December 2009

5% of the U.S. Corn Crop is Still out in the FieldIt’s wild that in an age when we can stream live video from a telephone onto the internet, travel anywhere in the world in less than a day, fly to the moon if we want to and isolate genetic information in tiny DNA samples we are still slaves to the whims of the weather, and it’s showing this winter.

Heavy snowfalls in the Midwest are causing concern for farmers and agricultural forecasters as they are further delaying the already slow harvest season this year. According to Reuters, up to 100 million bushels of U.S. corn could be lost due to the snowstorms. In the most telling of any statistic, corn futures are up 1%.

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Carlos Minc, Environment Minister of BrazilCopenhagen is over and everyone has their opinion about how it went- we have heard the U.S. media tout it as a spectacle of Obama swooping in to save the proceedings, and we have China saying it was their leader who did the most to get the agreement together. Regardless, most people both countries and groups, are saying that much more could have been done. And there were no legally binding agreements on emissions cuts.

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I went vegetarian this year, and I like to think that gives me a pass to sit back and be smug whenever the topic of your carbon footprint comes up.  After all, as Michael Pollan is quoted as saying, "A vegetarian in an SUV has a lower carbon footprint than a meat eater in a Prius."

Unfortunately, it turns out that the carbon footprint of cheese is fairly substantial.  I'm a vegetarian, not a vegan, and I dislike beans, so I eat a lot of cheese.  (As well as eggs from my pet chickens, but that's a different story.)


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Copenhagen ended effectively on December 18 and the gavel came down the morning of the 19th. Give everybody 48 hours or so to get home, get through jet lag and wake up to look at the agreement that they all made with their advisors and other important folks on Monday and, you guessed it, Tuesday rolls around and it is the time to start complaining. The wire feeds are flooded with different countries complaining about this or that part of the agreement- nothing surprising, really, as something that takes 193 signatures from around the globe and has to be in consensus is going to be watered down, and anything that gets countries as disparate as the U.S. and the Bahamas, or Australia and Sri Lanka, or even China and say, Jamaica to sign their names to it has got to be full of concessions and compromises, not passion.

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Now that the Copenhagen summit is done and everyone is heading back home to figure out what to do with it, everyone is publishing articles about just that- what they think of the deal and what they are going to do about it/ with it.

I read a great one for about four sentences that said the Copenhagen agreement meant essentially nothing to entrepreneurs- as in there are no clear things like targets or markets to walk away with and use as goals or building blocks. I read a great interview with the New York Times’ Thomas Freidman where he says what Obama should have done is told China that the U.S. would bury them in clean tech and essentially start an arms race- style international battle for clean tech supremacy. Great idea- Obama’s not much of a battle starter, though. He’s more on the diplomatic side, trying to keep everyone on ok terms with each other.

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Time to go home everybodyThere’s always next year. As the COP15 summit result is being largely hailed as either a failure or a very small success, all bleary jet-lagged eyes are turning toward 2010. This weekend the people at a U.N. climate meeting committed to attempt to complete the new global pact around climate change by the end of next year.

Reuters reprints a weird transcript they say was “code for the work of climate negotiators” "I have been given a note which I understand is the agreed text from the drafting group which looked at ... outcome of the work of the ad hoc working group on long-term cooperative action under the convention (on climate change)."

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Blue WhaleOne of the most eerily enchanting sounds in nature is undoubtedly the mesmerizing song of the blue whale. The song of the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth, can travel several miles away and while the exact nature, content, and purpose of these calls are not yet completely understood by the scientists that study them, researchers have recently discovered a trend in the pitch emitted by the singing whales.

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The future...This is where the real climate deal is being done- alongside the Copenhagen deal there is a conversation going on between the U.S. and China- and whatever these two decide is what the rest of the world will eventually agree to- perhaps not to the letter but certainly in principle. Why? Here’s why:

1.    The U.S. represents the Industrialized world- while the EU has a backpack full of issues with us, if we are game to sign on to a deal, the EU is most certainly game.

2.    China is the stumbling block for emissions limits. If they agree to something that the U.S. actually supports, well watch out people- that would be the game changer.

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Nuclear Power PlantAfter the Three Mile Island Disaster that took place in the United States in 1979, followed by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster just seven years later in 1986, most of the nation, and the world, began to speak out about the dangers that nuclear power posed to not only the stability of the environment but to our own lives as well. Many people realized the truth about the nuclear industry: that nuclear power is dirty, costly, and deadly, and they became quite outspoken about these facts. In fact, so dangerous is the concept of nuclear power plants that before his fall from grace, Patrick Moore wrote in the Assault on Future Generations in 1976 that "Nuclear power plants are, next to nuclear warheads themselves, the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.

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The Pacific Salmon, who depend on the mingled salt and fresh water of the San Francisco estuary as a nursery for young salmon, and who must swim upstream in fresh water like the Klamath river, are being killed because fresh water is being diverted from the rivers that they spawn in, and that feed into the estuaries, is being diverted to large commercial farms. There's a moratorium on salmon fishing in the bay, and has been for two years, putting many commercial fisherman and canneries out of business, but the salmon, meanwhile are still dying. The pacific salmon is in serious jeopardy—even in danger of extinction, as the absence of fresh cold water entering the estuary makes the water too warm for what few baby salmon hatch to thrive.

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5 days leftCopenhagen is playing host to quite a few people who desperately want climate change to be addressed by the international community- unfortunately they are at protests and not at the meetings. Folks with strong opinions have been holding up banners and protesting for weeks now, and it’s coming to a head as the world looks to Copenhagen for what the next agreement will be. On one hand, the developing nations are calling for money to help mitigate climate change’s effects and sharp cuts in emissions, and on the other hand developed nations are offering a little bit of money and a whole lot of words that basically mean we want to look like we’re doing something but not do enough to hurt our economies, which are already hurt enough- didn’t you notice?

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Copenhagen, where our climate future is being decided...There is so much going on with Copenhagen and the climate change summit right now that it’s hard to keep up- whether a flurry of activity actually means anything is being accomplished is best left until after the summit to surmise- but for now, here are a few highlights and what I think they mean:

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Day 2 at the Copenhagen summit is underway, and hopefully they will quickly get past the damaging side/ tangential debate over whether global warming and climate change is caused by humans or not- it is, folks. If it isn’t then there is no reason to have the summit at all. If we are going to have a society that is governed more or less by rational decision-making and science (which we do), then we have to allow that kind of thinking and world-view to inform us that the sky is basically falling. A 4 degree rise by the end of the century, according to a report I just read yesterday- and that’s Centigrate, which means 12 or 13 degrees F. That’s raising the average temperature of your hometown 12 degrees. That could mean little to no snow, or it could mean a major change in what grows there or it could, eventually, mean a complete change in the weather patterns there.

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A Bridge to the future.San Francisco is garnering a lot of attention around the new composting rules- well, laws. I just saw the city (my city ☺) noted in Reuters as the first to make it a crime not to compost food- which is kind of an amazing thing to think about.

And I’m psyched to say that my town will be looking to generate 5% of our energy by 2012 from small solar panel installations- nice job, San Francisco- they are even going to put solar cells on top of bus stops.

Adam Browning, executive director of the Vote Solar Initiative, commented on a new city plan that will use solar power during the daytime and switch to smaller wind turbines after sunset, saying, "It's kind of like peanut butter and jelly.”

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What's the next step, world?What can we expect as far as progress in Copenhagen? I am, again, sitting at my desk, looking out over the San Francisco horizon, watching a smokestack pour pollution into the sky, listening to cars honk and rev their way up and down the streets, it’s a bit overwhelming thinking about how many habits and institutions would need to change for there to be a meaningful shift in how things are done that would make a major climate change difference.

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What if we didn't have enough?Water shortage riots have left several injured and one killed in Mumbai.

I wanted to write about the climate change denialists that Copenhagen folks are worried about, that they are concerned about intellectual and physical sabotage at the COP15 summit, and about how environmental activists in Italy have built an ice sculpture of Prime Minister Burlusconi that will melt before the beginning of talks on December 7, but I couldn’t deny this headline. Those two concerns are commentary, they are politics, they are the argument over the theory and the philosophy of what is going down at Copenhagen. They touch on but are not the reality of the situation. They are not on the ground, so to speak.

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Reservoirs in Califronia like this one are missing much of the water they are used to...California has issues with the water supply- the simple fact is, there is not enough water to go around. For starters, Los Angeles only functions because there is a pipeline bringing in water from the north part of the state, and there is an even bigger pipeline bringing in water from out of state, from Colorado. Add that to the complete inability of the San Joaquin area authorities to develop a plan that actually works in dividing the water between farmers and towns, and you have yourself a state with a set of issues that could drown you before you even leave the starting gate. It’s like the same budget deal, only there is absolutely no way to invent more water the way you can invent more money- well there, is, I suppose, desalination, but that costs money, which we certainly do not have…

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