Berkeley’s undergraduate library currently has up a blackboard-sized piece of white paper and a bucket of markers, with a request for students to write down their suggestions on how to make the library more “green”. Among the multicolored contributions: F*CK FINALS, and Get reusable condoms for [NAME REDACTED]. (And yes, the redactions are mine.) How about “Stop wasting paper”, or maybe even “Tell the idiot administrator who came up with this idea not to bother burning the fuel it takes to drive into work next week”?
Filed under: education, environment, miscellany
The Dallas Morning News has an interview up that Rod Dreher conducted with Texas State University’s James McWilliams, a self-identified “agrarian” who’s already made a name for himself (see here for an especially angry (and especially profanity-laden) response) as a critic of the excesses of the “locavore” movement. The interview touches on a range of different topics aside from the problems with “food miles”, and is quite informative and well worth reading in its entirety; for example, I’m not sure whether I’d fully understood this before:
… grass-fed cows require up to 10 acres of land per cow. And the cows emit four times the methane of conventional cows. It’s not sustainable. Methane is 21 times more powerful than carbon as greenhouse gas. In the end, it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist. It is for that reason that the most effective thing a socially conscious eater can do is reduce, if not eliminate, meat consumption altogether. Not a very popular thing to say in Texas, but there you have it.
In my home, we’re solidly on the “reduce” side; especially with growing children and a perpetually pregnant and/or breastfeeding mom, going off meat altogether just isn’t an option for us. But we usually go heavy on the vegetables and grains and then restrict ourselves to much smaller portions when it comes to meat: hence a third of a pound of ground beef, say, is usually enough for all three of us. I hadn’t, however, understood that grass-fed cows actually emit more methane than, er, “conventional” ones – though as McWilliams says, the environmental (and ethical) disaster that is factory farming is clearly not a better alternative.
Here’s the concluding bit from the interview, where McWilliams speculates on what the future of food ought to look like:
There’s an instinctive and quite understandable tendency to look at the problems of industrialized food and seek solutions in the agricultural past. The assumption, however, that our forebears hold all the answers is a bit romantic. We have to keep in mind that the world’s population has more than quadrupled since 1900, so the pre-industrial food systems that we often mythologize were nowhere near as burdened to achieve high yields. Beyond that, I’ve never been terribly convinced that pre-industrial food was so safe or ecologically correct.
The future of food production must achieve a balance between high yields and high sustainability. The only way I see this happening is if we stop polarizing our discussions of food into big industrial and small organic, and start seeking common ground over compromises that split differences. We’ll have to eat much less meat, many more whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; tolerate the judicious use of chemicals in the production of our food; keep an open mind to the potential benefits of biotechnology; and worry less about the distance our food traveled than the overall energy it took to produce it.
As an aside, let me just say that it’s really this sort of compromising spirit that I was so frustrated to see missing from that NRO piece on Alice Waters. In any case, do read the whole thing.
Elsewhere: McWilliams’s forthcoming, provocatively-titled book.
Filed under: agriculture, environment, food
Having just finished reading it, I’ll join Ross and Rod and Will Wilkinson in strongly recommending Nicholas Davidoff’s profile of Freeman Dyson in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s one of the most enjoyable pieces of this sort that I’ve read in quite a while. Here’s an especially choice bit:
What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”
Read the whole thing, as we kids with our blogs are inclined to say.
Filed under: environment, science/tech
January 28, 2009 • 12:27 pm
The Telegraph reports that it may be contributing to global warming. I’m inclined to quote what Russell Arben Fox wrote last week:
… I am fully aware of the various economic impact calculations that have been made of recycling efforts over the years, many of which have concluded that melting down plastic and reprocessing paper and grinding up aluminum is ultimately a waste of time and fuel and money, and I am not persuaded by any of them. Why? Because they misunderstand the point of recycling. The point is not to ultimately lower overall energy use (a worthy goal, but one probably better achieved through other means), not to save us from being overrun by garbage (thankfully, there are few places around the globe where the future of WALL*E is anything except very, very distant, though of course it can’t hurt to start changing things now), but rather to simply stop using so much stuff. Forget all the environmental lamentations and warnings (as applicable and truthful as many of them are); there’s just no good reason to throw something away when you can re-use. As has been said, use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Recycling is a big part of that ethic–or, at least, ought to be.
To be clear: the particular concerns that are raised in that Telegraph article have to do with ecological considerations rather than economic ones, and there are some measures that are proposed therein – like, say, using waste to generate electricity – that are pretty clearly in keeping with the ethic of responsibility that Russell is endorsing here. But I still think that his general point is an important one: ecological responsibility is not – or at least: should not be – fundamentally an attempt to “save the Earth” or prevent or forestall some form of environmental calamity, but rather a basic aspect of a life well lived, and so something that doesn’t require complex calculations about things like carbon footprints to get it off the ground. That’s not to say that scientific findings can’t be helpful in determining the best ways to be responsible stewards of our environment, but only that they shouldn’t be allowed to displace the more fundamental ethics of care and restraint that stand at the ground of genuine ecological concern. If the stuff we’ve used can serve a better purpose than sitting in a barge or landfill, then that’s the purpose it should serve.
Earlier: I made a related point about cloth diapering.
Filed under: energy, environment
January 19, 2009 • 3:55 pm
Ryan Avent worries about what will happen if the Obama administration fails to pass significant climate change legislation:
I don’t think warming will mean the end of humanity, but it will be serious enough that major geo-political change will take place, leading to all manner of unpredictable, and often catastrophic, outcomes. And as we approach critical thresholds, I think you’ll begin to see some scientists and activists grow radicalized by our inaction. When people see that the political leaders aren’t going to take the necessary steps, they’re going to start blowing up coal plants. I’m not kidding.
And how much carbon would that emit?
Filed under: energy, environment
December 19, 2008 • 8:24 am
Via Ron Bailey, I see that Obama’s choice to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which is, I should note, my weather-junkie wife’s very favorite federal agency and her most-trusted source for daily weather) is a declared supporter of the use of property rights to restore fisheries, a promising strategy that I wrote about for Culture11 a few months ago. Here’s her statement from a 2007 panel discussion:
There are a lot of different variations on this thing, but the idea is that instead of every fisherman just fishing like crazy until the total allowable catch has been caught in any particular season, the idea is to guarantee or to allocate the total catch to individuals based on their history or some other rational way of doing it, so that they have a guaranteed fraction of the catch, regardless of what the total catch is and that, in fact, changes the dynamics because they then have incentive to make sure that there are enough fish to be caught next year, and the next year, and the next year. So it enables them to take a long term perspective and have the value of their portfolio grow through time not just to be exploited this year and so I don’t want to go into more detail about this except to say that there are some very innovative, new ways of restructuring fisheries to align fishermen’s interests with conservation interests that are economically profitable over the long term not just the short term and that that is being actively performed by science and that is actually a good thing, it’s a nice tool that has complimented marine reserves that I think will provide for hope for the future of oceans.
Here’s hoping she makes it happen.
Filed under: environment, food, government/law
October 22, 2008 • 7:41 pm
As Lee joins Ezra Klein in cautioning against an overemphasis on locavorism, I’d like to emphasize in turn that there are lots of reasons to eat locally-produced food that have very little to do with the desire to reduce emissions. For one thing, as Jim Henley points out, local food tasty – and for a few others, it facilitates community, revitalizes local economies, and encourages the kinds of interchange that make us less reliant on the all-seeing wisdom of the centralized state. Oh, and it’s tasty. Call it the Cloth Diaper Rule: if you’re only including the emissions in your analysis, you’re probably leaving a bunch of important stuff out.
Ezra’s right, though, that not everyone can be a locavore year-round, though I don’t think that even the most extreme Slow Foodists would want to claim otherwise – for example, one of the best bits in the “Year of Eating Locally” chapter in Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy comes when he admits that he just can’t do without the (decidedly not Vermont-grown) bananas. And yes, if reducing emissions is your top issue, then the “food miles” approach is pretty clearly overrated. But none of that means that eating local and seasonal food is anything but good for the culture, quite a lot of fun, and very, very tasty too.
Filed under: energy, environment, food
October 20, 2008 • 6:11 pm
I’d very much like to see more details on the research mentioned in this article, which reports that the British government, out of embarrassment at having encouraged environmentally-conscious people to use cloth diapers – sorry, nappies – for such a long time, is suppressing a study that found that, unless they’re washed and dried under rather austere conditions, cloth diapers actually have a worse effect on the climate than do disposable ones. In particular, I’d love to see whether the study takes into account the remarkable amount of space that disposable diapers take up in landfills, as well as the effects that they have on soil and water when they finally do decompose: if these sorts of things are taken into account, I have trouble imagining that cloth diapering doesn’t turn out looking pretty green.
For what it’s worth, Angela and I use cloth diapers for Jack and have not – and contra the prediction of Katherine Mangu-Ward – found them to be especially “disgusting”, though this may be in part because we don’t have our own washer and so end up sending them off to a diaper service to be laundered. (It would also be nice to know whether the British study took the greater efficiency of such services’ washing and drying methods into account.) The increased effort that it takes to put them on and occasionally clean the covers by hand is of course a mild inconvenience, but in our minds it’s well worth it when one factors in, as Angela enthusiastically reminds me that one must, the fact that cloth diapers are often said to be healthier for their wearers and encourage potty-training by allowing kids to be able to tell when they’ve wet themselves. And as I said, it’s hard to believe that they’re not better for the environment overall …
Image of my adorable kid via me.
Filed under: environment, science/tech
Following the lead of Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent points out that there are all sorts of ways in which conservative/libertarian opposition to stupid government interventions – licensing requirements, stupid land use restrictions, unnecessary hurdles to starting up a business, etc. – has the potential to yield huge benefits. I’d strongly disagree, though, with any implication that having interregional variation among regulations is a bad thing: even in the case of environmental policy, there’s a real need to experiment with different approaches and allow regulations to be sensitive to different regions’ different needs. Moreover, diffusing power is an essential part of the kind of accountability that allows bad regulations to be shown up for what they are: if it’s my city that won’t let me keep backyard chickens, I can fight them; if it’s the USDA, I’m not likely to get very far. But the general principle gets things quite right, and I’ll also give an enthusiastic second to the observation that creative intervention at one stage can eliminate the need for more serious and costly intervention at another – though don’t get me started on universal preschool.
Filed under: conservatism, environment, government/law, libertarianism
October 18, 2008 • 8:52 pm
Earlier today, Andrew Sullivan repeated a charge whose transparent falsity I’ve pointed out to him over e-mail before: namely, that Sarah Palin is a “liar” for having said the following to ABC’s Charlie Gibson about her position on climate change:
… show me where I have ever said that there’s absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any affect, or no affect, on climate change.
Here is the statement that Andrew points to as evidence that Palin was lying:
I’m not a doom and gloom environmentalist like Al Gore blaming the changes in our climate on human activity.
One doesn’t have to have a philosopher’s eye for nuance to recognize that the second of these quotations does not amount to the sort of claim that Palin was (implicitly) denying having made in her interview with Gibson: the claim in the second quotation does not even concern the notion of “absolute proof”, but rather is a statement of mere personal opinion – a false opinion, to be sure, and one that we might well be concerned that Palin apparently held as recently as a year ago, but clearly not an opinion about the presence or absence of “absolute proof” of anything at all. Palin was not, then, lying in (this portion of) her interview with Gibson, and to continue to claim – despite, I repeat, my having pointed this out before – that she was is to distort the record in exactly the sorts of ways that are supposed to be the odd province of the Governor of Alaska.
A quibble? Perhaps, but one that embodies a standard not all that different from the one Andrew has employed in his parsing of Palin’s every last word. Palin does seem to have been quite recently in denial of the ways in which human actions have contributed to changes in our climate, and there may well have been – as Gibson implied there was – something “cynical” in her change of opinion on this matter. But if Andrew wants to claim that she lied to Gibson about the nature of her earlier views, he’s going to have to do better than this.
For the record.
Filed under: environment, media/culture, politics, science/tech
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