt.
It certanitly LOOKS smart. Maybe TOO smart...
All is not lost, however, because as capitalism taketh away, capitalism also givith. WSJ, usually the dour gloomsy-pants to the Grey Lady’s austere liberal hope, published this sweet article about SkyNet in Boulder, CO (otherwise known as SmartGrid). If you are only going to read one article we link to this month, let’s make it this one: a very apt description of what works about Smartgrids and the places that Americans are resisting the machines. SmartGrid technology is basically taking the LtAG idea of a house and expanding it to an entire city. They are discovering what points people stick on (out door fridges) and what points people are willing to compromise on (when do you run the dishwasher and dryer? How about only during off-peak energy times, or when it is real windy outside?).
Here, though, is the big sticking point, and once again where capitalism has a change to break everything I love:
“Another obstacle is beyond the scope of Boulder: Utilities, regulators and manufacturers of dozens of appliances and meters will have to settle on a uniform language so they can talk to one another.”
Uh oh. Cause, you know… cell phones all have those universal plugs that are so useful, right? And Train Tracks certainly all ran on the same gage right off the bat. Too much to ask for a little pre-meditated communication? Yup.
But really- would you let your friends return this car?
When, I ask you dear reader, did “recession” become code for “push up prices, strip the citizens of all ability to survive, and throw PTSD-infected giant sea crabs into their bed linens?” Seriously. Sort of. But seriously. People are losing their jobs, people are not getting the inflation raises they usually do, and as a result big business is going to charge us more to do everyday things? Come on! Well, Hyundai might not be high up on the list of “green-savvy” car companies, but they are proving that they have some out-of-the-box gusto in a new ad campaign.
Supposedly, if you buy a Hyundai and lose your job within a year, you can return it. Return. Your car. Whaaaa? Of course, there’s a university library-long stack of fine print to this deal, but what I’m more concerned with is the concept itself. The cynical realist in me knows that Hyundai is just doing this in order to beat out its competitors, but theoretically they’ve hit on something huge here. They’re putting forth the notion that a business is going to take care of its customer. That there’s going to be a relationship between seller and buyer, and that that relationship is fluid. No ownership of one party by the other. In the great playground Tag game of life, they’re rescinding the “no tag back” rule. I mean, this is all the theoretical ponderings of a utopian mind, of course. But it’s an interesting, and somewhat comforting, thought in these times of epic monetary suckitude.
don’t drink me plz
Today’s story comes to you from the heart of the most beleaguered and yet hard core of the environmental supporters list. Outsiders for generations, these champions of green are finally getting some traction: that’s right, I’m talking about Nike, Johnson & Johnson, and other BF corporate leaders.
