It’s not down on the farm these days, alas. The healthy, natural beef of years gone by is almost extinct. It has been driven out by cheap beef, raised on gigantic feedlots, fattened on corn. The problem is: corn isn’t healthy for cows, and raising beef this way ultimately isn’t healthy for us either. Here are some things to watch out for and ways to be more healthy when it comes to your beef-related choices.
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We’ve all heard by now that corn-based ethanol has turned out to be a bad idea.

• Corn is energy intensive to grow, gobbling up fossil-fuels at every stage of production, from transporting seeds to fertilizing the fields (with petrochemical fertilizers) to final harvest.
• Corn is also a spectacularly water-intensive crop.
• The ethanol production stage consumes more fossil fuels and water.
• Once it finally reaches your gas tank, ethanol burns around 30% less efficiently than gasoline (meaning your per-mile cost is actually 30% more than you think it is).
• Estimates of how much actual energy we get out of the process range from barely breaking even to around 20 percent more than the input energy.
• And of course, every step of the process spews CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s been almost a year since The New York Times editorialized on the subject:

The economics of corn ethanol have never made much sense. Rather than importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, the United States slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. Then the government provides a tax break of 51 cents a gallon to American ethanol producers — on top of the generous subsidies that corn growers already receive under the farm program.

And unlike our inefficient corn-based ethanol, that Brazilian product actually yields 370% of the energy put into it.

So, why are we doing this? What possible calculus could convince us to even consider corn ethanol?

Corn is big business - and big agribusiness hires the best lobbyists.

Here, the return on investment is spectacular: plant a few tens of millions of dollars in seed money in the form of campaign contributions to senators and members of Congress, and reap billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies.

And for agribusiness, corn is king. (more…)

I want to change the environment, I really do. I want to have a green house, buy locally, and one day own a beautiful hybrid car that I’ll name Daisy, or Sunshine. I own a ton of reusable bags, but I forget them 90% of the time, so I’m stuck using plastic…and I’m stuck getting dirty looks. When did giving a shit about our environment, and being “green” become such a class issue? People that would normally throw a cigarette butt out of their SUV now shoot me dirty looks when I complain about the price of organic milk.

Down the road from my house, there is a shack [quite literally]  and in that shack there is a family of five that burn their own wood, grow their own food, shoot their own deer for meat, and live off the land as best they can.  Five years ago the SUV driving, designer bag toting, wasteful upper class would have scoffed and called them “white trash..” but now they are simply green. These people don’t live off the land because they want to save the planet, and look good doing it, they are just trying to survive on very little.

If you buy your flour in bulk, good for you. If you remember your reusable bag every single time you go to Whole Foods and blow half your paycheck? Excellent! If you can afford a hybrid car, I’m happy. If you buy all your products locally, high five. Do it for the environment, not because you think it makes you better then anyone else. Don’t look down on the person that DOES buy 140 candy bars from Costco because they don’t know better - instead, suggest to  them a better solution.  Don’t get all high and mighty because you ride your bike to work, and stop at the farm stand for lunch on the way. No one gives a shit.

After all, you’re not doing US a favor by being as crunchy as possible, you’re doing the earth one. And I mean, that’s why you’re going “green” after all? Isn’t it?

You may well be wondering - why the heck is Nancy Pelosi pushing through a bill that allows for offshore drilling? Isn’t that against everything we’re supposed to stand for? Is this another example of business-as-usual betraying core Democratic principles?

Alas, sometimes green areas fall in grey areas. Here’s the scoop:

Where’s the fire? Why rush it through now?

The offshore drilling ban, in place now for decades, has a “sunset provision”. It has to be renewed every few years.

Unless a bill is passed, the ban expires on September 30. At which point… Bush could immediately hand out leases anywhere he wants to.

So, we need a bill, and a bill that can pass, by September 30.

What’s in the bill?

As it now stands, the bill (technically, it’s House Resolution 1433,Louise Slaughter’s Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act), keeps some limits: no drilling within 100 miles of shore (50 miles in some areas). And it works in a bunch of good things:

• Restores tax credits for renewable energy, which had expired (and Republicans were blocking).
• Closes tax loopholes for the oil companies (when you hear Republicans talking about “Tax Increases” tonight on the TV, that’s what they’re talking about - the bill closes loopholes, but doesn’t impose any new taxes)
• Curbs to energy speculation (we still don’t know how much of this summers sky-high prices were the result of speculators)
• Release 10 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (which should also help to drive prices back down ahead of the election…)
• Includes a “Use It or Lose It” provision that says oil companies can’t just sit on leases, but have to actually drill for oil (companies currently have millions of acres of leases that they’re not doing anything with… leading some to wonder why we have to open up new areas for drilling if there are plenty of virgin fields just sitting there, undrilled…)
• Includes incentives for public transit, clean coal, and other good green goals.

Is this a good compromise?

Maybe. It might get a few things done that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And we have to get something passed, or we’re stuck with drilling, regardless.

Will it work?

Good question.

The Senate has a completely different bill under consideration, a bi-partisan compromise measure proposed by a “Gang of 20″ which just happens to include the Republicans up for re-election this year who are considered most endangered - New Hampshire’s John Sunnunu, North Carolina’s Elizabeth Dole, Maine’s Susan Collins, Minnesota’s Norm Coleman and Oregon’s Gord Smith.

The two houses will have to hash our their differences, bring together a compromise bill, and then… Bush has threatened to veto it.

So wait - this isn’t actually going to become law?

Not likely. Again, the drilling ban expires in two weeks… which is what the Republicans want.

So what’s actually going on here?

Cover.

The Repubs can go back to their moderate-to-liberal constitutents in Oregon, Maine and New Hampshire and say, “Look, I care about the environment!”

Pelosi and Reid can say “Look, we tried the bipartisan compromise that everyone in the damn media has been claiming we should be doing - and Bush vetoed it. So much for bipartisanship!”

And drilling?

Hopefully President Obama can do damage control after he takes office in January. Along with damage control on Iraq, Wall Street, infrastructure, health care, employment… well, you get the picture.

(Photo: “Offshore Oil Platform Under Construction” — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis)

The 100 month countdown

Without positive, permanent action taken RIGHT NOW, the latest estimates say we have 8 years and 4 months before climate change has reached an unstoppable point of build-up. And while the first thought of many is undoubtedly that the naysayers are on their soapboxes again, let’s point out that the report released today in The Guardian, a UK newspaper, says these numbers are based on the conservative outlook.

You see, the problem is that what we do today doesn’t have an affect for many years. Exactly how many years it takes for today’s carbon emissions to reach their full impact is under question, but the optimistic voices say 5 years, while the pessimistic ones say it could be as much as 20. The reason 5 years is the positive outlook is that until the emissions that are being released as I type have had their full impact, any reductions that are made tomorrow won’t begin to make a difference. If it requires two decades for today’s emissions to reach their full impact, then there is absolutely nothing that can be done to stop the buildup from 1988 through 2008, and we are, quite literally, in a world of hurt. On the other hand, if the maximum is only a 5 year waiting period, then by 2013 the efforts that are now underway may begin to reduce the catastrophic effects of buildup.

Aside from the United States’ Bush administration, there is no longer any doubt that climate change is happening, and that it is being sped along by the human population. The polar ice caps are definitely melting, the coasts of countries all over the world are certainly being eroded at geologically breakneck speeds, and water shortages are without question affecting regions which have never in recorded history felt such shortages. These are not opinions, they are well documented facts that can be seen in great detail by following the links included in this article.

Oddly, the 100 months countdown isn’t even a new number. In the early 1990’s U.S. Newspapers ran a series of syndicated articles on climate change, and estimated that irreparable damage would be attained in no more than 20 years. Those estimates were based on the best climate research available at the time, and here it is backed up, just over 10 years later, by climate research that has made tremendous amounts of progress in recent years. The only thing that has changed, it seems, is that humanity has allowed half the time they had to fix the problem slip away without any sort of positive action. It seems that the general public just doesn’t care about what will happen in the future.

As an example, take my roommate. He has 3 computers, all of which run most of every day, and only one is actually used for any real computing. Another one is used exclusively to monitor incoming telephone calls with a program that could run in the background on even an old 386 machine. He is infuriated that I explain it’s important to use water efficiently. “This is Florida,” he says, “there’s water everywhere.” That he can say this while ignoring his three computers and sitting in front of a television news program discussing the prolonged drought in south Florida is nothing short of amazing, but he is the rule, not the exception.

The question is, what will you do with the 8 years that are left for your way of life? Will you bother to fix the leaky faucets, or reduce your power consumption? Or will you decide that someone else will solve the problem, and that anything you can do as an individual makes no difference? Every single one of us has just been informed that we have 8 years to make drastic changes in our way of life, or climate change will take that way of life from us. What we do with that time will be the definition of our species. As I complete this article, the countdown clock says 70,481 hours remain.