For everyone who was hoping the Obama administration’s proposed new rules for natural gas drilling on public lands would make a difference, the just-released new draft amounts to a big “frack you.”
Federal rules governing fracking on public lands are being updated, ostensibly to help manage the boom that’s polluting America’s groundwater and shaking free vast volumes of cheap natural gas. Environmentalists were disappointed a year ago when the Department of Interior released a fracker-friendly draft of the new rules. But they submitted reams of comments and had hoped that the proposed regulations would be tightened up in this draft.
Instead, the opposite happened.
Bowing to industry pressure and disregarding concerns about environmental and health impacts, the department actually watered down the draft regulations during the past year. The latest proposal gives frackers virtual carte blanche to wreck the environment, and they don’t even need to tell America which chemicals they’re wrecking it with.
Under the draft proposal, frackers won’t be required to tell the public what chemicals they are injecting into their land. They won’t need to demonstrate that all of their wells are safe — just one well in each field will do. Toxic wastewater will be allowed to sit in open pits. And frackers will be allowed to work near homes, schools and on environmentally sensitive land.
“These rules protect industry, not people,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are riddled with gaping holes that endanger clean, safe drinking water supplies for millions of Americans nationwide.” She added that “this draft is a blueprint for business-as-usual industrialization of our landscapes.”
You would imagine that the oil and gas industry would be showering Obama with love and extolling his greatness right now, given that they are getting their way on virtually everything. But you would be wrong. For them, anything resembling regulation is too much regulation. More from the Washington Post:
Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute criticized the department for not simply leaving regulation to state agencies. “While changes to the proposed rule attempt to better acknowledge the state role, BLM has yet to answer the question why BLM is moving forward with these requirements in the first place,” said Erik Milito, API’s director of upstream operations.
In a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who as a petroleum engineer used hydraulic fracturing while drilling oil and gas wells in the 1970s, called the proposals “common-sense updates” of regulations that “date back to the Sony Walkman and Atari video game.” She called fracking “an essential tool” but said it should not be left to a “patchwork” of state regulations.
For a detailed look at the latest proposal and for a dissection of its environmental shortcomings, head over to Matthew McFeeley’s NRDC blog. The draft rule isn’t final yet — there is a 30-day public comment period. Let’s see if the regulators listen to the people this time.
For everyone who was hoping the Obama administration’s proposed new rules for natural gas drilling on public lands would make a difference, the just-released new draft amounts to a big “frack you.”
Federal rules governing fracking on public lands are being updated, ostensibly to help manage the boom that’s polluting America’s groundwater and shaking free vast volumes of cheap natural gas. Environmentalists were disappointed a year ago when the Department of Interior released a fracker-friendly draft of the new rules. But they submitted reams of comments and had hoped that the proposed regulations would be tightened up in this draft.
Instead, the opposite happened.
Bowing to industry pressure and disregarding concerns about environmental and health impacts, the department actually watered down the draft regulations during the past year. The latest proposal gives frackers virtual carte blanche to wreck the environment, and they don’t even need to tell America which chemicals they’re wrecking it with.
Under the draft proposal, frackers won’t be required to tell the public what chemicals they are injecting into their land. They won’t need to demonstrate that all of their wells are safe — just one well in each field will do. Toxic wastewater will be allowed to sit in open pits. And frackers will be allowed to work near homes, schools and on environmentally sensitive land.
“These rules protect industry, not people,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are riddled with gaping holes that endanger clean, safe drinking water supplies for millions of Americans nationwide.” She added that “this draft is a blueprint for business-as-usual industrialization of our landscapes.”
You would imagine that the oil and gas industry would be showering Obama with love and extolling his greatness right now, given that they are getting their way on virtually everything. But you would be wrong. For them, anything resembling regulation is too much regulation. More from the Washington Post:
Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute criticized the department for not simply leaving regulation to state agencies. “While changes to the proposed rule attempt to better acknowledge the state role, BLM has yet to answer the question why BLM is moving forward with these requirements in the first place,” said Erik Milito, API’s director of upstream operations.
In a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who as a petroleum engineer used hydraulic fracturing while drilling oil and gas wells in the 1970s, called the proposals “common-sense updates” of regulations that “date back to the Sony Walkman and Atari video game.” She called fracking “an essential tool” but said it should not be left to a “patchwork” of state regulations.
For a detailed look at the latest proposal and for a dissection of its environmental shortcomings, head over to Matthew McFeeley’s NRDC blog. The draft rule isn’t final yet — there is a 30-day public comment period. Let’s see if the regulators listen to the people this time.
The notion of “externalities” has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs.
While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I’ve always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics — it makes them sound Serious — but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.
To see what I mean, check out a recent report [PDF] done by environmental consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program. TEEB asked Trucost to tally up the total “unpriced natural capital” consumed by the world’s top industrial sectors. (“Natural capital” refers to ecological materials and services like, say, clean water or a stable atmosphere; “unpriced” means that businesses don’t pay to consume them.)
It’s a huge task; obviously, doing it required a specific methodology that built in a series of assumptions. (Plenty of details in the report.) But it serves as an important signpost pointing the way to the truth about externalities.
Here’s how those costs break down:
The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).
So how much is that costing us? Trucost’s headline results are fairly stunning.
First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion dollars a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.
(A “region-sector” is a particular industry in a particular region — say, wheat farming in East Asia.)
Second, surprising no one, coal is the enemy of the human race. Trucost compiled rankings, both of the top environmental impacts and of the top industrial culprits.
Here are the top five biggest environmental impacts and the region-sectors responsible for them:
The biggest single environmental cost? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in China. The fifth biggest? Greenhouse gases from coal burning in North America. (This also shows what an unholy nightmare deforestation in South America is.)
Now, here are the top five industrial sectors ranked by total ecological damages imposed:
It’s coal again! This time North American coal is up at number three.
Trucost’s third big finding is the coup de grace. Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment. None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. None!
That amounts to an entire global industrial system built on sleight of hand. As legendary environmentalist Paul Hawken put it, “We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”
This gets back to what I was saying at the top. The notion of “externalities” is so technical, such an economist’s term. Got a few unfortunate side effects, so just move some numbers from Column A to Column B, right?
But the UNEP report makes clear that what’s going on today is more than a few accounting oversights here and there. The distance between today’s industrial systems and truly sustainable industrial systems — systems that do not spend down stored natural capital but instead integrate into current energy and material flows — is not one of degree, but one of kind. What we need is not just better accounting, it is a new global industrial system, a new way of providing for human wellbeing, a new way of relating to our planet. We need a revolution.
Editor’s note: Welcome to Grist’s presentation of Alex Steffen’s new book Carbon Zero. We’ll be posting a new chapter every day till we’re done — here’s the full table of contents. And this post will tell you a little more about the project. If you like what you read, you can order Carbon Zero from Amazon.
Shelter: working with nature to drop emissions
Once we’re thinking differently about our streets, we need to start thinking differently about our buildings as well. How we build has a major impact on our climate emissions. To see why, we need to look at buildings themselves.
Buildings offer us many things: a place we can feel at home, a status display, a means of expressing our personalities, a productive workspace, an investment tool. But above all else, our buildings offer us shelter.
Shelter from what? The power of nature. Every day, vast quantities of energy flow through our surroundings. The seasons, the daily rotation of the Earth, the tides, the forces of sun and wind and rain: These are energies far vaster than anything human beings create by burning things. Most of us have only known exposure to the real power of nature — frost-nipped fingers, sunstroke, the misery of trying to sleep in wet clothes in unrelenting rain — through the occasional recreational misadventure. But for most of humanity, through most of history, the elements were a constant and threatening force. Vulnerability to the flows of nature was the most fundamental fact of our ancestors’ lives.
Traditional builders knew and made use of these flows. They had to. Trap the heat from sunshine (with a south-facing window, for instance) and a space gets hot. Block that sunshine (with a high wall or a line of trees, for instance) and that space will cool down. Open a space to breezes, and it will feel cooler. Make that same space airtight, and it will feel warmer. And, obviously, rooms with openings to let in sunshine are brighter than windowless ones. By orienting a building to the sun’s path through the sky and making good use of trees, screens, and windows, the best pre-industrial buildings were often surprisingly comfortable, absorbing the warmth of direct sunlight in the winter and making use of cooling breezes and shade in the summer. You can find examples of this vernacular awareness of seasons and flows in pretty much every culture in the world.
That doesn’t mean that every building worked in perfect harmony with the seasons, or that every building used quality materials, or even that every building was built well. Few of us would tolerate the miserable cold, the overwhelming heat, the bad air, the bugs, and the general discomfort of the huts that many of our bygone relatives called home. It’s easy to forget just how hard life was for most people.
Buy Carbon Zero on Amazon.
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution though, cheap coal, oil, gas, and the electricity they generated when burned in power plants transformed the way we thought about the places we lived. They didn’t necessarily lead to more sensible buildings, but they gave us the ability to turn even shabby buildings into comfortable ones — by burning things we made our own sun, wind, rivers, and ice.
We don’t tend to think of things this way, but every fan is an artificial wind, every light an artificial sun, every furnace a hidden fire, every refrigerator a domestic glacier, every tap a tamed river. Since with cheap energy we could run air conditioners, furnaces, and electric lights at low cost, it became both financially easier (and more stylishly modern) to ignore natural forces and build in new aesthetics that often completely ignored the outside world and provided artificially comfort-controlled environments with mechanical systems. In many cases, it was cheaper to use energy thoughtlessly than to spend time thinking about how to use less of it. Comfort came not from a building’s design, but from its thermostats and light switches.
The result? Tens of millions of buildings that are energy oblivious: so poorly insulated that without heat their inhabitants would freeze, full of windowless rooms requiring bright lights even on sunny days, or built with huge shadeless panes of glass that trap so much heat that they are unlivable without constant air-conditioning.
Today, building operations (heating, cooling, lighting, and so on) are one of the major sources of greenhouse gases. When you combine the emissions created by running all those furnaces, air conditioners, and light bulbs with the climate costs of building these structures and making the appliances in them, the result is that our buildings are second only to our transportation systems in their climate impacts. If we’re going to build carbon zero cities, we need to rethink not only the shapes of our buildings, but the way in which they connect to the world around them. We’re going to need to imagine a major upheaval in shelter systems.
What can we do about all that energy use? Well, if we knew that our cities were unlikely to grow much, and so the buildings we had today were going to be more or less the buildings we’d have in 20 years, our strategy would be all about preserving what we have and retrofitting it to be as efficient as possible.
Almost all of us understand that a building can be made more energy efficient. Building owners can insulate and air-seal their structures. They can refit them with more efficient appliances and better lighting. They can install energy- and water-saving fixtures. Even very basic home-efficiency measures can drop energy use for heating and cooling in a leaky, uninsulated building by one-third or more.
Using that much less energy, in turn, can save enough money every month that the payback time for the initial cost is often quite reasonable (and will be increasingly reasonable as energy costs rise). The main barrier here is financing: It’s hard in the U.S. to get the money to make these changes in the first place.
That’s why even the most aggressive retrofitting programs in America involve upgrading only 1 percent or 2 percent of a city’s buildings each year. (Some European programs aim for more than 5 percent, which is much better; after all, the difference between refurbishing 5 percent of a group of buildings every year and 1 percent is the difference between having changed every building in 20 years, and needing a century to get that job done.) Various policies, financing support, and tax incentives can speed up the rate of change. Even in the best case, though, we’re going to have a lot of work on our hands to steadily improve our existing building stock, for years to come.
Buildings for carbon zero cities
If in 20 years older buildings were all we had, that would be the end of this chapter: “Retrofit as quickly as you can.” But for many, if not most, cities in North America, the opposite looks likely to be true. Our cities will not be defined by what we have now, but by what’s coming.
As we discussed last chapter, a combination of fast-rising populations, regional migration, and changing housing preferences will likely mean that in some places, as many as half of the buildings in 2030 will be new construction; in a few places, a large majority will be new. The coming urban building boom presents both threats and opportunities. Our climate goals could be threatened by continuing old practices as we build new cities. Most new buildings today are only somewhat energy and water efficient. If we don’t raise our standards, new construction will be no better. The threat is that we build a flood of new housing, workspaces, and shops that will soon need to be retrofitted themselves, adding to the already difficult task of bringing our cities up to date.
It’s vital that every time a new building is built, we expect it to meet the highest possible green building standards. There are already some excellent efforts pushing for better standards. The Architecture 2030 project, for example, seeks by 2030 to have every new building be carbon neutral, with gradually rising minimum efficiency requirements. It’s an excellent plan, but we can’t wait until 2030 to raise our standards for new development.
Northern Europe’s Passivhaus standard represents the kind of goal we could embrace — practical now and ambitious enough to serve our needs in the future. A city in which every new building was built to Passivhaus standards would be a city on its way to radically reducing the carbon footprint of its homes, offices, and shops.
The German word “Passivhaus” translates literally to “passive building.” Passivity in this case means sticking to two simple core principles: work with (not against) natural flows and use airtight insulation to keep warmth (or coolness) where you want it. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the basic idea. Add to those simple principles the latest design, manufacturing, and materials advances (especially new superefficient window designs) and what you end up with are buildings that work in a different way than most of us would expect.
Anticipating sunshine and shadow can allow architects to use the heat of the sun to warm a building in the winter; they can then employ overhangs, canopies, and trees to shade the building and keep it cool in the summer. Digital design tools for properly orienting buildings to these flows of sunlight and shadow are widely available now.
Our buildings bleed warmth (and coolness); the physics of the world dictate that warm and cold things want to seek balance, so when we heat a building on a cold day (or cool it on a hot one), all of that heat is “pulled” from the house by the difference in temperatures inside and outside. Insulation slows down the process. A little insulation keeps a bit more of the heat inside a bit longer; better insulation a little longer than that. But when you superinsulate a building, the rate at which heat is lost slows so much that much smaller sources of heat can keep it warm. Insulate it thickly enough and make it airtight and even very small sources of heat — like that given off by a candle or the body warmth of a person — can make up for the tiny amount of heat the building loses, keeping it warm without constantly burning fossil fuels.
Passivhaus architects also think a lot about ventilation and insulation. Most Passivhaus buildings have operable windows, situated in a way to maximize the advantages of breezes on moderate days. All use heat-recovery ventilation systems that bring fresh air into the building without wasting the heat inside the house, moving the air but saving the warmth. Some have “heat pumps,” which make use of the cooler temperatures underground or from a nearby body of water to provide energy-efficient air-conditioning.
Such efficiency measures mean Passivhaus buildings stay warmer with very little actual heating (or cooler with little air-conditioning). The result can be a building that uses 90 percent less heating and cooling energy compared to a “conventional” new American home, but is more or less as comfortable (some people find the even temperatures of passive buildings take some getting used to).
That building can be cheaper, too. Large central-air systems and furnaces are expensive. Being able to do without them or use more economical, smaller versions (being able to “furnace dump”) can make the up-front cost of a passive home much lower, even competitive with “conventional” building, while dramatically lowering the occupants’ energy bills — lowering them so much, in fact, that Passivhaus structures all cost less than conventional ones over the life of the building. With more rational government incentives and building codes, meeting Passivhaus standards can even be cheaper up front (and then much cheaper over the long haul).
And here’s the kicker: There’s no downside. Energy used to heat, cool, or light a building serves no other purpose — it offers no other benefits — and nothing is lost by eliminating its use (except perhaps utility company profits). As long as a given efficiency measure pays for itself on a schedule that makes economic sense to the person paying for it, there is no reason whatsoever not to do it. And given the number of ways cities benefit from energy-efficient local homes and businesses, there’s every reason to try to make the economics work as well as possible. When the initial investments are paid off, the financial savings, after all, go straight back into residents’ pockets and the local economy.
Prefabricated buildings present the possibility of even greater savings. Using factory-built sections and on-site assembly, these buildings can potentially offer greater accuracies, more airtight surfaces, less construction waste. Prefab construction may also speed the uptake of specific components and materials, such as high-efficiency windows or the use of bamboo, that offer real sustainability benefits, but which builders have been slow to adopt. Modular construction and prefabrication need innovation, but the potential is very real.
Every time a new building goes up, we ought to be building to the highest currently practical standard. The opportunity costs of not doing so are too great. Every time a construction site opens, we have a chance to save a huge amount of energy for as long as the new building is standing, or to commit that building to wasting energy or undergoing a potentially costly retrofit in the future. Every time we build we have the choice to use the new structure and its systems to help improve the functioning of systems all around it — and we’ll come back to that — or to simply let another building be an additional burden on existing utilities and infrastructure. Every new building is a chance to turn things a little bit more in the right direction.
These new buildings don’t have to be expensive or elitist. I am particularly enamored of the 99K House competition, which asked architects to build a 1,400-square-foot, three-bedroom home, using sustainable materials, passive design approaches, and energy-efficient materials and techniques … for less than $99,000. I found the range of entries to be incredible, proof that plenty of room remains for creative application of cutting-edge green building principles, and that the result can be affordable and accessible.
New building types
If we want to really change things, we can reinvent not only how we build, but what we build. I don’t have space to do the subject justice here, but essentially all of our current housing and commercial spaces are architectural accretions: Their forms represent layer upon layer of historical building technologies, fashion trends, economic class identities, and accidents of practice. Though they are highly evolved to be what they are, what they are is not all we might want.
Indeed, most of us put very little thought into what we want from our homes and workplaces. And while certain general principles seem to hold true most of the time — for example, people like natural light — the range of possible expressions of those principles is wide and still largely untapped. We might, just as one example, see more types of “multi-family” housing built for groups of single adults (the most rapidly growing household type) who wish to live with some degree of common space and community feeling, while retaining privacy and independence.
Though political pressures against innovation are huge — everyone from NIMBY reactionaries to architecturally minded fans of “aesthetic cohesion” in neighborhoods will line up to hate a new type of building — some even stronger pressures are building towards an upheaval in architectural practice. This would be an excellent time for those with the ability and resources to encourage experimentation.
Historic buildings and bespoke innovation
Though it’s easier to build new buildings when we want to live in truly energy-efficient ways, older buildings, and historic buildings in particular, offer opportunities we shouldn’t overlook. Historic buildings can play a critical role in fast-changing communities.
Historic buildings offer community benefits outside their own energy use. Historic buildings can help an area with a lot of new development retain a distinct character and sense of place. They make the streetscape more attractive (especially since many historic buildings were originally designed to serve pedestrians). They also tend to raise property values nearby, helping to increase neighborhood prosperity. Finally, many old buildings are just beautiful.
With strong incentives, many older buildings can be retrofitted up to Passivhaus standards. Though it costs more money and effort than just insulating and weather-stripping, retrofitting older buildings can often drive the energy savings up near that 90 percent mark as well.
A complicating factor is that every historic building presents a unique situation. Each historic building has a specific history of use, change, damage, and remodels. Historic buildings have strange mixes of materials, hidden structures (and structural problems); they may be regulated in different ways than new construction. Smart solutions to the problems historic buildings face are by necessity one-offs — bespoke.
In this regard, heritage structures differ only in their extremes. The fact is cities are built of nothing but unique cases; every neighborhood, every site, every building differs in ways large and small. Though it’s easy to describe the general principles we want to apply in creating a landscape of low-emissions buildings, we must not, as Paul Saffo likes to caution us, mistake a clear view for a short distance. In reality, applying those principles will be a matter not of blanket fixes but of myriad custom-made solutions, applied with insight and creativity. We’ll need an army of boundary-pushing architects, designers, engineers, and builders to transform our cities building by building. We’ll also need a new understanding of what makes a building green, followed by an even bigger suite of tools for crafting custom responses to each green-building challenge.
People-focused places and green building
We’ve inherited a warped vision of what a green building looks like, especially in North America. Strong leadership displayed by green-building pioneers in the 1970s and ‘80s — many of whom were hippies and had a strong preference for independent lives and back-to-the-land lifestyles — has led many of us to associate green building with “living off the grid.” The “neighborhood sustainability” movements of the 1990s and 2000s, with their focus on transitional technologies and small-scale local action, left some of us thinking that green building is fundamentally a small-scale, grassroots project. Other prominent design trends (like the idea of “zero energy” homes, which through photoelectric panels or small wind turbines create as much power as they use) have convinced us that green building is, in fact, a matter of greening specific buildings one by one. Conversely, the last decade’s photos of large modernist single-family homes in forests or deserts or by ocean bluffs have given us the sense that green building is something for rich people’s summer homes and magazine-showcase houses; that it is expensive and exclusionary.
Now, I’m not interested in trashing any of these efforts. They got us as far as we’ve come, often in the face of active opposition and steep learning curves. Many of the structures born of these movements offer terrific illustrations of principles we’d all do well to learn more about — but they do not necessarily offer the best models of the practices we need to embrace. Fundamentally, that’s because they’re not genuinely urban.
Density is the foundation of all truly green buildings. Living urban lives within compact communities is what makes possible the shift from greener structures to truly low-carbon homes and workplaces.
How? Homes in compact communities tend to be smaller. Smaller homes take fewer resources to build and use less energy to live in comfortably. The shared walls of multi-unit buildings make them more efficient. Better-designed larger buildings can also take less work to maintain than a comparable number of stand-alone houses, which translates to lower emissions. People living car-free lives don’t need parking, either, meaning the buildings they live in don’t need parking structures. This can save $10,000–$30,000 in costs for each unit, and shave as much as 10 percent off the building’s carbon footprint. A study for the EPA found that multi-unit homes in compact communities used half the energy, on average, of large-lot suburban homes — without using any different materials, technologies, or designs.
Just as importantly, we live differently in more moderately sized city homes, as well. A home stocked with smaller appliances and less furniture has a smaller carbon footprint. People with less storage space think twice about purchases they’re about to make, and, trend-watchers say, tend to buy fewer things overall. (At least they do on average — some people pack small homes to the rafters!) The shared services in a compact neighborhood are more sustainable than multiple individual versions; for instance, a 500-building neighborhood with one large gym is more sustainable than 500 buildings with individual home gyms. We’ll come back to this different way of living — and the ecological implications of different patterns of consumption — in the next chapter. For now, it’s enough to note that density and green living work nicely together.
Density makes the systems connected to the buildings work better, too. The infrastructure serving each building works more efficiently when the homes and offices in those buildings are more modestly sized. The United Nations’ State of the World’s Cities report makes no bones about it: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” Green homes in compact communities make the existing infrastructure do more work, more efficiently. They can do something more, though: They can make it realistic to change the kind of infrastructure we use.
District systems
When communities densify quickly, they encounter an opportunity to upgrade the systems that serve them. In a low-density area, with few new homes, there’s little reason or financial justification for local governments to go to the huge expense and trouble of digging up existing pipes, wires, and sewers and replacing them with the latest alternatives. In some cases, replacing old systems in spread-out communities costs more energy and money than the financial and ecological benefits of the new system are worth. Upgrading sprawl is often not cost-effective.
But when an area is both compact and rapidly changing, that equation is tossed on its head. The density of the community means more people using the systems, and thus more users to pay for the cost of upgrades (and more efficiencies in operation, as I explained above). The amount of new construction, meanwhile, means that a certain amount of digging, repair, and infrastructure development is going to happen anyway, as a natural part of the construction process in a city. People-focused neighborhoods with a lot of new buildings give local governments and utilities the motive and the opportunity to innovate.
District solutions arm them with the means. District solutions are infrastructural improvements that work for a number of buildings in the same area, helping them all get better-performing infrastructure at the same time, without having to rebuild the entire city’s urban systems all at once to do it. Done right, they are relatively fast, cost-effective, and transformative.
Perhaps the classic example is district energy. A common and successful form of district energy is a local combined heat and power (CHP) system. CHP often involves producing electricity with a steam turbine (commonly by burning relatively eco-friendly biomass like wood pellets) to make electricity while capturing the extra “waste heat” thrown off in the process and using it to warm local buildings as well.
What is waste heat? We all encounter it on a regular basis. If you’ve ever driven a car and noticed the hood was hot after you got out, you’ve encountered it. Burning gasoline releases an enormous amount of concentrated energy, but internal combustion engines can only use so much of that energy in actually propelling the car — the rest simply heats up the engine. It serves no purpose (unless you’re one of those folks who likes to cook food wrapped in tinfoil on top of your engine while you drive). It is wasted heat. Waste heat is also what makes an incandescent light bulb hot. Waste heat is always a sign we could be doing better.
Capturing waste heat can provide warmth in an extremely efficient manner. Waste heat can even be stored, using underground liquid “heat sinks” and systems of pumps; these in turn can be linked together with geothermal systems that use the more constant temperatures underground to heat (or cool) the buildings above it.
District energy and smart grids
But heating and cooling are not the only services district systems can offer: They can also introduce intelligence and adaptive capacity into dumb infrastructure. Many of us probably know about “smart grids,” electrical systems that let energy flow both into and out of buildings, measured and controlled by computerized systems. We’ve probably all heard how smart grids can cut down on inefficiencies, and can help route around problems, making blackouts and crashes less likely.
But what we might not have thought about is how many possibilities smart systems offer at the local level. Let’s start with power production. Though it’s certainly possible to put up your own solar roof tiles or wind helix turbine or whatever, numerous problems persist. You may not live in a building that’s well sited to make use of these. You may not use power at the right times to make optimal use of the system. You may lack the money to buy adequate storage. Or, your regional utility may not buy the power you generate back at a rate that covers your installation and maintenance costs. A whole field of companies has sprung up, trying to solve the problems of home-energy systems, and lots of progress is being made; but the fact persists that single home systems hooked up to large utilities are not as easy, cost-effective, or efficient as they might be.
But take a number of homes, a number of local energy systems, and a smart grid, and you’ve got the pieces for quickly improving the local energy infrastructure. A number of supplies and a number of users makes syncing supplies and needs more efficient, and offers the ability to build energy storage at a larger scale and lower cost. If the cars that remain in the neighborhood are electric vehicles, their recharging stations and batteries can become part of that storage capacity. If appliances with jobs that can wait (like a dishwasher) are linked to the smart system, then demand management gets easier, since the appliance can be programmed to do a task (like start the wash cycle for the dishes) only when supply is high and demand is low. Finally, smart systems allow the users to monitor their electricity use directly, and people use things differently when they measure them.
My favorite example of the last point is the Prius Effect. The story goes that if you take two cars that are in every way identical, except that one of them has a mileage meter and the other does not, the car with the mileage meter will get better mileage. At first, this seems dubious: If the cars are the same, how could one get better mileage than the other? The answer is that as drivers note their mileage on the meters, they get a constant stream of feedback on their driving. They notice that when they floor it as the light turns green, driving fast and braking to a stop, their mileage drops; it rises again when they accelerate more gradually, drive a bit more slowly, and brake less frequently. In effect, the car teaches them how to be better drivers.
This same kind of metering effect holds true in all sorts of systems. Feedback makes us smarter. For instance, multiple studies have shown that home energy use drops when energy meters are brought into the home and put in a prominent place, even when no other actions are taken. And we’re not talking about a minuscule drop, either — the reductions in energy use range in studies from 7 percent to 12 percent. Comparing usage between different people or households has an even stronger effect. Several projects have shown that when high-volume users are shown that their energy or water consumption is higher than their neighborhood average, they become more willing to invest in energy- and water-saving improvements, and may become more conscious of their behavioral choices.
More visible information may also make clear just how much energy we can save without in any way impacting the quality of our lives. Consuming less energy will not make us poorer. Huge amounts of power are wasted every day — we generate that power, move it, and consume it, yet it does absolutely no good for us at all. Squeezing the energy waste out of our communities — and this is a matter of systemic design to eliminate stupid, repetitive waste, not choosing to shiver in the dark; it is an engineering problem more than a behavioral one — would make a modest yet meaningful dent in our buildings’ carbon footprints just by itself. Better yet, it would free up money and time for more important things. All those efficiencies mean savings, and those savings add up quickly.
At larger neighborhood scales, these systems can be even more cost-effective, particularly when the local governments expedite work to avoid costly delays, and neighborhood businesses and residents purchase products and services together in order to leverage the best deals. Communities can encourage cultural collaboration and experimentation of a kind and intensity that society as a whole can’t match. A whole neighborhood of people who were excited to go “net zero” might find themselves happily taking steps that might feel onerous if they were acting on their own; they might, for example, be more likely to slim down to an electric car, buy more-efficient appliances, and be a bit more competitive about turning off unneeded lights. These steps, in turn, could make the whole smart system work better and more effectively.
The electric car angle is worth noting. We must change cities so few people need to drive (see the section on electric cars in chapter 3). That said, smart grids offer us an even stronger incentive to see the cars that remain converted quickly to electric vehicles. Electric cars are essentially battery packs on wheels, and since most cars, even in auto-dependent suburbs, stay parked in one of a few places for more than 20 hours a day, having a lot of electric cars means having a lot of batteries plugged into the grid. Since charging stations are programmable, cars can easily be fully charged when they will be needed, but store and feed energy back into the grid when they’re not. This means that the “peak load” of power usage can be met in part by stored-up energy created at other times, a very useful thing when dealing with renewable energy sources that are intermittently available. (We don’t want to buy EVs just for their batteries, though. Simply building more storage capacity into local systems is a better economic and ecological bet than buying electric cars to fill that role.)
What’s true for energy systems is also true for water. “Smart pipes” is a buzzword for various monitoring and measuring systems designed to do for our water use what smart grids do for our energy use. Many water-saving measures (like low-flow showerheads) are already available, of course. Adding smart-pipe systems allows the demand for water to be handled more intelligently. Why talk about water at all in a climate discussion? Because water is energy intensive: It takes energy to capture water, to store it, to pump and purify it, to deliver it to homes and businesses, and to treat the resulting wastewater. And since every one of those steps can be done in more intelligent ways, and every part of these systems can incorporate a variety of water supplies, alternate water uses, and ways of treating wastewater (as we’ll see later), smart pipes might mean a leap in water conservation.
Innovation zones
We have tons of design and technology innovations left to discover in every one of these fields, both in principle and practice. We need to learn a lot about applied innovation in an urban context, and we need to learn it quickly. We need experimentation, risk-taking, new approaches, and just plain creative weirdness. Most of all, we need permission to fail.
And there’s the rub. Most cities have elaborate codes, accreted case by case over decades, designed specifically to avoid failures, almost at all costs. Now, overall, most of the original intentions behind these codes were unimpeachable. Bureaucrats compiled them to protect citizens from known hazards and unscrupulous landlords, contractors, and developers. They compiled them because people sickened or died, were cheated or injured by the practices the codes are designed to prevent. Many of them remain in force for two reasons: First of all, the inherent dynamics of government make it far more likely that someone will be inspired or pressured to add something to the code than to spend time eliminating unneeded parts of that same code. Secondly, property owners are inherently conservative about their property values and often believe that these codes protect those values; therefore, they view change as an economic threat. (Because they allow safely awful projects, codes in actual practice in most cities rarely protect anything of importance. If the average property owner realized what monstrosities are generally within the permitted range of most codes, they would rest less easy, but that’s a story for another time.)
So while these codes often sprang from a desire to protect the public, many of these same codes are out of date. Many are full of contradictions; many are needlessly inflexible. Anyone who’s been around sustainable urbanism for a while can tell you stories of great projects, projects everyone — the neighbors, the builders, the banks, the bureaucrats, everyone — likes getting wrapped up, mummy-like, in red tape. In timid, corrupt, or conservative local governments, code is often actively used to discourage and delay innovative projects, for any of a variety of reasons. Even in communities with forward-looking and well-run local governments, innovation in the built environment is often a matter of figuring out how to permit a practice despite the code. For some projects, these kinds of costly delays simply cut into the profit margin and disincentivize risk-taking; other projects are rendered financially untenable. The most interesting experiments are often the ones that are most entrepreneurial and novel, but these same projects are often the ones with the most tenuous financing. For these projects, red tape means death.
And yet it is precisely these kinds of projects that expand the range of possibilities in our cities, that bring new solutions into play, that help change the thinking of professionals throughout their whole fields. To lose scrappy, start-up attempts by architects, planners, engineers, and place-based businesspeople is to lose your edge. Without an ecosystem of small risk-takers expanding the boundaries of the possible, the projects bankers are willing to invest in will change very slowly, if at all. Successful examples make the best arguments.
One solution? Create specific, legally defined areas where codes and regulations are stripped to their minimums, and bold thinking is actively encouraged. Projects in these special innovation zones would need only prove that they avoid very basic hazards — public health risks, unsound structural engineering, toxic pollution, fire — and that they meet larger legal standards that the city is powerless to change (for instance, that no explosives are produced, all appropriate professionals are licensed, and that no racial discrimination is practiced). Beyond that basic set of strictures, they would have the capacity to challenge constraints, try new things. They might even be able to experiment with financial models, looking to crowd-funding or microbanking, for instance.
Every city needs a place where innovators are encouraged to try new things and take chances, and at entrepreneur’s pace — not the normal glacial pace of bureaucratic process. Currently underutilized or abandoned areas can be turned over to small- and mid-scale experiments in carbon zero work, commerce, and living. Think of them as seedbeds for new urban ways of life. Such zones could quickly become hothouses for growing the kinds of urban innovation carbon zero cities need. If they bloom, they will certainly draw the kind of creative young people every city hankers for — what many of the brightest of the next generation want most of all is to participate in making a better future. Done right, these innovation zones could change the economy of their entire region, as well as greatly accelerate climate-friendly technologies, designs, and start-up businesses. The ability to create innovation zones might even prove a new advantage struggling cities have when competing with more prosperous ones.
But it’s not just buildings and infrastructure we need to reinvent. How we live within our cities also demands reexamination, and there, the possibilities prove even more unexpected, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
CAFOs stink. In addition to being crowded, dirty, inhumane, and brimming with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, produce thousands of gallons of liquid waste with a stench that wafts through the air in the surrounding communities practically daily.
These odors are nasty and hard to live with, but new science suggests they also might put the bodies of those living near them in a state of stress that could have frightening effects on their blood pressure.
A study released last week out of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and published in Environmental Health Perspectives, asked 101 residents of towns in close proximity to large, industrial swine operations to sit outdoors for 10 minutes a day and record the level of hog odor on a 9-point scale. Then they were also asked to measure their blood pressure twice on portable digital devices. As a result, the researchers found a strong correlation between the days when the subjects reported strong odors and regular stress-induced blood pressure spikes.
The study’s lead researcher, Steve Wing, has already looked into some of the more well-known downsides to living near a CAFO. Last year, he released a related study finding that North Carolina residents who live in areas near big hog farms experienced eye irritation, wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath, sore throats, and nausea.
Jeff VanugamA CAFO manure lagoon.
And while those experiences are important (and truly awful to live with on a regular basis), they must all be self-identified by the study’s subjects, while this new science shows what Wing describes as “a physiologic change that can be measured and is independent of their perception.”
Regular spikes in one’s blood pressure can lead to hypertension, and while the study did not measure hypertension in and of itself, Wing says he sees the blood pressure spikes as problematic on their own.
“What’s very well known is that the risk of stroke and heart disease and other serious and fatal problems rises as blood pressure rises,” he says.
Of course residents in the area studied may face these health challenges for other reasons (such as diet, lifestyle, heredity, etc.), and these findings only apply to 101 people. That said, they’re still fairly significant.
Wing adds: “It’s not something that’s purely aesthetic; it’s not something that’s restricted to perception and behavior. It actually translates into a biological change that has medical significance. And if the same thing is going on with people all over the country who live near CAFOs, then [high blood pressure in nearby residents]is one of the consequences of industrial food production. The meat supply is dominated by CAFO production worldwide. So this might be one of the casualties of producing meat in this way.”
The study also has larger implications.
“There are other types of malodors that impact stress and quality of life,” says Wing. “That’s part of the larger picture of environmental justice.” In other words, this science could apply in other places where large quantities of gas, plastics, resins, or other strong-smelling industrial products are made or transported.
Other research has touched on the correlation between noise levels and blood pressure, but this is one of the first times stress and its physical effects have been studied in relation to odor.
Wing met a number of people living near CAFOs — many of them too disenfranchised to relocate — and he was motivated to begin documenting what he heard from them. It’s worth noting, the scientist adds, that nothing he and his team are studying is illegal. “The CAFOs in this study all hold permits from the government to operate and use the practices they use to pollute their neighborhoods.”
Of course, the fact that such research is necessary in the first place can be discouraging. “In one sense, we shouldn’t have to do studies like this,” says Wing. “People who live near CAFOs are being exposed to fecal waste through air and water, and we know it’s affecting their quality of life. That should be enough.”
And until that knowledge is enough to change the state of modern farming, it’s good to know there are people willing to stick their noses out — literally — to get the facts.
Bonus: Blogger and Superbug author Maryn McKenna live-tweeted a presentation by Wing at the recent conference of the National Association of Science Writers. See it Storified here.
By now, you know that not all meat is created equal. That familiar fable about Old MacDonald and his happy barnyard menagerie is a far cry from the cruel reality of factory farms, where cows, pigs, and chickens are crammed together in giant warehouses, fattened on grain, and pumped full of antibiotics, then rolled out to the slaughterhouse to become the next Big Mac or box of McNuggets.
In regulatory lingo, these meat factories are called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. (Pronounced “cay-fo.”) Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about them — and a few things you’d probably rather not know.
Q.What makes a CAFO a CAFO?
A. Most in the industry consider all factory farms CAFOs, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a very specific meaning. According to the EPA, an Animal Feeding Operation (AFO) is an operation that confines animals for over 45 days in a vegetation-free area. These animals are packed into warehouses and lots with slatted floors, not wandering around in the grass. Here’s the EPA’s website: “AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland.”
CAFOs are essentially big AFOs. The EPA breaks CAFOs down [PDF] into large, medium, or small varieties, depending on the number of animals involved, how wastewater and/or manure are managed, and whether the operation is “a significant contributor of pollutants.” Large CAFOs, which have at least 1,000 cows or 30,000 hens, are automatically subject to government oversight.
A. It’s hard to say exactly. Despite their growing presence in this country, CAFOs are invisible to most of us. If you live in an urban or suburban part of the country, most livestock — save the occasional decorative cow or sheep — is kept out of sight. But if you’ve driven through California on Interstate 5, you may have seen and smelled the giant feedlot known as Cowschwitz. There are CAFOs in just about every state, but the Southeast and the Midwest — Iowa has an especially high number — are where you’ll find them in the highest concentration.
The exact number of CAFOs in this country is not easy to pin down. In its 2008 report, CAFOs Uncovered, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “Although they comprise only about 5 percent of all U.S. animal operations, CAFOs now produce more than 50 percent of our food animals.” That was four years ago, and there is evidence that the number of CAFOs — especially in the Midwest — has gone up since then.
Q.Isn’t it more efficient to raise meat like this?
A. It’s true that CAFOs crank out a whole lot of cheap meat in the short run, but there are long-term environmental costs associated with these operations that don’t show up on the price tag in the supermarket. Many CAFOs are located in arid areas, where large quantities of groundwater are required (like in the case of several large dairy producers in New Mexico). CAFOs also pollute the air and waterways with toxic feces and urine.
Q.Ooh, did somebody say “toxic feces”?
A. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs produce about 65 percent of our country’s manure, or about 300 million tons per year — that’s double the amount of poo generated by all the people in the U.S.
Here’s what that looks like:
A CAFO manure lagoon. (Photo by Jeff Vanugam.)
Some of that poo gets spread over farm fields, kinda like the old days, and some gets turned into energy through something called methane digestion. But a great deal of it ends up in holding areas, or lagoons, like the one pictured above. The result is often toxic fumes and high-nutrient (not in a good way) waste that leaks into streams and well water. The EPA reports that CAFO waste has polluted over 35,000 miles of river and groundwater in 17 states.
Q.Why do CAFO owners use so many antibiotics?
A. The kind of extreme crowding that happens in CAFOs puts animals under a lot of stress. It can make some of them aggressive (you might be too, if you were locked in the mosh pit with a bunch of overweight metal heads), and it also makes many of them sick. CAFO owners use routine, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to both prevent disease and make animals grow faster. In fact, a frightening 80 percent of the antibiotics used in this country go to “treat” animals.
Q.Surely regulations make this stuff safe for people and the environment, right?
A. Only the largest CAFOs are subject to special federal government oversight. Beyond that, the rules vary state by state.
Of course, there are regulations governing farms — but most of them were designed for something that looks a little more like Old MacDonald’s place, and by calling themselves farms, many CAFOs have escaped the regulations associated with big factories. As Daniel Imhoff, editor of the 2010 CAFO Reader, said in a 2010 Grist interview: “If the CAFO is legally considered a farm, or an agricultural enterprise, rather than an industry, then it is exempt from regulation of its airborne and land-borne waste. The industry has been fighting for many years to retain this agricultural status.”
CAFO owners have done their damndest to keep their operations from public and government scrutiny. Their latest ploy is something called the “Farmer’s Privacy Act of 2012,” a bill, recently introduced in Congress, that would prevent the EPA from being able to fly over CAFOs.
Q.What about the people who work at these factories?
Working conditions in CAFOs are among the worst around. Not only are wages low and hours long, but these facilities — which are full of dust, ammonia, and endotoxins (toxins released by bacteria) — are also very hard on workers’ respiratory systems. They are also rife with viruses that can pass from animals to humans.
Q.How do I know if meat I buy in the grocery store is from a CAFO?
You don’t see it? Ah, right. That’s because meat from animals raised in CAFOs looks a lot like any other — and it isn’t labeled. In fact, the onus remains on the relatively small percent of meat-producers who are trying to do something else — whether it’s use organic feed, raise their animals in smaller numbers, or keep them on pasture — to make their practices known through labels that are often perceived as something extra.
“I just want normal meat,” you may think to yourself, when faced with labels that declare things like “grass-fed,” “grass-finished,” and “pasture-raised.” Well, these days, we can all pretty much assume that “normal meat” = CAFO meat.
Q.So, how do I avoid CAFO meat?
A. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:
* Find a farm in your area that raises animals on pasture (a farmers market is a great place to start the hunt).
* Be willing to spend a little more and eat a little less. You may also want to experiment with less-popular cuts, buy ground meat, and make your own stock from bones.
* Before ordering meat at a restaurant, ask if they know where it came from. If they don’t, it’s a safe bet it came from a CAFO.
We read the whole 62-page Republican platform so you don’t have to. No need to thank us. Well, actually, you really should thank us. Thank us profusely, please.
Here are the good bits, by which we mean the bad bits.
Climate change gets a mention
Only in a mocking way, within a section entitled “A Failed National Security Strategy.” But still, a mention.
The current Administration’s most recent National Security Strategy … subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy, and international health issues, and elevates “climate change” to the level of a “severe threat” equivalent to foreign aggression. The word “climate,” in fact, appears in the current President’s strategy more often than Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction.
Interesting that Republicans think it’s a wise strategy to discuss frequency of use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction.”
Republicans are for property rights, except when they’re against them
The GOP platform is clear in upholding the Fifth Amendment:
[W]ithout property rights, individual rights are diminished. That is why we deplore the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London decision, allowing local governments to seize a person’s home or land, not for vital public use, but for transfer to private developers.
We are committed to approving the Keystone XL Pipeline and to streamlining permitting for the development of other oil and natural gas pipelines.
Coal is cool
The dirtiest of all fossil fuels is the first energy source highlighted in the platform’s energy and environment section.
We look toward the private sector’s development of new, state-of-the-art coal-fired plants that will be low-cost, environmentally responsible, and efficient.
And we look toward the day when each American child will get a pony of his or her own.
Oil and gas are cool
We support opening the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) for energy exploration and development and ending the current Administration’s moratorium on permitting; opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for exploration and production of oil and natural gas; and allowing for more oil and natural gas exploration on federally owned and controlled land.
Fracking is cool
We will respect the States’ proven ability to regulate the use of hydraulic fracturing, continue development of oil and gas resources in places like the Bakken formation and Marcellus Shale, and review the environmental laws that often thwart new energy exploration and production.
Nuclear is cool
Nuclear energy … must be expanded.
Renewables are somewhat less cool
We encourage the cost-effective development of renewable energy, but the taxpayers should not serve as venture capitalists for risky endeavors.
Cap-and-trade totally sucks
In case you weren’t sure where the party stands:
[W]e oppose any and all cap and trade legislation.
EPA’s push to curb CO2 emissions totally sucks
We also call on Congress to take quick action to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations that will harm the nation’s economy and threaten millions of jobs over the next quarter century.
In fact, the entire EPA completely, absolutely, utterly sucks
The platform has a section devoted to “Reining in the EPA,” but the EPA hatred is so intense that it overflows into other sections. A portion of the platform focused on “The Restoration of Constitutional Government” accuses the Obama administration of “encouraging illegal actions by … the EPA.” And there’s more:
We will end the EPA’s war on coal …
We stand with growers and producers in defense of their water rights against attempts by the EPA … to expand jurisdiction over water, including water that is clearly not navigable.
no peril justifies the regulatory impact of … the EPA’s … overreaching regulation agenda.
Obama wants to make everyone live in studio apartments in grimy cities with nowhere to park
The current Administration [is pursuing] an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.
We should chop down more trees
Timber is a renewable natural resource, which provides jobs to thousands of Americans. All efforts should be made to make federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service available for harvesting.
We should be fretting about fertilizer
Not about the fact that it’s devastating our fisheries and aquatic zones. Rather, about the fact that we’re increasingly importing it instead of producing it right here in the USofA.
Our dependence on foreign imports of fertilizer could threaten our food supply, and we support the development of domestic production of fertilizer.
Here’s an odd one Plumer missed: the veiled defense of the Gibson Guitar Corp. for illegally using endangered hardwoods.
The Lacey Act of 1900, designed to protect endangered wildlife in interstate commerce, is now applied worldwide, making it a crime to use, in our domestic industries, any product illegally obtained in the country of origin, whether or not the user had anything to do with its harvesting. This unreasonable extension of the Act not only hurts American businesses and American jobs, but also subordinates our own rule of law to the legal codes of 195 other governments. It must be changed.
[Congress should] reject agreements whose long-range impact on the American family is ominous or unclear. These include … the various declarations from the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development [aka the Rio Earth Summit]. Because of our concern for American sovereignty, domestic management of our fisheries, and our country’s long-term energy needs, we have deep reservations about the regulatory, legal, and tax regimes inherent in the Law of the Sea Treaty … We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty
That’s not the wholesale smackdown of Agenda 21 that the Republican National Committee had recommended earlier this year, but mentioning the (non)issue at all moves the GOP platform one step closer to the tinfoil-hat zone. As does violent opposition to the just-not-very-threatening Law of the Sea Treaty.
Fie on population control and high-speed rail
What do these two things have in common? They’re both big wastes of money. From the section “Reining in Out-of-Control Spending, Balancing the Budget, and Ensuring Sound Monetary Policy”:
We suggest a tripartite test for every federal activity. … Against those standards we will measure programs from international population control to California’s federally subsidized high-speed train to nowhere, and terminate programs that don’t measure up.
More dissing of rail follows a few pages later:
Amtrak continues to be, for the taxpayers, an extremely expensive railroad. The public has to subsidize every ticket nearly $50. It is long past time for the federal government to get out of way and allow private ventures to provide passenger service to the northeast corridor. The same holds true with regard to high-speed and intercity rail across the country.
Teenagers don’t need to know about birth control
We renew our call for replacing “family planning” programs for teens with abstinence education which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and respected standard of behavior.
The most powerful environmental policy is liberty
That’s a direct quote, actually.
The most powerful environmental policy is liberty, the central organizing principle of the American Republic and its people. Liberty alone fosters scientific inquiry, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and information exchange. Liberty must remain the core energy behind America’s environmental improvement.
In case you couldn’t tell after reading everything above, Republicans loooove sustainability and conservation
We are the party of sustainable jobs and economic growth — through American energy, agriculture, and environmental policy. … We are as well the party of traditional conservation: the wise development of resources that keeps in mind both the sacrifices of past generations to secure that bounty and our responsibility to preserve it for future generations.
I’m inspired by a recent poll conducted by The New York Times which found 60 percent of New York City residents oppose Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on sodas larger than 16 ounces.
His constituents’ opposition, which other polls have documented at lower levels, isn’t stopping Bloomberg, however. It’s still full steam ahead on the ban, which only requires a vote by his hand-picked Board of Health to become the law of the land.
Of course, as the Wall Street Journal reported in June, just because Bloomberg says it’s the law doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay the law. He’s out of office come January. According to the WSJ, one of the leading candidates for New York City Mayor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, is skeptical of the ban; she observed that a “future mayor ‘should certainly think about’ reversing the ban.” Her opposition is grounded in a misconception — that the ban will somehow limit people’s right to drink as much soda as they want, when in fact anyone intent on drinking mass quantities of soda will be free to buy it.
As I argued when the ban was first announced, Bloomberg and his public health team are instead banking on the documented psychological phenomenon that limiting serving sizes limits the desire to consume more. Indeed, the New Yorker’s influential financial writer James Surowiecki recently endorsed this view (and the ban itself) from an economist’s perspective.
Perhaps a more common reaction to the ban is what one might charitably call the “constitutional argument,” which was expressed by what the Wall Street Journal declared a “slender” occasional soda drinker: “If I want a soda one day I have that right,” she said. “If one day I want to buy a five-gallon pail of soda, I should be able to.” That’s totally covered by the Ninth Amendment, am I right?
I mean, come on! This is America, dammit! If we want to drown ourselves in liquid candy, we should be able to! After all, the supersizing of fountain soda is one of the few good deals Americans have enjoyed over the past several decades. Good jobs, good wages, good health care and good government? Not so much. But as much soda as you can drink? American progress at its best! It’s understandable that many people would be reluctant to give up the last great benefit of living in America.
In all seriousness, there is a huge leap from the first part of that interviewee’s statement to the second. Bloomberg’s proposal isn’t an outright ban. And New Yorkers will still be able to buy unlimited numbers of two-liter bottles (as well as Big Gulps, since 7-Elevens will be exempt from the ban). But I have no doubt that the American Beverage Association, which is fighting the ban, wants New Yorkers to think the way that she does.
It’s definitely a fair question to ask how people will react to the ban, however. A recent study by researchers from Emory University suggests that more and more people, and more and more children, will switch to diet soda — which is not covered by the Bloomberg ban. To an extent, that’s already happening. The study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that diet beverage consumption has doubled among kids over the last decade.
You can argue that this is a good thing. Kids are drinking less sugar! But the study observes that the effects of low-calorie sweeteners (LCS) on kids aren’t well understood:
The effects of these sugar alternatives have not been well studied, and both short- and long-term effects have yet to be determined …
… Recent human and animal studies have shown that LCSs may affect glucose metabolism, satiety, and vascular function, despite their inherent lack of energy. A growing body of evidence suggests that repeated exposure to sweet substances may lead to the development of preferences for highly sweet foods and beverages. This is particularly concerning in young children, among whom early exposure to highly sweet substances can lead to the development of dietary patterns replete with highly caloric foods, typically lacking in nutritional value.
That last point is key. There’s growing evidence that sugar is addictive, but what if it’s as much the sweetness as anything that causes that addiction? In other words, drinking diet soda might still program young brains to prefer and seek out other “highly caloric foods.” It could be a “win the battle, lose the war” sort of thing.
Let’s be clear: The jury is very much out on all this. As Barry Popkin, a top researcher on the public health effects of diet and soda consumption, told NPR recently, “we still have no evidence of any toxicological or negative health effect of diet sweetener intake.”
NPR noted that the European Union is still going ahead with a scientific review of the safety of aspartame, one of the leading artificial sweeteners (if you want to read about aspartame’s controversial route to FDA approval under President Ronald Reagan, Tom Philpott dug into it for Grist).
There is some indirect evidence of the dangers of diet sweetener intake, however. A study quoted in Mother Jones found that “people who drink at least one diet soda a day are 43 percent more likely to experience a ‘vascular event’ — i.e., strokes and heart attacks — than people who drink none.” That risk is present even after researchers accounted for other metabolic and health factors like obesity, diabetes, or hypertension.
I know this is a sensitive area for a lot of people — and the research is merely suggestive and quite thin (though I will bet that beverage companies have piles of data on the health effects of low-calorie sweeteners that they’re keeping to themselves).
Clearly, Americans hate to be told what to do, even when their health is on the line. Smoking bans in restaurants and nightclubs weren’t popular at first either. But no one that I know of has gotten booted from elected office for supporting smoking bans. The New York City soda ban isn’t popular in polls at the moment, but the ban, once implemented with non-world-ending consequences, will likely soon become a minor irritant.
But all of this points to a larger problem. If we’re programming ourselves to seek out high-calorie foods no matter what kind of sweetener we use, we are and will remain our own worst enemies. If that’s the case, it will take far more than supersized soda bans to change our deep and abiding affection for sugar.
What’s that sound? It’s the clock ticking as the timeline for this year’s farm bill process begins to run out. The current bill expires Sept. 30, and we now have less than two weeks before Congress’ month-long recess begins on August 3.
So what’s the holdup? Now that both the Senate and House Agriculture committees have passed their versions of the bill, you’d think they’d get to work hashing it out, right? Wrong. Instead the Republican-controlled House is stalling.As Politico reports:
Never before in modern times has a farm bill reported from the House Agriculture Committee been so blocked. POLITICO looked back at 50 years of farm bills and found nothing like this. There have been long debates, often torturous negotiations … but no House farm bill, once out of committee, has been kept off the floor while its deadline passes.
As we’ve been reporting, neither farm bill reflects the goals of sustainable food advocates (in fact most in the good food movement think the bills stink and haven’t been afraid to say so). Both would continue to heavily subsidize industrial-scale commodity farming, cut funding to conservation, and short-shrift poor folks, just to varying degrees (the House draft is currently much worse on the latter). But the chaos that could descend if a bill does not get passed at all this year may be even worse than the House bill.
According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), it’s looking very likely that Congress won’t address the bill until it returns in September. By that point, “action on a short-term extension will likely take all of the short number of legislative days available in September, and may spill over into early October.” If they can pull an extension to the current, i.e. 2008, Farm Bill together, NSAC adds, “the working assumption is that then the leadership of the two committees will attempt to work out a final version of the farm bill in closed-door negotiations.” If they can come to a consensus (an image that’s become awfully difficult to conjure these days), “they would then attempt to attach the melded product onto one of several ‘must pass’ bills during the lame duck session of Congress in November and December.”
A number of officials have done their best to put pressure on House leaders to get the darn thing off the ground. Nancy Pelosi is calling on the House, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has made a handful of speeches urging Congress to get moving, and then, just this Friday, 82 members of the House sent a letter [PDF] to House leaders (namely John Boehner, who apparently “hates the farm bill”) urging them to send it to the floor for debate.
The drought in the Midwest is also turning up the heat on the process, as roughly a third of the counties in the nation have now been designated disaster areas. Of course, most of the corn and soybean growers we’re hearing about in the news already have federally subsidized crop insurance, but Vilsack has announced that he hopes the bill reinstates additional disaster funding. And while it’s unclear whether the farm bill would really do much of anything to help small farmers and specialty crop farmers — i.e. the ones with the most to lose and the smallest safety nets — there is some emergency assistance for livestock farmers in the 2012 draft bills.
I’m with the folks at NSAC, who seem to believe that getting this farm bill — or almost any farm bill at this point — passed seems to be the lesser short-term evil. And at least some members of the House seem to be leaning in that direction as well, such as House Agriculture Committee Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) who told Poitico: “If this drought continues in the West and Midwest, it could drive members to want to see some action.”
Of course, I say the above with a huge caveat, because it’s also our job here at Grist to think beyond this year’s legislative battles. After all, the drought is impacting agriculture much more intensely than it might were we not growing huge swaths of industrial monocrops in the first place. And, as Tom Laskawy wrote last week, the system of commodity agriculture the 2008 and 2012 farm bills props up doesn’t even begin to allow farmers to prevent or adapt to future droughts. “The weather patterns which gave rise to the Corn (and Soy) Belt of the Midwest have permanently changed. And farming needs to change with them,” he wrote.
Ideally, of course, our lawmakers would be moving quickly not just to pass this bill but to build a food system that is resilient, biologically diverse, supportive of small producers, and based on rich, greenhouse gas-absorbing soil — one where we don’t have to choose between growing food and protecting our environment. That has yet to happen, but we can — in the meantime — build a food movement that is big and flexible enough to allow room for both: A call to short-term action and a vision for long-term change.
One of the biggest water polluters in our country is the factory farm. In 2008, a Government Accountability Office report panned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to know where most of these farms were located, let alone if they were releasing their manure into rivers, lakes and streams.
So in early 2011, the EPA announced a rule asking such farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs, to submit basic information, like their address and how many animals they have, to the agency. On Friday, July 23, EPA quietly announced they were withdrawing that rule, planning instead to try to collect the data from the existing records held by states, even though they’ve tried that before, with poor results.
In trying to understand why the EPA would back off such a seemingly-innocuous yet important data collection project, I imagined myself inside a meeting of EPA clean water officials as they made the decision to withdraw the rule.
Setting: A 10-top table in a soulless gray-hued conference room, Federal Triangle, Washington, D.C.
Official One (storms into room, slams hand on table): I wish those House Republicans would all go on a schmoozy farm tour and fall into a manure lagoon! I can’t believe they accused us of flying spy drones over American farms.
Official Two (looking worn): Well, we are flying planes over factory farms in Nebraska and Iowa.
Official One: That’s because we can’t enforce the Clean Water Act without aerial inspections. Ever since the National Pork Producer’s Council sued us, the only way we can know if factory farms are polluting the water is if they tell us by applying for a discharge permit–
Official Two: Not likely.
Official One: Or if we check up on them with flyovers, where we can see manure flowing into waterways.
Official Two: Well, our work will get a little easier when we at least know how many factory farms there are, how many animals they have, where they are located, and how they manage their manure. I mean, how can we regulate the biggest source of water pollution in the country if we don’t even know where they are?
Official One: Yeah, I’m glad we’re going to release that rule requiring CAFOs to report those details to us soon. We’ve been working at getting better intel on them for over a decade!
Enter Official Three
Official Three (looking dejected): Hi guys.
Officials One and Two: Hey.
Official Three: So…you know how it’s an election year, and those Nebraska senators just gave us a bunch of shit for the aerial flights over CAFOs? That’s not playing too well in the farm belt.
Official One: But these guys are in an industrial occupation! Their cows, pigs, and chickens produce three times as much poop as all Americans every year. And we don’t even know where it’s going! Not knowing where they’re located or what they are doing with their waste is like not knowing where sewage treatment plants are located, and if they are following the correct protocol for managing waste.
Official Three: Well, it’s just going to have to wait. We’re going to withdraw our rule requiring CAFOs to report basic data.
Official Two: People who care about clean water are going to be pissed.
Official Three: Well, we are going to try and work with the states to gather that information from them.
Official Three: I know, but it’s really the only option right now. So deal with it. We’re going to work with the Association of Clean Water Administrators to get the data on CAFOs from states, and maybe this time around it will be a little better.
It’s not like anyone gives a damn about clean water when they’re about to run out of unemployment insurance anyway. If you don’t like it, move to the Netherlands. They regulated their dairy CAFOs so strict that half of them moved over here.
Official Two: Okay. So let me get this straight. We’re withdrawing our proposal to collect information about addresses, contact details, animal numbers, and manure management on 20,000 of the nation’s most polluting farms, even though we have a legal agreement with three major environmental groups saying we will do this?
Official Three: Yes. But maybe we’ll release the withdrawal notice late on a Friday, after everyone’s left the office.
Well, it’s four-o-clock. Want to hit up Harry’s? I’m buying.
Editor’s note: Welcome to Grist’s presentation of Alex Steffen’s new book Carbon Zero. We’ll be posting a new chapter every day till we’re done — here’s 
By now, you know that not all meat is created equal. That familiar fable about Old MacDonald and his happy barnyard menagerie is a far cry from the cruel reality of factory farms, where cows, pigs, and chickens are crammed together in giant warehouses, fattened on grain, and pumped full of antibiotics, then rolled out to the slaughterhouse to become the next Big Mac or box of McNuggets.
We read the whole 62-page 
What’s that sound? It’s the clock ticking as the timeline for this year’s farm bill process begins to run out. The current bill expires Sept. 30, and we now have less than two weeks before Congress’ month-long recess begins on August 3.
