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The installed cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) power continues its precipitous decline, mostly due to falling prices for PV panels. Pushing solar forward in coming years will involve driving down the other costs — the non-panel costs.

Those are a couple of the insights to be found in the fifth annual report on solar PV [PDF] from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which digs into “project-level data for more than 150,000 individual residential, commercial, and utility-scale PV systems, totaling more than 3,000 megawatts (MW) and representing 76% of all grid-connected PV capacity installed in the United States through 2011.” That’s an incredibly rich source of data (though it does have some limitations — for one thing, it doesn’t reflect the even more precipitous decline in prices thus far in 2012).

So what do we learn from LBNL?

Installed costs are falling for solar PV systems of every size:

Most of the sharp decline that begins in 2009 is attributable to declining solar-panel prices (though Obama’s stimulus bill didn’t hurt). The nerds call these “module prices” and everything else — customer acquisition, financing, permitting, installation, maintenance, worker training, etc. — “non-module prices.” The latter are also known as “balance of system costs” or sometimes [this isn't right -- balance of system costs have to do with non-module hardware specifically] “soft costs.”

Here’s an illustrative graph showing how how module and non-module costs compare in small PV installations:

As you can see, panel prices have fallen sharply since about 2008, but, at least since 2005, soft costs have been largely stagnant.

These are averages, though. What they don’t show is that costs vary widely from project to project. For instance, they vary widely from state to state.

Across all three system size ranges, substantial differences in median installed prices can be observed. Specifically, among systems ≤10 kW in size, median installed prices range from a low of $4.9/W in Texas to a high of $7.6/W in Washington, D.C. Within the 10-100 kW size range, median installed prices range from $5.0/W in Florida and Nevada to $7.2/W in Texas. Finally, for systems >100 kW, median installed prices range from $4.5/W in Pennsylvania to $6.2/W in Arizona.

Since solar panels are well on their way to being commoditized — that is, more or less fungible and similarly priced across markets — most of that variation can be explained by differences in soft costs.

An earlier LBNL report showed that over half the difference between the low cost of German rooftop PV (around $3.4/kW) and the comparatively high cost of the American variety (around $6/kW) is in soft costs:

Click to embiggen.

I imagine the story is the same among U.S. states.

What this illustrates is a point I’ve become fond of making: When it comes to accelerating the wide deployment and falling costs of clean energy, market innovation is every bit as important as technological innovation. Even if PV technology remains static (which of course won’t happen), enormous savings could be had simply through market building — helping markets with high soft costs match the performance of those with low soft costs.

Part of that will be professionalization and scale in the industry itself. And part of it will be a matter for public policy — not only government incentives but, just as importantly, removal of legislative and regulatory barriers at the local and state level. This is precisely the kind of thing that the Department of Energy’s SunShot program is working on.

“Driving down soft costs” is a pretty boring bumper sticker. But what’s it’s really about is the Apple-ification of solar: making solar consumer-friendly, standardized, simple, and appealing. It can be done. We just have to decide to do it.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy

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Off Target: Your money goes further when you spend it on quality products — and it’s more satisfying, too.

I really thought I was above binge shopping. But on a recent trip to Target, the women’s clothing section quickly pulled me in with trendy pastels, $19 dresses. The moments clawing through racks under fluorescent lights are a blur — but unfortunately, the resulting bright purple shorts are all too real. They remain at the bottom of my closet, a (literally) uncomfortable reminder of the irresistible pull of cheap fashion.

Ring a bell? It’s no accident. The fashion industry has sped up and priced down to the point where a common shopping trip can make you feel like you’ve doubled down on a Double Down: bloated, unsatisfied, and foolish for indulging in something so trendy and cheap.

Elizabeth Cline was all-too-familiar with the feeling. “I had gotten to a point where I really wouldn’t buy any clothing if it was over $30 and I owned almost 400 pieces of clothes as a result,” Cline says. The Brooklynite was curious as to how clothing had gotten so cheap and why it felt like her huge closet lacked substance and any sense of personal style.

So she set out on a nearly three-year journey behind the scenes of the fashion industry, traveling from sweatshops in China to overflowing Goodwills to a mostly shuttered New York garment district haunted by ghosts of U.S. industry’s past. The resulting book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, is a revealing look at how fashion arrived at where it is today. Before you write off apparel as low-hanging Fruit of the Loom, keep in mind that clothing is easily the second largest consumer sector, after food. I chatted with Cline about how cheap clothing cramps our style, our economy, and our planet.

Elizabeth Cline. (Photo by Matt Roth.)

Q. How do companies make clothing so cheaply now?

A. The secret is in producing clothes at really high volumes. The product is cheap and low quality but they are able to take a very small markup on the clothes. The other ingredient is cheap labor in developing countries.

Q. How have prices changed over the last couple of decades?

A. Going back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, you could still walk into a department store and almost everything would be mid-priced, meaning you would find things — and this is adjusted for inflation — that were between $60 and $300. That’s what people were used to paying for ready-made clothes off the rack. What we’ve seen over the last several decades is the industry splitting into two extremes. There are very few middle-market brands and retailers and everything has become very cheap or irrationally expensive on the other end. It’s interesting to me because it really has followed the decline of the middle class in the U.S. as well.

Q. I think the phrase you used was “recession brands.”

A. Now that we’re in the middle of a global economic downturn, it’s making people even cheaper. It’s a huge problem because one of the reasons why I think we’re in this economic crisis is because we don’t have a manufacturing base anymore. … The garment and textile trades were two of the fastest-dying industries of the last 10 years. Those are a lot of really crucial jobs that are just gone now. People don’t think about that when they’re in these stores buying $10 dresses.

Q. What are the environmental impacts of cheap clothing?

A. The way I approached it in the book was to talk about the dramatic increase in our consumption because I think people infer what that means for the environment. One of the more astonishing figures from the book was that our fiber consumption has leapt from 10 million tons to 82 million tons [annually] in the last 60 years. It’s far outpacing population growth.

I also get into the waste that’s created. We throw away 68 pounds of textiles per person per year. On top of that, we’re using thrift stores and charity shops as dumps for an incredible volume of clothes that we don’t wear anymore. [The average charity shop is able to sell a mere 20 percent of what comes in.]

Q. With the economy being what it is, how much do you think we’re going to be able to change if wages stay flat? I feel like we could run into the same problems as the food movement: It’s easy for the wealthy to buy with their conscience, but difficult for most people to make a big change.

A. I think it is similar to the food movement in that people in this country don’t have a lot of money yet they’re obese. It’s so similar to fashion. We are drowning in cheap clothes. Even people who don’t have a lot of money have overflowing closets. I think it’s about how people spend the money they do have. The national average of spending on clothing is around $1,100 per year. Instead of going out and buying another two pairs of jeans when you already own 10, think about using that money this year to instead invest in something that you’re going to keep for longer. Or invest in something that you don’t already own that’s actually really unique. I think it’s about changing the way you shop and not necessarily increasing your overall spending.  …

In so many ways, in our lives and in this world right now, people are looking for ways to reconnect. And clothing is such a fundamental part of our culture, part of our economy, and part of our everyday lives that I think people are really going to embrace figuring out a different way to clothe themselves.

Q. I thought it was interesting that buying vintage isn’t the solution. It’s part of the solution, but there’s a limited number of pieces out there.

A. Right, if the whole world started shopping vintage tomorrow, by the end of the day it’d probably all be dried up.

Q. We’d all look really cool for a little bit, though.

A. Yeah, at least we wouldn’t all be wearing acrylic and polyester. [Synthetic fibers are now 63 percent of the global output.]

Q. What’s the best way to make a difference?

A. Support local and independent fashion designers when you can, and that includes people who are using sustainable fabrics but also people who make their clothes domestically. Support fair trade clothing and living wage clothing when you can. …

In terms of online resources, there’s this newer site called Fashioningchange.com. You input what brands and stores you shop at now and it gives you a comparable alternative that’s sustainable. [Editor’s note: Oh my god.] …

Also, ask yourself, “Do I really need another tank top, pair of jeans, pair of shoes?” Look at what you already own and take care of it. I’ve really gotten into using seamstresses and tailors and getting back into altering and customizing the things that I already own. I just think that that’s enormously satisfying and it really stops that obsession with needing something new. I think a lot of that comes out of the fact that everything in our closet is just a little bit off. So I think that it’s really cool to be able to go to a tailor and say, “Please take my pants in, take in the side seams, cut off this weird bow.” Whatever it is. Make it work for you.

Filed under: Article, Living

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I hope everyone read Joe Smyth’s post about the upcoming “auction” of 721 million tons of publicly owned Powder River Basin (PRB) coal. “Auction” goes in scare quotes because there’s only one bidder: Peabody Coal, which can keep bidding at its leisure until it clears the ridiculously low minimum price established by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Peabody, of course, wants to export the coal.

If a one-bidder auction strikes you as shady, you’re not alone. As Juliet Eilperin reports in the Washington Post today, the practice “is being reviewed by the Interior Department’s inspector general and also will be the subject of an audit by the Government Accountability Office.”

There’s a reason only one or two bidders participate in these auctions: Only four big companies are operating in the PRB. They each have their own areas of land. When an adjoining lease opens up, one of them already has the equipment and infrastructure in place, so it will always be able to underbid a company bringing gear in from outside. So nobody bothers to bid against it. Cozy.

The net result is that taxpayers are getting screwed. According to a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, BLM’s non-competitive coal auctions have cost taxpayers “as much as $28.9 billion over the past 30 years.” It has to do with the Powder River basin being “decertified” as a coal-producing region, which is absurd. Read Smyth’s post for more on that.

The larger problem is that BLM is supposed to manage public lands in the best interests of the public, not coal companies, and it’s hard to argue that accelerating climate change by sending cheap coal overseas is in America’s best interests.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) has a must-read report out on this today called “Using Public Lands for the Public Good.” It finds that, of the electricity generated by land and resources in the public estate, some 66 percent comes from coal. Coal, they say, “is the de facto priority for the use of the federal estate when it comes to power generation.” Just 1 percent of public land is used for wind and solar. What’s worse, projecting out 20 years shows no major change in the situation. (Coal goes down to about 57 percent.)

That does not comport with Obama’s much-ballyhooed vision of a clean energy future. Nor, given what we know about coal’s health and environmental impacts, does it comport with good sense or the national interest.

CAP’s primary policy recommendation is that …

… a “clean resources standard,” or CRS, for public lands and waters be implemented by executive order. This would require land management agencies to delineate what portion of publicly owned natural resources used for electricity generation will be clean and renewable — from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and small hydro-electricity. We recommend the entirely achievable target of 35 percent renewable electricity from public lands and waters by 2035.

In addition, they recommend:

• Put a carbon price on coal mined on public lands
• Reform the leasing process for coal mined on public lands to achieve fair-market value
• Establish renewable energy zones on public lands and waters
• Include public lands and waters in the executive order on sustainability to better track the government’s carbon pollution
• Ensure that all federal environmental analyses include scientific carbon pollution studies

That all sounds about right to me.

When it comes to the federal government’s relationship with energy, a lot of attention gets focused on loan guarantee programs and tax credits and the like. But it’s time climate hawks clued in to the fact that the feds — that is to say, we, collectively — own a sh*tload of land and resources, much of which can be used for energy. Among other things, this land we own provides 43.2 percent of the nation’s coal. Not only do we offer this coal up, but we practically beg coal companies to mine it, offering them “billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies via preferential tax treatments such as the ability to expense exploration and development costs, tax deductions to cover the costs of investments in mines, and favorable capital gains treatment on royalties.”

Why are we doing that? We know more than we used to about the damage done by coal mining and combustion. We know more than we used to about the dangers of climate change. There’s no excuse any more for us to allow our common heritage to be used in a way that hurts Americans, the planet, and future generations.

Filed under: Article, Coal

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A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has a new report out, “Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas” [PDF]. Unfortunately, the IEA buried the lede — the Golden Age of Gas scenario destroys a livable climate — so the coverage of the report was off target.

For instance, The New York Times opines, “Energy Agency Finds Safe Gas Drilling is Cheap.” And the Council on Foreign Relations headline is similar: “Safe Fracking Looks Cheap.”

That’s true only if a ruined climate, widespread Dust Bowlification, an acidified ocean, and rapidly rising sea levels constitute your idea of “safe.”

Still, the IEA deserves much of the blame for this miscoverage. It’s not until page 91 (!) of the full report [PDF] that the agency explains that adopting its “Golden Rules” for developing shale gas doesn’t stop catastrophe:

The Golden Rules Case puts CO2 emissions on a long-term trajectory consistent with stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse-gas emissions at around 650 parts per million, a trajectory consistent with a probable temperature rise of more than 3.5 degrees C [6.3 degrees F] in the long term, well above the widely accepted 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] target. This finding reinforces a central conclusion from the WEO special report on a Golden Age of Gas (IEA, 2011b), that, while a greater role for natural gas in the global energy mix does bring environmental benefits where it substitutes for other fossil fuels, natural gas cannot on its own provide the answer to the challenge of climate change.

D’oh! Or is that duh?

The IEA was far clearer and blunter when it released its original report, as I wrote last year. At the time, the Guardian story put it well:

At such a level, global warming could run out of control, deserts would take over in southern Africa, Australia and the western U.S., and sea level rises could engulf small island states.

Not exactly a champagne moment.

Also, it’s far from clear that 650 parts per million (ppm) is even stable, in the sense of not triggering carbon cycle feedbacks that cause further warming — or not crossing dangerous tipping points.

If we risk warming beyond 3.5 degrees C, we are courting multiple, simultaneous disasters. Such warming is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation,’ is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable (i.e. 4 degrees C would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

Also, the IEA scenario assumes coal use is basically flat from 2020 to 2035, which the report makes pretty clear would require a price on carbon. Without a carbon price, natural gas is a brige to nowhere and can actually crowd out carbon-free sources of power. That was precisely the point made by Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, at a London press conference for the 2011 report:

While natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, it is still a fossil fuel. Its increased use could muscle out low-carbon fuels such as renewables and nuclear, particularly in the wake of Fukushima. An expansion of gas use alone is no panacea for climate change.

The Guardian focused on the crowding effect for its piece Tuesday on the new report, “‘Golden age of gas’ threatens renewable energy, IEA warns.”

To be clear, the “Golden Rules” proposed by the IEA still lead to a 20 percent rise in energy-related CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2035, a time we need to be slashing global CO2 levels. As climatologist Ken Caldeira told me in March, natural gas is “a bridge to a world with high CO2 levels.”

Oh, and there’s a mini-bombshell that the IEA sticks in a footnote when discussing options for avoiding the 3.5-plus degrees C warming:

This conclusion could be changed by widespread application of technologies such as carbon capture and storage, which could reduce considerably the emissions from the consumption of gas (and other fossil fuels); but this is not assumed in the period to 2035.

It’s wise not to assume much carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2035 given the unresolved feasibility, permanence, and safety issues surrounding CCS as well as the fact that CCS efforts around the world are being scaled back or terminated.

But here’s the footnote:

There is the possibility that the capacities for CO2 storage might be affected by hydraulic fracturing. A recent study (Elliot and Celia, 2012) estimated that 80% of the potential area to store CO2 underground in the United States could be prejudiced by shale and tight gas development, although others have argued that, even if the rock seal in one place were to be broken by hydraulic fracturing, other layers of impermeable rock underneath the fractured area would block migration of the CO2.

Yeow!

I’d been meaning to blog on that study, “Potential Restrictions for CO2 Sequestration Sites Due to Shale and Tight Gas Production.” No, this study doesn’t mean fracking will wipe out all potential CCS storage areas. But it does suggest that an all-out fracking spree — aka the Golden Age of Gas Scenario aka GAGS — will constrict our storage options in the future.

Finally, on my 2011 post on GAGS, Tyler Hamilton, business columnist at The Toronto Star, commented:

Not only is gas threatening to crowd out renewables, cheap natural gas — viewed as an input fuel — is dramatically improving the economics for unconventional oil. More cheap gas means more dirty oil. Not a good combination.

The bottom line is that if your goal is to stay under or as close to 4 degrees F warming as possible, then we can’t be investing significant resources in new fossil fuel infrastructure — especially without a high and rising CO2 price.

Filed under: Article, Natural Gas

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By David Roberts

(Photo by Takver.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the issue of public land in the Powder River Basin being leased to coal companies for cheap, so they can strip-mine it and sell the coal abroad at an enormous profit.

Also yesterday, the feds held a “competitive lease sale” for the South Porcupine Tract, which contains almost 402 million tons of mineable coal.

Guess how many companies bid in this “competitive auction”? One: Peabody Coal, the company that filed the original application [PDF] for the lease.

This was actually the second auction for the tract. The first ended with no sale because BLM rejected Peabody’s lowball offer of $0.90 a ton. The winning price in Thursday’s sale? $1.11 per ton.

Again: $1.11 per ton.

The price of a ton of Powder River Basin coal on U.S. spot markets? $9.15 per ton, as of May 11.

The price of a ton of coal exported to China? It averaged $97.28 per ton [PDF] in 2011. It’s now up to $123 per ton.

And exports are only likely to go up:

So, to summarize: You, the U.S. taxpayer, just leased another huge chunk of your land to Peabody Coal at $1.11 per ton of coal. Peabody will strip-mine that land and take the coal to China, where it will sell it for over $100 per ton. Peabody pockets enormous profits*, the U.S. taxpayer gets devastated land, and China accelerates global warming.

And it’s all being pushed through by the Obama administration.

Happy Friday.

——

* Now, obviously, $1.11 per ton is not the sum total of Peabody’s costs. They also pay BLM some production royalties and rental fees. And of course it costs them money to mine the coal and ship it to China! Nevertheless, the notion that $1.11 per ton is “fair market value” for coal that Peabody is going to tell for over $100 a ton is a sad joke.

Filed under: Article, Coal, Energy Policy, Politics

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by Jared Green.

This interview originally
appeared in The Dirt.

Jaime
Lerner was elected mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, in 1971, and reelected two more
times before serving as governor of the Brazilian state of Paraná. As mayor, Lerner
devised a number of low-cost solutions and innovative partnerships with the
public and private companies that turned Curitiba into a model green community. He has won
a number of major awards for his transportation, design, and environmental
work, including the United Nations Environment Award. In 2002, Lerner was
elected president of the International Union of Architects. Today, he is
principal of Jamie Lerner Associated Architects.

Q. You’ve argued that cities
are the solution to climate change, not the problem. What is the case for this?

A. Well, my point of view is
that there are many, many answers to what would be the best way to avoid
climate change. A lot of people are talking about new materials. Or new sources
of energy. Or wind turbines. Or recycling. They’re really important but not
enough. When we realized that 75 percent of car emissions are related to the
cities, we realized we can be more effective when we work with the concept of
the city. It’s through cities that we can have better results.

Q. What do you see as the
relationship between livability and sustainability?

A. Every time we try to
create a solution, we have to have a good equation of co-responsibility with
the public. That means it’s not a question of money and it’s not a question of
skill; it’s how do we organize the equation of co-responsibility?

For example, when I was
governor we had to work hard to reduce pollution in our bays. Of course, it’s
very expensive to do environmental cleanup work and we didn’t have the money.
Another region had taken out a huge loan from the World Bank, about $800
million. For us though, the question wasn’t about money; the question was about
mentality. We started to clean our bays through an agreement with fishermen: If
the fisherman catches a fish, it belongs to him; if he catches garbage, we
buy the garbage. If the day was not good for fishing, the fishermen went to
fish garbage. The more garbage they caught, the cleaner the bays became. The
cleaner the bay was, the more fish they would have.

It’s that kind of win-win
solution we need. We need to work with low-cost solutions.

Q. You also decentralized
garbage collection. One program to clean up dirty, narrow streets that were
inaccessible to trash collectors gave residents bags of groceries or transit
passes in return for their garbage. How well did this program work?

A. It’s been working for more
than 20 years in Curitiba. In many cities, there are places where it’s
difficult to provide trucks access to collect garbage. In many cities, if the
slums are on the hills or deep in valleys, they’re difficult to access. In
these places, people are throwing away their garbage and polluting the streams.
Their children are playing in polluted areas. In 1989, we started a program
where we said, “Okay, we’re going to buy your garbage as long as you put your
garbage in a bag, and bring it to the trucks, where it’s more accessible.” In
two or three months, all these areas were clean, and these very low-income
people had an additional source of income.

We also started public
education programs on the separation of garbage [into separate streams for
recycling, composting, etc.] because we realized that we could transform one
problem if we separated garbage in every household. We started teaching every
child in every school. Children taught their parents. Since then, Curitiba has had
the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world for more than 20 years.
Around 60 or 70 percent of families are separating their garbage at home.

Q. As mayor of Curitiba, you
created the world’s first bus rapid transit system (BRT), “Speedy Bus,” which
works like a surface subway system but at far less cost. How did you form the
public-private partnership that made it cost-effective?

A. We didn’t have the money
for a completely new fleet, which would have cost $300 million. What was the
equation? What was the solution? We said to the private sector, private
companies, “We’ll invest in the itinerary as long as you invest in the fleet.
We’ll get loans for the work on our side, for public works, for the itinerary,
if the private sector gets loans for the fleet.” We paid them by kilometers and
there are no subsidies. The system pays for itself. Now, there are more than 83
BRT systems around the world.

The problem is in many
countries, government wants to invest in everything. That doesn’t work. I’ll
give you an example. Why don’t we have a good system of transport in New York
on the waterfront? This could be a very good approach for reducing congestion
in the city’s bridges and tunnels. The city could have a very pleasant system
of water public transport. But instead, the policymakers are holding it up,
saying there are no passengers and we don’t want to invest in the fleet. First,
they need to create a good partnership and create an attractive system, then
they will have the passengers, and then they will have a low-cost solution.

Q. You’ve also mentioned
that many poor copies of your BRT are out there, and are actually setting back
BRT as a transportation movement. What are other cities doing wrong?

A. BRT can’t be designed as
a transportation solution. It has to be planned as a whole city. Why? Because
the city is a structure of living, working, and leisure. Everything together.
Transportation has to provide a structure for living and working together. It
can’t just be a system of transport. You will just have a kind of commuting system,
which is more difficult to make feasible. With that kind of approach, you will
only use public transport twice daily, concentrated in just a few hours. If you
have a system that works always and connects working and living activities,
it’s more a city [approach] than just a corridor of public transport.

Q. Now you have your own
architecture and urban design firm and you are working with major city
governments and private clients throughout the Americas. What kind of projects
are you working on?

A. Sustainability is an
equation between what we save and what we waste. There are so many problems of
mobility or integration of systems, but we have to work fast. If we understand
the city as a structure of living, working, moving together, we can work more
effectively …

For instance, in Sao Paolo,
they have three subway lines. They are working on fourth line of the subway,
with 84 percent of the trains running on the surface. It’s the surface that has
to operate better. At the same time, the suburb railroad is being improved. The
idea is to take advantage of the existing path of the suburb railroads and
build above the rail a kind of linear park like the High Line. However, this
linear park would link the whole city, where you can connect people of all income
levels. In every place, you could have good public transport and you have a
huge park linking it all. Within this park, you could walk, bike, or take small
electric cars.

Sometimes there’s an idea
and it has to be improved. In other cases, we use “urban acupuncture.”

Q. At the street level,
you’ve been experimenting with “portable streets,” creating informal and spontaneous
market street life.

A. Some places in some
cities have become decayed. There’s no life. When that happens, it’s very
difficult to bring back life because people don’t want to live in a place like
that. However, the moment we bring street life, people will want to live there
again. That’s why we designed the portable streets. On a Friday night, we can
deliver a portable street and remove it Monday morning. We can put a whole
street life in front of a university or any place, bringing street life back …

These are small
interventions that can provide new energy to the city, and provide assistance
during the process of long-term planning, which has to take time. But we have
to work fast.

Related Links:

One billion cars clog traffic worldwide

Monkeys go on looting spree in Rio

Renewable Energy Keeps Growing: Earth Summit in Rio provides an opportunity for even more action

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Claire Thompson.

Say you want to eat healthy. You even support the idea of a
more sustainable food system. But really embracing either might mean breaking
out of an entrenched microwave meal routines, carving a big slice out of your
budget, or—gulp—learning to cook.

How about a trial run? That’s the idea behind Saturday’s
Slow Food USA $5
Challenge. It’s an invitation to gather friends,
family, and neighbors together for a “slow food” meal that costs no more than
$5 per person, or around the price of a typical fast food value meal.

In case you need a refresher, Slow Food USA’s Jerusha
Klemperer defines “slow food” as food that’s “good for the people who are eating it, good
for the people who produced it, and good for the planet. And on top of all
that, delicious.”

Taking the $5 Challenge can mean simply eating a family
dinner, but with the commitment to spend no more than $5 per person and use as
many local ingredients as possible. Or it can mean gathering a larger group of
like-minded people to shop, cook, and eat together, as Portland, Maine’s Slow
Food chapter plans to do. “What’s so cool about it is that the looseness of the
parameters means that people can really take it and make it their own,” said
Klemperer.

Other groups in line with the slow food philosophy have
found creative ways to participate, expanding the event beyond the limits of
the Whole Foods-frequenting foodie stereotype sometimes conjured by the term
“slow food.” For instance, the Restaurant
Opportunities Center (ROC), an organization that advocates for the rights
of restaurant workers, will host a meal and discussion at the restaurants they
run in New York City and Detroit.
ROC promotes worker ownership, provides training for restaurant employees to
advance their careers, and offers sustainable, locally sourced menus at their
restaurants. They’re planning a panel discussion, focused on issues of workplace justice in the slow food movement, at their Detroit restaurant. As Minsu
Longiaru, director of ROC-Michigan sees it, “being able to ensure that the people who are growing, cooking, and
serving your food are treated with dignity” is integral to the continued
success of the Slow Food Movement.

The restaurant also will serve a $5 “values” meal that
night. “Many times there’s the argument that you can’t serve a meal that’s
affordable and healthy and pay the workers decent wages,” Longiaru said.
“Having a restaurant like [ours] participating in the $5 Challenge shows that
this is possible if we come together as a community and have the determination
to do it.”

Klemperer said that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers,
a worker advocacy group in Florida that has been working for justice for tomato
workers for nearly two decades, will participate in the $5 Challenge during a
training they’re hosting this weekend.

A group of food trucks in Louisville, Ky. will also offer $5
meals at their Food
Truckus Ruckus, an occasional gathering of local street food vendors.

The idea for the $5 challenge came from the University of
Wisconsin’s Slow Food chapter, which for several years has maintained a
tradition of hosting weekly $5 meals for students, prepared with local
ingredients in campus kitchens. Jen Bloesch, leader of the UW chapter and now a
senior, started participating in these “family dinner nights” as a freshman.
She said they’ve grown from about 40 attendees per dinner to 80 – 100 every
week. They’re now so big that they have
students sign up to take turns as “guest chefs,” instead of opening the kitchen
doors to anyone who wants to cook. (You know what they say about too many
cooks … ) The student chefs shop at local farmers markets and food co-ops, and
have learned that buying in bulk and getting to know farmers pays off,
literally. And they budget for around $3.50 per person, per meal—proof that
the $5 challenge isn’t hard to achieve, if you know what you’re doing.

“One of thing we’ve noticed out there in the national
conversation is that, in spite of [the] challenges, there are people all over
the country finding ways to make it work,” says Klemperer. College students are
a notoriously time- and budget-crunched population, so the fact that they can
find a way to eat slow bodes well for the widespread success of the movement.

“There’s this great saying,” says Bloesch. “Do the best you
can with what you’ve got where you’re at.” Changing your personal eating habits—or reforming an entire food system, for that matter—is much less
intimidating when taken in small bites. Bloesch started by simply switching to whole
wheat bread. “Figure out something you can do, and feel good about that, and be
constantly looking to do more,” she adds.

Klemperer acknowledges that the $5 Challenge may sound way
more accessible to some people than others. But that disparity is part of the
point. “We’re really interested in looking at those underlying institutional
and structural and policy-driven things that make it harder [to afford even a
$5 meal] for some people than others,” she said. “In a perfect world, we
wouldn’t have to do a campaign like this, because this kind of food should be
available and accessible every day. Our hope is that the conversation that
starts around the meals [on] Sept. 17 will help us make a road map for the kind
of work we need to do to get there.”

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by Tom Philpott.

Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

Remember when gas was a dollar a gallon? The era of the fast-food “dollar menu” may be going the same way.

Cheap food has been with us for a while. After World War II, global grain prices fell steadily for decades. U.S. and European farms scaled up, resorted to synthetic and mined fertilizers and pesticides, invested in massive planting and harvesting machines as well as novel seed varieties. All of this pushed crop yields into the stratosphere—and crop prices into the dirt. The era of cheap food was upon us, giving rise to things like corn-sweetened Big Gulps and the dumping of boatloads of U.S. corn on foreign markets. But now things are changing fast.

From Justin Gillis’ big front-pager in last Sunday’s New York Times:

The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.

And here’s the formidable Lester Brown, writing in Foreign Policy:

Unfortunately, today’s [crop] price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry.

Both the Times and the Brown analyses are worth reading.  They accurately portray the big-picture situation: The globe is consuming staple crops faster than farmers can churn them out, and climate change, population growth, high energy prices, and increased meat consumption all threaten to make things worse. The Times’ Gillis shatters the stubborn claim that climate change will be good for agriculture, at least in the global north, because all of that excess carbon in the air will make plants grow faster. Turns out that other factors, like extreme weather events and excess heat, will likely more than offset that effect.

Brown is especially good on the “land grab” problem: the trend of cash-rich, land-poor countries like Saudi Arabia buying up prime farm territory in low-income countries, mostly in Africa:

By the end of 2009, hundreds of land acquisition deals had been negotiated, some of them exceeding a million acres. A 2010 World Bank analysis of these “land grabs” reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved—an area that exceeds the cropland devoted
to corn and wheat combined in the United States. Such acquisitions also typically involve water rights, meaning that land grabs potentially affect all downstream countries as well. Any water extracted from the upper Nile River basin to irrigate crops in Ethiopia or Sudan, for
instance, will now not reach Egypt, upending the delicate water politics of the Nile by adding new countries with which Egypt must negotiate.

In other words, rich countries are essentially colonizing farmland in places where millions of people face chronic hunger—often in secret deals with domestic elites that ice out local farmers whose families have occupied the land for generations, Brown reports. He adds a detail I hadn’t heard before: Two-thirds of these land grabs involve crops grown for non-food purposes, mainly biofuels. The industrial world is essentially turning the global south’s prime farmland into another source for car fuel.

For all its analytical power, Brown’s article is scant on solutions. “The time to act is now,” he concludes, “before the food crisis of 2011 becomes the new normal.” But he doesn’t specify what he’d like to see happen. Gillis, meanwhile, fixates on technology—though to his credit, he doesn’t parrot the agrichemical industry’s marketing line that without heavy doses of its products, global famine is inevitable. According to industry dogma, only patent-protected GMO seeds will fit the bill. Yet most of the examples Gillis points to are seeds
“improved” by conventional breeding, not genetic modification.

But both analyses neglect a burgeoning consensus among some development specialists and ag experts that the solution to the “global food crisis” doesn’t come from technology at all—at least not the kind that comes in a bag. Just last month, a team of researchers led by the eminent Washington State University soil scientist John P.  Reganold published a paper [PDF] in Science arguing that conventional U.S. agriculture research has become too “narrowly focused on productivity and efficiency” at the expense of
public health and resilience to the pressures of climate change. Rather than promote techno-fixes, the researchers called for “organic farming, alternative livestock production (e.g., grass-fed), mixed crop and livestock systems, and perennial grains.”

By rejecting agribusiness as usual, Reganold and crew find themselves in good company. Their recommendations dovetail with those Olivier De Schutter, the U.N.‘s special rapporteur on food; the U.N. Environment Program; and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development, a three-year project that engaged 400 scientists from around the globe under the aegis of the World Bank and the U.N.‘s Food and Agriculture
Organization.

As such ideas flourish in high-level development circles, they tend to wither in media discussions. From recent reports in The Economist and the public-radio show Marketplace, you would assume experts agree that giant agribusiness firms hold the key to “feeding the world,” and that their only critics are frivolous hippies. That’s just not true. The looming food crisis is all too real; it’s time for a real public debate on how to address it.

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View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Tom Philpott.

For decades, the federal government has watched idly while a few gigantic companies grabbed ever-greater control of the food industry. As big players gobble smaller ones, they concentrate power at the top of the food chain—and apply relentless pressure to cut costs, giving rise to many of the things I hate about the food system. Workers, farmers, the environment, animals, public health—all get abused so that mega-retailers like Walmart, meat producers like Smithfield, and corn processors like Cargill can keep costs down while profitably selling cheap food.

Well, in a sharp break from its predecessors, the Obama Justice Department is actually acknowledging the problem and contemplating actually doing something about it. The DOJ has been holding public meetings to let players in the food system air out thier views on the issue.

I will be very surprised—and very pleasantly so—if anything substantial comes of the exercise. But it’s fascinating to watch it play out.

Over on Eclectic Edibles, blogger Shwankie found an interesting tidbit while watching the C-Span feed of recent hearings in D.C. Apparently, a representative from the Food Marketing Institute got to mouthing the food industry’s main defense of consolidation: that it benefits U.S. consumers by allowing us to spend less on food as a percentage of income than the citizens of any other country in the world.

Comparing U.S. consumers’ food expenditures to those of the French and Spanish, the flack concluded that our tightly consolidated food industry is serving us a higher “quality of life” along with all the burgers and frozen dinners.

Shwankie very smartly shredded that assertion by coming up with a little chart comparing food expenditures and various diet-related troubles among the United States, France, and Spain. She didn’t give her data sources, so I felt uncomfortable reprinting her chart. Inspired by her, I came up with my own version. I threw Germany into the mix, just to broaden the sample.

Now, correlation does not prove causation. But if the food industry wants to claim that its abundance of cheap crap delivers higher quality of life, it will have to explain why our citizens come down with diet-related maladies at rates so much higher than those in countries where food is pricier. For most of us, “quality of life” does not dovetail with gaining too much weight, getting diabetes, and dying of a heart attack.

I added to my chart a metric not found in Shwankie’s post: the United Nations’ “Gini index” of income inequality. That’s my tribute to U.K. researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, whose book The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger has been blowing my mind.

If the food-industry rep is probably dead wrong that cheap food increases quality of life, Wilkinson and Pickett point to a factor that actually seems to: income equality. Below, find their chart tracking income equality against a broad quality-of-life index.

To me, cheap food underpins our highly inequitable income system. If we’re going to have a large low-income class, a perpetually squeezed middle class, and a small caste of super-rich, then a cheap food system plays a vital role in keeping those at the bottom fed—if under-nourished.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s inequality work has provided me with a new way of looking at food-system reform. It may be that that a food system predicated on slashing costs—at the expense of the environment, workers, animals, and public health—is a symptom of a broader problem: an economic system that concentrates power and income at the top. It may well be that we can’t really reform the food system until we reform the economy. That’s an idea I’ll be mulling and teasing out in the new year.    

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