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Peak oil, power & potatoes
Julian Darley, Post Carbon Institute

The power of concentrated money - capital as we usually call it - is clearly enormous. Some things have to be done with collected resources if you want civilisation to continue, especially things to do with transport. But then there is the fact that if someone is doing it (using concentrated resources) and you are not, you will most likely be pushed out of the game.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080924/wl_uk...zl8CySQ6FNvaA8F
BHP Billiton chairman says Asian demand to continue

Wed Sep 24, 3:18 AM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) - Asian economic growth will slow at some point but demand for raw materials from countries such as China is expected to continue, the chairman of the world's largest mining company said Wednesday.

BHP Billiton's Don Argus said commodity markets would be volatile in the short-term due to the global financial crisis but he was confident longer-term market fundamentals would support growth in demand.

"I have no doubt that economic growth in the Asian region will slow at some point but, if I look at China specifically, the slowdown is concentrated in regions oriented to the light export sector," Argus said.

"The sectors of the economy oriented more towards domestic consumption are still performing well despite increasing input costs, particularly for energy."

"We expect Asian demand for our products to continue," he said.

The Anglo-Australian giant, which this year reported a record profit of 15.4 billion US dollars, produces iron ore, coal, oil and gas -- products much in demand in rapidly developing Asian nations.

In an annual report to shareholders, Argus said the economies of developing countries were central to the world's economic growth amid the lessening influence of Europe and the relative shrinkage of the US economy.

"As the world's largest diversified resources company, we are watching the creation of competitor companies that are spearheading the economic emergence of countries like Russia, Brazil and China."

He said these economic shifts provided the context for BHP Billiton's hostile takeover bid for rival Rio Tinto, the world's third-largest miner.

Argus said the two firms together could "help meet the developing economies' demand for resources better and faster than the two companies do apart."

Rio has rejected BHP's 3.4-for-one share offer, saying it significantly undervalues the company.

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http://www.sacbee.com/740/story/1251435.html
The Conversation: How do we become less dependent?
Hosted by Daniel Weintraub
By Daniel Lerch - Special to The Bee

Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 21, 2008
Story appeared in CALIFORNIA FORUM section, Page E2

With a peak oil conference in Sacramento this week and the 100th anniversary of the first mass-market automobile coming up, it's a perfect time to re-visit our relationship with that most ubiquitous icon of the American (and California) Dream: The Car.

Ford's 1908 Model T didn't just mark the start of widespread private automobile ownership. It heralded the complete restructuring of America around petroleum-powered cars and trucks. By mid-century we had discovered massive oil fields in Texas and the Middle East, and World War II had effectively modernized our industrial base. The stage was set for the true mass consumption of the car, a shift that would fundamentally change our economy, our landscape and even our culture.

These days it's pretty well accepted that we can't all drive everywhere. California was home to some of the earliest suburban sprawl, so its metropolitan areas experienced early on what happens when everyone tries to drive everywhere: unending congestion (despite more and bigger highways), more sprawl and overall greater dependence on oil.

For years we've tried to limit sprawl and promote transit, bicycling and walking – first in the name of conservation and quality of life, more recently to fight global warming. Today peak oil (the looming high point of global oil production) and the end of cheap oil make it more urgent than ever to reduce our dependence on cars.

There's a problem, though. We're stuck with the landscape we've built over the past 60 years, much of which is literally uninhabitable without a car. Trying to make our communities less car-dependent simply by adding more buses, streetcars and light rail is like trying to make a bowl of chicken soup vegan simply by picking the chicken out. It's just not that simple: like the chicken broth in my chicken soup, car dependence is an inherent property of nearly every city, town and suburb in this country and especially so in car-loving California.

That said, it's not impossible to quickly scale up transportation alternatives in our communities. High and medium-density urban areas can boost their transit and bicycle systems in just a few years with targeted funding and policy. Lower-density areas will have a harder time, but can still act quickly with targeted programs supporting modern car-sharing, hybrid "smart jitneys" and, where possible, mixed-use and higher density development.

Moving away from the car doesn't mean reducing our quality of life, either. Cities and suburbs throughout Western Europe have proven for decades that people will choose walking, bicycling and public transit over personal cars if the price is right and the trip is pleasant. For transit, that means headways well under 15 minutes, and a rider experience that is safe, reliable, fast and clean. For bicycling that means extensive networks of dedicated, wide, uninterrupted paths with minimal stops and secure, covered parking at destinations.

How might this look in the long run? Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel "Ecotopia" is one of the earliest and best-known visions of a modern California no longer dependent on cars: People get around by bicycle and maglev train; cities are compact; and rural areas have reverted to villages and farmhouses; suburbs are nowhere to be found. Richard Register's nonfiction "Ecocity Berkeley" (1987) presented a more nuanced – though no less radical – vision for the future: The city is rebuilt as a beautiful, productive urban garden; the hinterland returns as a place for wildlife and agriculture instead of shopping malls.

Significantly, neither vision is excessively low-tech or high-tech. Both see ample use for existing technology, whether in constructing buildings, growing food or producing energy. Also significant is that both chart a role for personal vehicles – particularly electric vehicles (albeit not one in every garage).

This underlines an essential point for the real transportation future of California. The car will not disappear: It's simply too useful. But how we use cars, how we plan our economies and communities around cars, and even how we build cars, all have to change.

What California needs, then, is not a future without cars, but a future that uses cars intelligently – a future in which California has declared its independence from the car. Millions upon millions of Europeans are living rich, modern lives without requiring a private car to meet their most basic needs. They're in communities that function perfectly well with gasoline three times the price as at our pumps, and with the resilience to continue thriving if prices doubled tomorrow. How many places in America can say the same?

The good news is that we can not only envision a car-independent future, we can actually visit it and learn from it. We can learn how the Danes turned downtown Copenhagen from a virtual parking lot into one of the busiest and most economically successful pedestrian zones in the world. We can learn how the Germans accommodate growth, not by expanding suburban sprawl but by improving existing cities. California in particular can look to its cultural touchstone – the Mediterranean wine country – and rediscover the bustling, walkable village with its heart at the piazza.

Some American cities are already moving in that direction. New London, Conn., recently decided to overhaul its historic Parade Plaza. The plaza was mangled in the 1970s by the kind of design philosophies that treated urban spaces as either conduits to pass through quickly or themed destinations with no real relation to their context. But the plaza worked quite well in earlier times, and for a simple reason: It was designed with the same millennia-old, human-scale principles that make great urban spaces all over the world.

In fact, a lot of how we did things in the pre-oil era makes good sense for a post-carbon 21st century. Without cars to skew our sense of distance and place, we developed cities, provisioning systems and even cultural and social norms suitable to a lower-energy world. That doesn't mean we need to revert to some 19th century or anti-technology lifestyle. We simply need to rediscover those ways of running a society and an economy that don't completely depend on petroleum-powered engines.

California is already on the route toward breaking its ingrained car dependence with legislation like Senate Bill 375, which links energy use with transportation and land development. The challenges we face in global warming and declining oil supplies, however, require that we do more than just tinker around with zoning codes and transportation funding. We need to fundamentally rethink the way we do urban planning and the way we fund public infrastructure, and fast.

Portland, Ore., remains the best American example of this fundamental rethinking, with its vibrant downtown, pioneering light-rail system and strict constraints on suburban sprawl. Portland achieved its successes not by executive fiat, but through decades of work by countless elected officials, planners and community members to forge regional agreement on land use and transportation issues. Car independence has been a central part of the Portland vision, and today the city boasts some of the nation's highest rates of walking and bicycling, despite miserable weather half the year.

There's no reason sunny California cities and towns can't do the same. The Village Homes development in Davis, begun in 1975, was one of the first in the country to prove that pedestrian-oriented communities are not only nicer to live in but more lucrative to build. Today, towns across the state are investing in modern transit and lower-carbon "smart growth," and both modern streetcars and high-speed trains are quickly becoming realities in California's largest cities.

Retrofitting our communities to be car-independent – car-smart – isn't rocket science. And we're fortunate that the American legal system leaves the bulk of land use and transportation decisions to the state and local levels. Every community across this country has the choice to continue increasing its car and oil dependence, or to reorient itself for the new post-oil era. If the successes of Western Europe and American cities such as Portland are any indication, car independence is clearly the smart path for California to choose.

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Reinventing Reality (or Collapse Sandwich) - Orlov and Pinchbeck (podcast)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast
Daniel Pinchbeck and Dmitry Orlov!

KMO welcomes Daniel Pinchbeck and Dmitry Orlov to the program to discuss their visions of the challenges and opportunities that present themselves in this liminal moment in human history. Might our economic system be on the verge of collapse? Would that necessarily be a bad thing? How might we reinvent ourselves and our society as we search for a new guiding communal myth? Later, KMO talks with Corey Call about the upcoming Coalessence Festival in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
(26 September 2008)

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Real food makes a comeback: You may now kiss your local farmer
William Dietrich, Seattle Times

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How to create change In your community: finding or forming a local group
Melinda Briana Epler, One Green Generation

When we live locally and strengthen our communities, we become stronger and better able to adapt to changes in the economy, climate, and energy availability. But we discuss much about how to go about this. So... how do you create change in your community? And how do you form a group of people who can tackle these community needs?

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Back to the Dark Ages: National Grid raises the spectre of blackouts this winter
Sam Fleming, Daily Mail

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Peak Moment: Meeting the Energy Challenge

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Farmer in Chief

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 9, 2008

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be — and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals — if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale “alternative” farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can’t survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don’t survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason — save current policy and custom — that American farmers couldn’t grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today’s sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don’t farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields — a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to “perennialize” commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses — without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project. For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm — as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste — all without our help or fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these — the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it — has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will — as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields. Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world — with a population expected to peak at 10 billion — survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone — however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work. Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day’s drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food-system impact statements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy — one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community-supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community-supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of-season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers’ Markets. Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones. Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems — it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass-based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department’s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve. In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda — as well as the food security of billions of people around the world — will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement. In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of “Food.” It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a “junk food.” We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you’ll recall President Reagan’s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do. One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have. We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food-service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible — the other sense in which “sunlight” should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House. If what’s needed is a change of culture in America’s thinking about food, then how America’s first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, focusing the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America. The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.) Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever. There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

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Quantifying Overextension—America’s “Predicament”
Chris Clugston, Energy Bulletin

The objectives of the following paper are to demonstrate quantitatively that America is irreparably overextended—living hopelessly beyond our means ecologically and economically; and to quantify the disastrous consequences associated with our “predicament”.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair10172008.html
A Trip to America's Most Toxic Place
Inside Hanford

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Richland, Washington.

The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.

Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.

Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.

One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.

Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.

A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”

This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”

No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”

Needless to say, the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional hearings after the Inspector General’s report was released, bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson in the art of concealment: The easiest way to avoid bad press and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the most likely to produce unpleasant information.

It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks since the moment it learned of them.

How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The DOE isn’t talking. It isn’t even looking for answers. But geologists estimated that the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium, will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia in something like twenty-five years. That means that the first traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.

This reckless strategy persists. In a document called “Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum, called the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford’s soils and water table.

If the DOE remains locked onto this course it will never acknowledge or even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward the great river of the West. That’s because the managers of Hanford say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.

To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of forty feet—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region of the most dangerous contamination.

There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped into a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now under construction. There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.

There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive, and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the surface—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had “reached groundwater in this area of the tank farm.”

Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant. How far have faster moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one knows. No one is even looking.

The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close down the C Quadrant of the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 percent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks. There is mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.

John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top environmental engineers and a world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or avoid collecting it entirely.

A decade later, Brodeur has once again been asked to assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth, this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His conclusions are disturbing.

“There remains much that we don’t know about the subsurface contamination plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur. “The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify what we don’t know up front and get it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of omission are standard practice and people lose their jobs because they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”

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Why I Wrote a Book About Human Waste
By Rose George

Parts 2, 3, 4

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http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/gyrobas...t?oid=oid:52177
SEPTEMBER 24, 2008
The Zero Life
Two weeks, a zero-waste kit, and no trash

BY STRATTON LAWRENCE

From the moment you wake up and brush your teeth, wash your hair, and shave your face with products packaged in non-recyclable containers, you're contributing to the waste stream. Need to buy something at a big box retailer or grocery store? Good luck finding anything in recyclable packaging. Going out to eat can be especially wasteful, as restaurants continue to use Styrofoam and other disposals, simply because it's deemed cheaper or easier than having to wash dishes.

Trying to live without generating trash is next to impossible. But we decided it was worth a shot.

For 14 days, the folks who participated in our experiment went to extremes, constantly discovering previously unnoticed and often unavoidable sources of trash in their daily lives. Between the lawyer and the meteorologist, the outdoor ed teacher and the work-at-home mom, the college student and the City Paper reporter, none of the eight participants made it more than three days without contributing to the waste stream.

Of course, attempting to live waste-free inevitably leads to some awkward moments. The girl at the register at your noontime haunt might look at you funny when you ask for your sandwich on a plate you just pulled out of your backpack. Bartenders might mock you when you tell them that their non-recyclable plastic cups won't do, or when you're seen dropping your empty cans and bottles into your purse. Your co-workers probably won't be too happy with you when you forget to take your hand towel to the bathroom, and they inquire about the wet door handle they've just grabbed on to. And try walking down the street with your dog's poo fisted in a dish glove — at least it's easier than rinsing out a poop baggie.

Erica Schneider is already the green type. The Coastal Conservation League intern and frame shop employee brings her own bags to the grocery store, composts in her backyard, and doesn't eat meat or animal products. But never before had she found herself sorting through the fruit bins at Earth Fare, looking for the peaches and plums without stickers on them because she didn't want to toss the add-ons into the trash. (Schneider later discovered that those stickers are edible and compostable).

Like most participants, she carried a mug with her for coffee and her own napkin and plate for eating out. But exactly what do you do with a hair tie when it breaks? Or the non-recyclable top from the recyclable soda bottle? Or for that matter, the condom that you're sure as hell going to use, zero waste experiment be damned?

Going waste-free will force you to make sacrifices. If you want cereal, you'd better buy it in bulk — Whole Foods even let us weigh our own reusable containers before tallying the cost of items in their bulk section. Foods like Clif Bars and chips don't make the cut — the wrappers and bags aren't recyclable — and most meats come packaged with Styrofoam and plastic. To go all the way, you'd even have to make your own products like toothpaste — mint and baking soda, anyone?

But with sacrifice comes innovation and substitution. Patricia Carson, a law student at the Charleston School of Law, brought a reusable bag with her to purchase a loaf of bread; the good folks at Saffron Bakery promised to reuse the plastic bag her loaf came out of. And instead of buying a half gallon of ice cream in a non-recyclable container, she'd go out for a walk and a cone when she got the craving.

"It was a way of keeping me from overindulging. It forced me to get on my bike and go get things more often," says Carson. "If I was in the mood for something, I had to go get it. It forced me to eat healthier."

Carson even went camping with a group of friends during the experiment, and apart from a s'more out of the community supply and the plastic from a 20-pound bag of ice, she managed to do the entire trip waste free.

Traveling to Greenville for her mother's birthday the next weekend wasn't so easy. When she let the folks at a coffee shop know that she was going to stay awhile, they still served her drink in Styrofoam, instead of a reusable ceramic mug. To make matters worse, the only creamer in sight was in individual plastic containers.


To avoid waste on-the-go, a zero-waste kit became a necessity for the participants. Brad Sale, an environmental educator at Old Santee Canal Park in Moncks Corner, brought his own plate and cup when he went to eat at Subway. They didn't flinch, building his sandwich right on the plate, sans paper and plastic. "I just acted like it's what I normally do, which it will be from now on," says Sale.

Most everyone carried their own napkins and to-go plastic containers for leftovers. But biodegradable items like peach pits and banana peels don't break down well in an oxygen-starved landfill, and even the sugar cane- and corn-based cups and cutlery used at earth-conscious restaurants won't decompose if they're just tossed in the trash.

If you're going to live waste free, you need a compost bin, a fact that the members of our zero waste challenge were well aware of. From vacuum scraps to human hair, spoiled leftovers to paper napkins (accidentally used of course), the backyard decomposition piles of the participants received a heavy load over the two weeks.

Jessica Zichichi is a stay-at-home mom and a geographic information systems programmer. She normally goes the extra mile when it comes to her baby; Zichichi uses washable cloth diapers and breast-feeds her child. But finding a substitute for throw-away baby wipes? No, thanks. "I couldn't bring myself to dry them out and recycle them," she says.

Even for the most dedicated, eliminating trash completely simply wasn't feasible. From a new cell phone to iPod earphones, tampons to wax-lined dog food bags, there are many things that just can't be recycled — you have no choice but to toss them into the trash. You can't even buy a lickable stamp at the post office anymore.

The Mess Behind the Scenes

Broken down by person, the average South Carolinian generates 6.4 pounds of trash a day; 1.8 pounds more than the national average. Each of the zero-waste participants was able to fit their personally generated trash into a gallon bag for the two weeks. But that doesn't take into account all of the waste that is created during the production of the goods the participants used. Some estimates state that for every can of trash generated on the consumption end, there's as much as 70 times that waste created during production.

"There's waste that you've generated and waste that's generated on your behalf," says Alec Cooley, a Charleston-based project manager with the National Recycling Coalition.

Cooley participated in the challenge and found himself at a recycling conference where he was served a box lunch in a non-recyclable container, in which all the food items were wrapped in plastic, along with the typical plastic-wrapped silverware and napkin. He says that we've developed a culture where everything is disposable and perceived as having no value, a luxury that won't last much longer.

"Plastic bottles are made out of petroleum, and that's oil that's not being used to make other things, including gasoline," he says. "So why not recycle it, or better yet, refill an old bottle and use that water to make gas cheaper? We have a finite matter of resources. If we decide to squander them by using something once and then throwing it away, that's a resource we no longer have to use in other ways or otherwise leave for the next generation."

Unfortunately, many business owners continue to use disposables because up front, they're still the cheapest option available. But even big companies like Walmart are finding that packaging products efficiently ultimately saves money — less unnecessary plastic means more product fits on the truck, adding up to savings in shipping and energy costs.

"When you hear about that, it just makes sense. You're almost surprised that every company doesn't have someone managing sustainability and conservation," says Jonathan Lamb, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service and a zero-waste participant. "You can save so much money with simple changes."

A Cleaner Future?

Charleston County is staring a big trash monster in the eye this year. We're faced with the decision of whether or not to renew a 20-year contract with the incinerator, where nearly 80 percent of our household waste is burned and converted to electricity. The health, air quality, and mercury-releasing effects of that facility have been well-reported, and are concerns shared by citizens and government alike.

But because we rely on the incinerator to handle so much of our waste, taking the trash that otherwise would have been burned and transferring it to a landfill is also problematic. It would require us to either haul waste to neighboring counties or construct a new landfill. The latter is questionable because of our proximity to sea-level and the high water table. It's also less-than-popular with the potential neighbors of any new Mt. Trashmores.

In response to public input during the incinerator debate, County Council voted to establish a Green Ribbon Committee earlier this summer. Over 60 applications were received, and by November, the members should be chosen and an outside consultant decided upon. After that, the Committee will begin discussing how to best move forward on the solid waste issue.

"It's the four 'R's — reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink. It's a whole new thought process of what we're trying to do," says Councilwoman Colleen Condon. "I think we're going to be seeing lots of changes."

Condon emphasizes that even while disposable products seem cheaper on the front end, businesses, particularly restaurants, that have switched to recycling and reusable products see significant savings when they're able to reduce or eliminate dumpster fees. Restaurants and bars like Monza and Raval that utilize Fisher Recycling, a local pick-up service, echo those claims.

So with the City of Charleston adopting its own Green Committee (separate from the County entity), could comprehensive waste reduction, even zero waste, be a possibility here? A recently adopted resolution by the City of Austin, Texas, calls for zero waste (or darn close) by 2040. Their plan calls for banning problem products and packaging, encouraging composting in homes and schools, and "pay as you throw" incentives to discourage putting recyclables into the waste stream.

Charleston's recycling rate is currently at 30 percent. Ideas like city-wide recycling pick-ups for businesses, currently offered only privately, would likely be the first to come to the table.

"We each need to take personal responsibility and learn to conserve again," says the Recycling Coalition's Cooley. "That doesn't mean we have to do extreme things like carry our own plates and utensils to a restaurant, but it does mean moving beyond the 'throw it away' mentality."

the kit

Want to try it yourself? In addition to avoiding non-recyclables, a zero-waste kit and a compost bin are essential.

Here's what we kept on hand:

•Refillable drink bottle/coffee mug

•Plate and utensils

•Cloth napkin

•Personal hand towel

•Reusable plastic container for leftovers/bulk items at store

•Mesh bag for produce

•Cloth grocery bags

Recycling 101

Charleston County lets us be a bit lazy. Apart from paper and cardboard, we're instructed to put all of our recyclables together in the big blue bin, no sorting required. (Put paper products in a separate container or a paper bag.) Don't have a blue bin? Get as many as you need free at their facility (13 Romney St., Downtown). Once the contents of your bucket get to Romney Street, a team of dedicated workers sorts it — #1 plastics, #2 plastics, glass, and otherwise recyclable jars and cans you were too lazy to wash; a magnet sucks up all the metal. But just because that jug is plastic doesn't mean you can throw it in the bin. Plastics #3 through #7 are either too expensive or lack the demand for the County to accept them. So check your numbers. Milk bottle? Good to go. Ketchup bottle, plastic wrap, CD tray, and Tupperware? Probably not. Now get really eco-savvy and check the number before you buy it.


Illustration by Scott Suchy/CCP

Make your own compost bin

Here's a super easy DIY project. Try it, then use the healthy soil to grow your own.

1. Get a plastic bin or trash can with a tight-fitting lid. Punch five to 10 small holes in the bottom, a few around the sides near the top, and about 10 in the lid. This provides oxygen to the bacteria making your compost.

2. Fill the container two-thirds with the following: about one-fourth with dry leaves or newspaper, one-half with dirt from your yard, and one-fourth with green plant debris. Go ahead and add any fruit and veggie leftovers, egg shells, and tissue paper-like materials you have ready to compost. NO MEAT. Mix well.

3. Spray the mixture, so it's moist but not soaked.

4. Put the lid on.

5. Add scraps (and stir!) at least once a week. The smaller the scraps and the more you stir, the quicker the decomposition process.

Keep your compost moist, well-mixed, and out of constant direct sunlight. Secure the lid well with a brick or you may make some raccoon friends. If it starts to smell, it's too wet or you've added too many scraps. Move it further from your back door and give it a couple of days. After a month or two, you should have healthy black compost, ready to mulch your home garden, flower beds, or house plants.

[papabear]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JJ24Dj02.html
Big Oil, the big survivor
By Antonia Juhasz

This year began with three landmark events. Oil reached US$100 per barrel for only the second time in history as gasoline prices began an ascent toward the highest prices in a generation. And on January 3, Democratic Senator Barack Obama became the first African American to win the Iowa caucus.

In his historic victory speech, Obama chose to highlight just a handful of policy issues in the 15-minute address, making his focus on oil all the more significant. Obama forcefully declared that he would free the United States once and for all from "the tyranny of oil" and then pledged to be the president "who ends the war in Iraq and finally brings our troops home". An already raucous crowd met these pronouncements with thunderous applause and waves of cheers.

"The tyranny of oil" powerfully encapsulates the feelings not only of Americans, but of people the world over. Without viable and accessible alternatives, entire economies suffer when increasing proportions of national budgets must be used to purchase oil. And on an individual level, families, facing the same lack of alternatives, forgo basic necessities when gasoline prices skyrocket. Communities that live where oil is found - from Ecuador to Nigeria to Iraq - experience the tyranny of daily human rights abuses, violence, and war. The tyranny of environmental pollution, public health risks and climate destruction is created at every stage of oil use, from exploration to production, from transport to refining, from consumption to disposal. And the political tyranny exercised by the masters of the oil industry corrupts democracy and destroys our ability to choose how much we will sacrifice in oil's name.

Standard Oil, 'Seven Sisters'
The masters of the oil industry, the companies known as "Big Oil", exercise their influence throughout this chain of events: through rapidly and ever-increasing oil and gasoline prices, a lack of viable alternatives, the erosion of democracy, environmental destruction, global warming, violence, and war.

The American public is fed up with Big Oil. In 2006, Gallup published its annual rating of public perceptions of US industry. The oil industry is always a poor performer, but this time it came in dead last - earning the lowest rating for any industry in the history of the poll.

As the 2008 election progressed, both Obama and his leading Democratic challenger Senator Hillary Clinton went increasingly on the attack against Big Oil, and each was eventually called a "Populist candidate", their words sounding an alarm similar to one made over 100 years earlier by the Populist movement against corporate trusts generally and Standard Oil in particular, the company from which many of today's oil giants descend.

John D Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870. By the 1880s, Standard Oil controlled 90% of all refining in the United States, 80% of the marketing of oil products, a quarter of the country's total crude output, and, in this pre-automobile era, produced more than a quarter of the world's total supply of kerosene. Standard Oil was renowned for both the ruthlessness and the illegality of its business methods. Dozens of court cases were brought against the company, and Standard Oil was broken up by three separate state-level injunctions.

In 1911, the federal government used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up Standard Oil into 34 separate companies. Standard Oil would not regain its singular dominance and consolidation of the industry, or the political control it held at the height of its power in the late 1800s.

The 1911 breakup largely failed over the course of the next decade, however, due to the absence of effective government oversight. Primarily to address these failings, new antitrust laws and, most importantly, a new government agency - the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - were later introduced to tighten the government's control over antitrust violations by US corporations. The FTC remains the most important government agency in charge of regulating corporate consolidation and collusion.

Still, while the nation's antitrust laws were fairly well applied to domestic oil operations, the largest oil companies functioned in the international arena as a cartel. From approximately World War I to 1970, the three largest post-breakup companies, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Standard Oil of New York (Mobil), and Standard Oil of California (Chevron), joined with Gulf, Texaco, BP, and Shell to form a cartel, earning them the nickname the "Seven Sisters". These seven companies owned the vast majority of the world's oil and controlled the economic fate of entire nations.

Over the decades, many strategies to rein in the power of the Seven Sisters were proposed, debated, and even attempted in the United States. These included reducing the flow of oil the companies could bring into the United States, state-owned refineries, a national oil company, and massive antitrust action against the oil companies. Some of these efforts were successful, but most were not.

It was the oil-rich nations operating as their own cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which ultimately brought down the corporate cartel. By the mid-1980s, the OPEC governments had taken back full ownership of their oil. The Seven Sisters, which in 1973 earned two-thirds of their profits abroad, turned their attention back to the US market that they had largely abdicated to the smaller "independent" oil companies. Big Oil's new mantra was "Merge or die", as the companies first bought up the independents and then each other.

Since 1991, government regulators, under the direct and heavy influence of the nation's largest oil companies and their lawyers, have allowed more than 2,600 mergers to take place in the US oil industry. The mergers have resulted in the near demise of the independent oil company, refiner, and gas station in the United States.

The mergers of the mega-giant oil companies have all taken place since 1999 and remain the largest mergers in corporate history. Exxon merged with Mobil, Chevron with Texaco, Conoco with Phillips, and BP with Amoco and then Arco to create the largest corporations the world has ever seen. Shell also participated in the merger wave by purchasing several "baby-Standard" oil companies.

While nowhere near its Seven Sisters "glory years", Big Oil's oil reserves are impressive nonetheless. Were the five largest oil companies operating in the United States one country instead of five corporations, their combined crude oil holdings would today rank within the top 10 of the world's largest oil-rich nations. ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP exercise their control over the price of oil today through these individual holdings and through participation in the crude oil futures market. The futures market has replaced OPEC as the principal determinant of the price of crude oil. It is largely unregulated and prone to excessive speculation and manipulation.

The mergers also allowed the oil companies to take control of the refining and selling of gasoline in the United States in the style of Standard Oil. They have forged a mass consolidation of these sectors, yielding rapid increases in the price of gasoline and oil company profits.

Most profitable industry
Riding on high oil and gasoline prices, the oil industry is far and away the most profitable industry in the world. Six of the 10 largest corporations in the world are oil companies. They are, in order, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell (Shell), BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total. (The others are Wal-Mart, General Motors, Toyota Motor, and Daimler-Chrysler.) According to Fortune's 2007 Global 500 listing, the 10 largest global oil companies took in over US$167 billion in profits in 2006 alone - nearly $50 billion more than the top 10 companies in the second most profitable industry, commercial and savings banks.

The largest publicly traded oil companies operating in the United States and those with the greatest influence on US policy-making are ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, Valero, and Marathon. Each is either a direct descendant or has purchased direct descendants of Standard Oil. They are among the most powerful corporations in the world. These companies are Big Oil.

Big Oil is experiencing a level of power that has only one historical precedent: that of the Standard Oil era. And like Standard Oil, the companies appear willing to do anything to maintain their position. With over $40 billion in pure profit in 2007, ExxonMobil is the most profitable corporation both in the world and in world history. Its profits are larger than the entire economies of 93 of the world's nations ranked by GDP. ExxonMobil had the most profitable year of any corporation ever in 2003 and then proceeded to surpass its own record every year for the next five years.

Wal-Mart edged out ExxonMobil as the world's largest corporation in 2007 by just barely surpassing its sales - $379 billion compared with ExxonMobil's $373 billion. Wal-Mart's $12.7 billion in profits, however, were a mere one-third of ExxonMobil's. In fact, ExxonMobil's profi ts were more than twice those of the next three US companies on the Fortune 500 list combined: Chevron with $18.7 billion; General Motors, which lost $38.7 billion; and ConocoPhillips with $11.9 billion. Similarly, in 2006 ExxonMobil's profits were nearly twice those of the next two US companies combined: United Airlines with $23 billion and Citigroup with $21 billion.

ExxonMobil is not alone. Each major American oil company - ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Valero, and Marathon - has surpassed its own record-breaking profits in almost every year for the last five years. Combined, they earned more than $80 billion in 2007 profits. There is simply no comparison with any other industry in the United States.

What does $133 billion in profits buy an industry? It bought the oil industry at least eight years of a US "oiligarchy": a government ruled by a small number of oil interests. The oil industry spent more money to get the George W Bush administration into office in 2000 than it has spent on any election before or since. In return it received, for the first time in American history, a president, vice president, and secretary of state who are all former oil company officials.

In fact, in 2000 both George W Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had more experience running oil companies than they did working for the government. Every agency and every level of bureaucracy was filled with former oil industry lobbyists, lawyers, staff, board members, and executives, or those on their way to work for the oil industry after a brief stint of government service. The oil industry got what it paid for: an administration that has arguably gone further than just about any other in American history to serve Big Oil's interests through deregulation, lax enforcement, new access to America's public lands and oceans, subsidies, tax breaks, and even war.

Democrats failed to deliver
Americans tried to change course in 2006 by replacing the Republican Congress with a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Democrats pledged in their election campaigns to take action against the oil industry, climate change, and the war in Iraq - all three of which are intimately and rightly connected in the public's mind. The Democrats failed to deliver. Far too often, Big Oil's money appeared to be the reason why.

In one particularly glaring example, the Center for American Progress investigated the relationship between votes and campaign contributions in connection with HR 2776, the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2007. The bill would have eliminated $16 billion in oil and gas industry tax breaks to fund clean energy alternatives. Between 1989 and 2006, members of Congress who voted against the bill received on
average four times more money in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry (approximately $100,000) than those who voted for the bill (approximately $26,000). The bill ultimately died.

Similarly, Oil Change International compiled voting records for the five most important bills on the Iraq War: the initial 2003 vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq and the subsequent supplemental war funding bills in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. From 1989 to 2006, members of Congress who voted for all five bills received on average eight times more money from the oil and gas industry (approximately $116,000) than those who voted against the war (approximately $14,000). And the war rages on.

Big Oil does not only wield its financial purse at election time, it impacts daily policy-making through its unprecedented spending on lobbyists. In fact, the millions of dollars it spends on elections is small potatoes compared with the tens of millions it spends lobbying the federal government.

From 1998 to 2006, ExxonMobil alone spent more than $80 million lobbying the federal government, over 14 times more money than it spent on political campaigns. Combined, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, Marathon, and ConocoPhillips spent $240 million lobbying the federal government from 1998 to 2006 - more than the entire oil and gas industry spent on federal election campaigns from 1990 to 2006.

There is simply no comparison between the financial reach of the oil industry and that of organizations working on behalf of consumers, the environment, public health, communities living near oil production or gasoline refining facilities, and groups working in support of alternative energy, antitrust enforcement, or the protection of human rights. Through lawyers, lobbyists, elected officials, government regulators, conservative think tanks, industry front groups, and full-force media saturation, the oil industry uses its wealth to change the public debate and, more often than not, achieve its desired policy outcomes.

Running out
Yet for all its enduring power, Big Oil finds itself in a precarious position today. While it is at its financial and political pinnacle, it faces the greatest threat to its existence in its 150-plus-year history: oil, the resource on which it depends, is growing far more difficult to come by.

Today the Earth is just about tapped out of conventional oil. There are no new vast, untouched reserves sitting close to the earth's surface just waiting to be discovered. In fact, even with phenomenal advances in technology, no one has made such a discovery in more than 45 years. This, of course, is not for lack of trying. From Canada to China, Mexico to Brazil, Nigeria to Iraq, Malaysia to Greenland, California to Florida, through ice, sand, silt, and rock, over the course of the past 150 years and at an incalculable cost, we have scoured the globe in search of oil.

Oil is a nonrenewable natural resource: when a reservoir of oil is depleted, no new oil emerges to take its place. Since about 1960, the rate at which the world has consumed oil has outpaced the rate at which we have discovered new fields. Today we find only about one new barrel of oil for roughly every four that we consume. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the world will consume 120 million barrels of oil a day by 2025, over 50% more than we consumed in 2001. We are therefore forced to confront a bitter reality: the world is fast approaching the point at which conventional sources of oil will decline until they are forever gone.

More than 50% of the world's remaining conventional oil is found in just five countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2003 the Bush administration, composed of former and future oil company executives, led the United States into war against Iraq on the pretense that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The same administration is now threatening war against Iran while establishing permanent US military facilities across the region, including in Kuwait and the UAE. The administration supplies arms to Saudi Arabia while negotiating for greater access to that nation's oil for US oil companies.

The rest of the world's conventional oil is found in comparatively small amounts in 14 other countries: Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, the United States, China, Qatar, Mexico, Algeria, Brazil, Angola, Norway, and Azerbaijan. If you map the massive increase in construction of US military bases and installations and military deployments around the world under the Bush administration, you will see that they directly follow oil locations and oil transit routes. New US military installations in Central and South America, West Africa, and elsewhere raise the threat of new military action in those regions. The costs to people who live in those countries and along those routes are mounting, from human rights abuses, environmental destruction, military occupation, and war.

Oil production in most of the world has reached or is nearing its peak. Production in most Middle Eastern countries, on the other hand, is not expected to peak until 2025. This means that an even greater percentage of the world's remaining oil will be consolidated in just a few Middle Eastern nations.

The realization that oil is being concentrated in the Middle East has led many to argue that the United States should become more "energy independent". In response to this sort of view, Sarah Emerson of Energy Security Analysis Inc explained in 2002, "The trouble with diversifying outside the Middle East ... is that it is not where the oil is. One of the best things for our supply security would be to liberate Iraq."

Climate change
Outside of the Middle East, the oil that is left is becoming more technologically difficult, expensive, and environmentally destructive to acquire. Conventional oil is found offshore below the world's ocean waters, making its production risky, environmentally harmful, and destructive to coastal communities. Among the largest unconventional sources of oil are the tar sands of Canada and the shale regions of the midwestern United States.

In addition to the problems just listed, the process of removing the tar and shale from the earth, extracting the oil, converting it into liquid, and refining it into gasoline is far more energy-intensive and ozone-depleting than traditional methods of oil production and thus contributes more to climate change.

Climate change and global warming are increasingly critical issues. Including 2007, seven of the eight warmest years since records began in 1880 have occurred since 2001, and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997. Burning fossil fuels, primarily oil, natural gas, and coal, increases atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas. The more greenhouse gas there is in the earth's atmosphere, the more of the sun's heat is trapped near the earth's surface; the more heat that is trapped, the higher the planet's temperature; the higher the earth's temperature, the more ice melts, oceans rise, and extreme weather results. All of which would be better described as "climate chaos" rather than mere "climate change" or "global warming." Just to stabilize current greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, it is estimated that the world must reduce emissions of these gases by 50 to 80% by 2050 or even sooner.

The United States is by far the largest per capita contributor to global warming - releasing 30% of all energy-related CO2 emissions in 2004 (the most recent date for which data is available) - primarily from our cars and trucks. The United States is also the largest consumer of oil. With just 5% of the world's population, the United States uses almost 25% of the world's oil every year. In fact, Americans consume as much oil every year as the next five countries - China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India - combined. On average, each American uses nearly three gallons of oil per day. Products made from petroleum, such as plastics, linoleum, nylon, and polyester, fill our lives, but it is the car that dominates our oil consumption.

One out of every seven barrels of oil in the world is consumed on America's highways alone. In fact, the population growth of cars in the United States is greater than that of people: a new car rolls onto the street every three seconds, whereas a baby is born only every eight seconds. Americans are increasingly aware that this consumption is unsustainable. Many of us would like to see fewer cars on the road, cleaner-burning renewable alternative fuels, more and better public transportation, more pedestrian-friendly downtowns, better rail systems, and electric cars. This is where we collide head-on with the economic clout of the oil industry.

Big Oil would like us to believe that it is part of the solution, that it has seen the writing on the wall and knows that the future is clean energy. The companies' advertising campaigns would have us believe that they are in fact using their vast resources to embrace a clean, green, sustainable, and renewable energy future. Do not believe the hype. None of the companies invests more than 4% of its entire annual expenditures on clean, renewable, alternative forms of energy. Big Oil is deeply committed to remaining Big Oil and is putting all its considerable resources behind this effort.

And Big Oil thrives on secrecy, a lack of transparency, and control over information. We can only address its power by pulling back its veil.

[papabear]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_on_...9RSUsSq3ZW3IxIF
Mexican energy reform passes Senate
Thu Oct 23, 4:33 pm ET

MEXICO CITY – The Mexican Senate has passed a controversial energy reform meant to revitalize the nation's flagging oil industry.

The bill now goes to the lower house.

Senators approved the bill Thursday even as riot police held back protesters demonstrating outside.

The measure would allow more private and foreign investment in the state oil monopoly known as Pemex, which has seen production sag.

Many analysts say it will do little to halt the company's slide and leftist protesters argue it is a veiled attempt to privatize the industry.

[papabear]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081029/ap_on_...wNqL2ANu81vaA8F
Mexico approves watered-down oil industry reform
By ALEXANDRA OLSON, Associated Press Writer Alexandra Olson, Associated Press Writer – 47 mins ago

MEXICO CITY – Mexico's Congress passed a watered-down energy industry reform Tuesday that enables private contractors to participate in the state-owned oil business but won't likely draw enough investment to reverse declining production in the third-largest oil supplier to the United States.

The lower house overwhelmingly approved the reforms despite protests by leftist lawmakers who stormed the podium to block a bill they said was a stealth privatization of an industry that was nationalized in 1938. The Senate approved the reform last week.

Falling oil prices and output threaten to slash Mexico's state oil income, which makes up 40 percent of the federal budget, just as the country sees falling remittances from U.S. migrants and a plunging peso rattles the long-stable economy.

So far this year, Mexico has produced an average of 2.8 million barrels of oil a day, down 10 percent from 2007 levels. At current production rates, experts say Mexico will blow through its proven reserves in 10 years.

State oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, lacks the technology and expertise for deep-water exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, believed to hold many of the country's unproven reserves. But experts say the reform bill has few incentives for private companies to take on the risk and expense of such exploration.

"It's a big disappointment from the investor's perspective," said John Cogan, a Houston-based attorney for McDermott Will & Emery LLP, who focuses on the hydrocarbons industry. "It doesn't do what needs to be done if they are going to fully benefit from their hydrocarbons natural resources."

Leftists had rallied popular support to limit openings to private investment in the oil industry.

After months of arduous negotiations, the bill was stripped of many of the most significant changes in President Felipe Calderon's original proposal.

It allows deep-water exploration only on a straight contractual basis, instead of paying private companies based on the amount of oil found. It also would no longer allow private investment in the building and operating of oil refineries, or private ownership of storage and transport facilities.

Mexico has not built a new refinery in three decades, and now depends on U.S. refineries to convert much of its crude into gasoline.

The reform will let Pemex keep more of its profits for investment in exploration and development. And it does allow for incentivized contracts, including paying contractors bonuses for early completion of projects and for technological transfer to Pemex.

"Investors will wait and see how this reform translates into actual contracts," said David Shields, an independent energy expert in Mexico City who has written books on Pemex. "But what we won't be able to avoid is a major drop in oil production in the short term."

Still, the government managed through its concessions to build consensus in a divided Congress on one of the most sensitive issues in Mexican politics. The compromise bill easily passed in the Senate last week.

"Oil politics in Mexico is a lot about politics and a little about oil," said Enrique Bravo, a Washington-based oil analyst for Eurasia Group. "For many people, this will be a lacking reform, and I see why they see it that way. But within the political setting in Mexico, it's not a minor achievement."

Even Calderon's original proposal had limited sweep, constrained by a constitutional ban on sharing oil or direct income from oil production with outside companies. That essentially ruled out joint ventures that would allow private companies to shoulder most of the cost burden of deep-water exploration. Such restrictions set Mexico apart even from leftist-led countries like Venezuela, which allows joint ventures in hard-to-explore fields.

In a televised address late Tuesday, Calderon congratulated lawmakers for what he called "a historic achievement." He assured Mexicans that the oil industry will not be privatized.

"With this reform we all win," Calderon said. "Mexicans win, and Mexico wins."

The bill passed even though a group of leftist lawmakers tried to disrupt the debate by seizing the speaker's podium.

The protest erupted shortly after former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador denounced the bill in a speech to the lower house. Since narrowly losing to Calderon in 2006, Lopez Obrador has used the oil reform as a rallying cry, staging street protests against what he says is an attempt to turn Mexico's natural resources over to private and foreign companies.

[papabear]

http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&...3610&size=A
10/29/2008 13:46
RUSSIA – CHINA
Siberian oil for China
The two sides sign an agreement to build a pipeline from Siberia to China. Prime ministers Wen and Putin praise Sino-Russian co-operation and deals and plan to work together to reform the world’s financial system to play a “greater role.”

Moscow (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao agreed to build an oil pipeline from the Siberian town of Skovorodino to the Chinese border, 70 kilometres away, where it will link up with the Chinese pipeline network to reach the oil hub of Daqing, Heilongjiang. Both leaders also saw eye to eye on playing a greater role in the world.

Yesterday press reports said the deal was in the bag but Putin’ spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the issue was “still being worked on”.

Russia’s Rosneft and Transneft and the China National Petroleum Corporation have until 25 November to sign the final long-term oil supply deal.

The pipeline will have a capacity of 15 million tonnes of oil per year (or about 4 per cent of China’s consumption) and will be a branch of the main East Siberia-Pacific Ocean trunk pipeline, still under construction, which should supply the whole of Asia with Russian oil.

Beijing will provide the Russian companies with billions of dollars to build the pipelines, to be repaid in oil.

Beijing has thus overtaken Japan’s fierce competition. Tokyo sought to get Moscow to build its pipeline to the Pacific Ocean and the Japanese islands.

Wen, who is in Moscow for the Russia-China economic Forum, said the two countries should “deepen co-operation in the energy sphere.”

“Russia and China are growing economies with major influence in the world,” Mr Wen said, adding that they should also step up co-operation in the financial sector to fight the global crisis and join forces to reform the global financial system.

“We need a new system whereby developing nations will have a stronger say. We need to diversify the global currency system, to support its stability through the use of different currencies,” he also said.

Putin agreed. “It's hard to find another country in the world that is our partner with such a wide range of interaction,” Putin said after the talks.

The Russian prime minister also lambasted the United States for its irresponsible behaviour in failing to prevent the global crisis.

Faced with the world crisis, China’s foreign reserves stand at US$ 1.9 trillion whilst Russia’s are US$ 500 billion, largely from energy sales.

But Russia is still only the 5th largest exporter of crude oil to energy-hungry China.

“We need to build oil and gas pipelines, increase downstream and upstream co-operation, and increase co-operation in the nuclear sphere,” Zhang Guobao, head of China's State Energy Bureau, said.

The two countries have also signed a number of agreements, including the sale of Russian civilian heavy helicopters and the development a new model of heavy helicopter that brings together Russian technology and Chinese capital.

[papabear]

http://energybulletin.net/node/47049
The peak oil crisis: A steepening slope
by Tom Whipple

Thus far, last week's OPEC production cut of 1.5 million barrels a day (b/d) has done little to stem the slide in oil prices.

Immediately after the cut, prices went down another $4 on the theory that the cut was too small. OPEC of course is trying to maximize its revenue in real dollars. If they cut oil production more slowly than world demand slows then oil prices will continue to slide and revenues will go down. If they can agree on more substantial cuts, then they will almost certainly drive prices back up hurting demand and eventually setting off a round of inflation that will reduce the value of their revenue. For OPEC, it is a tough call.

At the minute, the oil and other commodity markets seem seized with the notion that a rip-roaring, world engulfing depression is on the way that will demolish oil consumption. People are actually starting to talk about oil falling all the way to $20 a barrel again. Is this likely or even remotely possible?

Start with the International Energy Agency, which is still forecasting that worldwide demand for oil will grow during 2008 and 2009. They have of course reduced their growth estimates in the last six months, but they still are talking about actual growth in world consumption - not declines.

In thinking about who might slow their use of oil in the world these days, let's start with the oil exporting countries as this is where consumption has been growing the fastest. Most of these sell their oil products domestically at discounts, some substantial, to world prices. Their foreign exchange earnings are obviously hurting from much lower prices at the minute and they are starting to talk about slowing economic development projects, but there certainly has been no sign of lower domestic consumption for now.

Oil consumption is so ubiquitous today that, somewhere, oil is used by people in all walks of life - from multi-billionaires to those who are just getting by. As hard economic times descend, it is obvious that people at the bottom of the economic scale will stop consuming oil first. Reduced consumption then will climb right on up through the several billion of us who are at least moderate oil consumers until we get to those who are so rich there is almost no price that would force them to lower their consumption.

Where do we find lots of people who are not particularly well off, are likely to be hit hard by the coming economic problems and who use lots of oil? The answer, of course, is in North America where we consume on the order of 1,000 gallons per capita per year largely because most of the transportation is by automobile. While the rest of the world drives private cars too, they are more likely to be in economically stronger hands, get much better mileage, and are not driven very far. Thus it is not surprising that in the last 12 months of increasing economic difficulties and much higher gasoline prices, consumption of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel fell by nearly nine percent in the U.S. while consumption in the rest of the OECD countries where they consume about half the oil per capita as in the U.S., consumption was basically flat.

Another place where oil products, especially kerosene and propane, are consumed by relatively poor people is for daily cooking fuel across the underdeveloped world. While this fuel is nearly essential to sustaining life once one is trapped inside a city, in most cases, it is subsidized by the national government and is not consumed in particularly large quantities per capita. There are, of course, millions of small gasoline-powered bicycles and scooters across the world, but most are using small amounts of subsidized fuel.

The message here is that as oil prices drop, it is not at all clear that there will be large reductions in the demand for oil products - at least until the economic situation becomes far more precarious. Discretionary driving such as lengthy motorized vacations and aimless driving by teenagers seems to have declined in the U.S. in recent months. There has been some reduction in the transport of goods due to the weakening economy. We may however be deceiving ourselves that oil consumption is going to drop precipitously in the near future. Oil has become so ingrained in our lifestyles and economies that it may take months or even years of harsh economic conditions before we see significant drops in worldwide demand.

The other side of the coin is oil production. Hardly a day goes by now without a report of some major oil development project being cancelled or placed on hold due to high costs and the unavailability of capital. While these delays may have little immediate impact, a few years down the line the results will be disastrous as world oil production will be declining very rapidly.

Always keep in mind the basic proposition of peak oil that the world is still burning oil at the rate of 31 billion barrels a year. Seventy five million barrels a day are coming from currently producing fields that with each passing year will produce anywhere from 4 to 8 percent less oil. It is simple arithmetic to show that with current production declining, fewer new oil producing projects under construction, and major declines in demand a dubious proposition, shortages are in the offing. Thanks to the worsening economic situation the effects of declining oil production - much higher prices and shortages - look to be even closer and more severe than before the financial crisis emerged. Falling prices at the gas pumps are only a temporary distraction: the real troubles are getting closer all the time.

[papabear]

http://www.counterpunch.org/rhames10312008.html
The Doomed Rustic's Lament
Nothing for Something

By RICHARD RHAMES

“The (economy’s) primary functions are agriculture, manufacture, and transportation. Community life is impossible without them. They hold the world together...The great delusion is that one may change the foundation. The foundations of society are the men (sic) and the means to grow things, to make things, and to carry things.”

Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 1922

There’s some limited talk lately about the roots of the current, and unfinished economic unwinding. In official circles, there’s a broad bipartisan agreement that billions and then trillions of dollars must be sluiced to Our Bettors who gambled aggressively with other people’s money. Their wagers ill-placed, those gamers are now trying to squeeze through the casino’s exits, their pockets bulging with money from the paychecks of teachers, letter carriers, health care workers, and the rest of the gamed.

Some have suggested that the present and apparently intractable tanking should offer an opportunity to gaze with fresh eyes on some of the establishment’s most cherished economic/political assumptions. You know them well: 1)Business people are society’s natural leaders. They must be secure in their mansions if the pop-top people are to sleep in mortgaged double-wides. 2) Any government “intervention” on behalf of ordinary people is fiscally ruinous and morally corrosive ---- their only responsible “entitlement” should be a ceaseless quest for employment by capital for whatever wage the boss class deems appropriately profit enhancing. 3) Money loaned at interest to people who will use it to consume things they can no longer afford is the primary engine of US economic growth.

I know. When one puts it like that, the conventional wisdom doesn’t sound very appealing or even particularly wise, but the above, is ---stripped of artifice --- THE official outlook of politicians, media, and institutions that matter.

Of course, there was a time when other economic views were at least tolerated --- even giving rise to policy. There was a time when farmers and industrial workers understood their common interests and pursued them. They used terms like The Money Power, and “economic royalists” to describe those who waged continuos class warfare against them. They understood that the people who actually did the real work of civilization deserved to live in dignity. But more importantly, they also knew that this sharing of societal wealth by its producers was vital to the nation’s survival.

Such historical notions are effectively banished from officially sanctioned thought today. You won’t find labor organizers or Farmers’ Union types talking to public school students, though the doors are always open to car salesmen, investment shysters, or smooth-talking military meat merchants. Nor will you discover husbandmen, hod carriers, or upstart hicks on the evening news except when their views support ruling class interests or perhaps when their colorful manner of speaking is found amusing.

When I was very young, the book was already being closed on the so-called “golden age” of American agriculture. After many decades of struggle, and with the weakening of the Bossocracy during the Great Depression, domestic farmers finally gained a fair return for their harvests. New Dealers called it “parity pricing.” Through democratic management of production, and instruments like the farmer/eater-friendly strategic grain reserve (sometimes called the Ever Normal Granary), many millions of farm families had the money to pay for new tractors and equipment forged and assembled by union labor in America’s great industrial centers.

Farmers got their cost-of-production plus a reasonable profit out of a “market” in which they (for once) had collective power. They could afford to not push their land too hard; to maintain their top soil through long rotations, to manage complex diversified operations involving animals and their fertility- building manures, and develop knowledge of what might safely be done on their places over generations of careful stewardship.

As Michael Pollan recently noted in the New York Times Magazine, (“An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief”), the 1940 American farmer’s food system “produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used...” Today, when agribiz rules both landscape and the dinner table, and petroleum power has replaced bankrupted farmers in rural America, “it now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.”

But as fossil-fuels become less abundant and much more expensive we may discover that in our mad rush to suburbanize America and beggar its farmers, we’ve made a fatal mistake. Pollan notes that currently, “we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million.” On many of these huge remaining industrial “farms” the operators have been de-skilled and turned into “drivers and sprayers,” rolling over thousands of acres of monocultured corn or soybeans each year applying petroleum-based fertilizer and poisons to crops anchored in increasingly lifeless and eroding soil.

“Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production,” Pollan argues. But that diversified rotation and sun-based “golden age” farmer-centric system of 1940 (which produced more calories than it consumed) will require not just neo-peasants but land. And Pollan notes that currently “farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day.”

One might imagine that people who like to eat several times a day might be interested in issues like this looming structural problem. Mostly, one would be wrong. The political class mumbles about “economic opportunity” for farmers, which comes down to continued flat-out petro-based production, sold at below cost, and “safety net” subsidy checks. Entrepreneurial rustics are encouraged to turn their places into agri-theme parks, complete with petting zoos and hay rides to hang on a while longer.

It’s bizarre. But in a society which denigrates physical work, worships consumption and waste, and suffers from chronic attention deficit disorder, it’s not surprising.

We’ve made another huge gamble here. Again, we’re likely to lose.

[papabear]

Green prisons farm, recycle to save energy, money

By PHUONG LE, Associated Press Writer Phuong Le, Associated Press Writer – Sat Nov 1, 11:26 pm ET


LITTLEROCK, Wash. – Of all the things convicted murderer Robert Knowles has been called during his 13 years behind bars, recycler hasn't been one of them.

But there he was one morning, pitchfork in hand, composting food scraps from the main chow line and coffee grounds from prison headquarters — doing his part to "green" the prison.

"It's nice to be out in the elements," said Knowles, 42, stirring dark, rich compost that will amend the soil at the small farm where he and fellow inmates of the Cedar Creek Corrections Center grew 8,000 pounds of organic vegetables this year.

Inmates of the minimum-security facility, 25 miles from Olympia, the state capital, raise bees, grow organic tomatoes and lettuce, compost 100 percent of food waste and even recycle shoe scraps that are made into playground turf.

"It reduces cost, reduces our damaging impact on the environment, engages inmates as students," said Eldon Vail, secretary of the Washington Department of Corrections, which oversees 15 prisons and 18,000 offenders. "It's good security."

As around-the-clock operations, prisons are voracious resource hogs, and administrators are under increasing pressure to reduce waste and conserve energy and water.

In 2007, states spent more than $49 billion to feed, house, clothe, treat and supervise 2.3 million offenders, the Pew Center on the States reported this year.

As the prison population has grown this decade, up 76 percent from 1.3 million in 2000, the number of prisons and jails has risen with it. The latest U.S. Bureau of Justice data show 1,821 facilities in 2005, up from 1,668 in 2000.

To keep costs down, the Indiana Department of Corrections installed water boilers that run on waste wood chips, and built a wind turbine at one prison that generates about 10 kilowatts an hour and saves $2,280 a year.

At Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, Calif., 6,200 solar panels send energy back to the grid, enough to power 4,100 homes a year. The prison was trying to meet an executive order requiring state agencies to reduce energy use by 20 percent by 2015, said a spokeswoman, Lt. Sue Smith.

North Carolina's Department of Corrections switched to chemical-free cleaners and vegetable-based inks. This summer, because of a water shortage, inmates converted 50-gallon pickle barrels into small cisterns that capture rainwater.

Under a state mandate to reduce energy use, the Oregon Department of Corrections replaced old appliances with energy-efficient ones, installed solar water heaters and used a geothermal well to heat water. It also modified washing machines so they could reuse rinse-water to wash about a million pounds of clothes a month.

At Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, Ore., inmates recycle scraps from old prison blues to make diaper bags for women's shelters and dog beds for animal shelters.

"We try to model prosocial behavior," said Vern Rowan, business manager for the Oregon Department of Corrections. Being sustainable "is something that everybody should be doing, regardless of where they're at."

Cedar Creek, in the heart of a forest, feels more like an outdoor retreat than institutional lockup.

Most of the 400 inmates are in a work program, and put in between six and eight hours a day.

The responsibility of caring for the prison's three hives of Italian honey bees falls mostly to Daniel Travatte, 36, a soft-spoken former drug addict who is serving 10 years for attempted armed robbery.

Under the supervision of prison counselor Vicki Briggs, Travatte has learned to harvest honey — which inmates occasionally eat with breakfast biscuits — and use beeswax to make lotions. He's become an expert on their habits.

"I'm trying to change myself," said Travatte. "A lot of people go through prison with no intention of changing. I love working with the bees. It keeps me busy. I have a lot of responsibility to take care of."

While there isn't scientific evidence that such activities are helping inmates, Nalini Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., notes anecdotal evidence that it's working.

"They were stimulating their minds and having conversations that were different than 'How much more time we have left'?" said Nadkarni.

One inmate went beyond conversations, enrolling in a doctoral program when he got out and co-authoring a research paper with Nadkarni on a moss-growing project she started to help reduce the impact of wild moss harvesting on forests.

While Cedar Creek went green out of economic necessity — it had to conserve because it didn't have the wastewater capacity to expand four years ago — it is now embracing other benefits, said Dan Pacholke, a state prison administrator who helped implement many of the practices.

Cedar Creek uses 250,000 fewer gallons of water a year, saves $6,000 to $8,400 annually on garbage bills and avoided a $1.4 million sewage treatment plant upgrade.

A large "Con-Post" marks the prison's composting station, made of recycled concrete blocks and reclaimed wood, where Knowles spends about six hours a day, making sure the compost gets enough heat, moisture and air to break down food scraps.

"They trust me to do all this with no supervision," said Knowles, who is serving time for the hit-and-run death of an off-duty police officer.

"I like growing the vegetables," Knowles said. "My mom had a garden. I can see having my own garden."