Ag subsidies are contributing to global warming

It's been nearly two months since I wrote an addition to this blog. Since that time I suffered a terrible loss; my beloved wife Audrey developed a sudden illness and died on January 10th, 2020.  We had a joyous 69 years and 5 days as a married couple. At a time when consolation is hard to come by, I am cheered by the outpourings of others’ shared sorrow and the love and affection expressed for Audrey.  Now it’s time for me to find my way back to some of the things we shared and others that she left me to pursue on my own. That brings me to my abiding concern over global warming.

For me personally, this may be a time to reassess what I’m about. I want to start with a question, “Where the heck are we with respect to slowing or even reversing the levels of greenhouse gases?”  If I look at any of the many graphs published online, I see that things are not looking good. For example, here’s a graph of global carbon emissions up to 2014:

To appreciate the significance of this graph, you’ve got to realize that it is showing us how much new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere.  Every year we add more, and the planet becomes still warmer.  We’re told that that the advanced economies are polluting less,  slowing down just a bit, as the graph below shows, but still at suicidal rates:

The advanced economies (black) are showing a slower rate of emissions; still pumping out lots of carbon emissions, but not so rapidly.  At the same time, the rest of the world (green) is adding carbon dioxide at a higher rate than ever.  As to where we are on slowing greenhouse gas emissions--we’re in a bad place. If we don’t improve  substantially from the status quo over the next couple of decades, harmful changes in the global climate will occur at an accelerating pace.

Awareness of climate change has grown in the general population, but we are nowhere near a level of concern that would provide the impetus for major economic and social moves starting right now.  Simply put, we humans have got to up our game. In the U.S.,It’s time to shift the conversation from talking about lifestyle changes that smack of “green”: veggie burgers, fewer airline trips, electric cars, conferences that don’t seem to progress beyond channeling the mantras of ecological good works and the like. Lifestyle changes are good, we’ll be better off and healthier for adopting them, but as Michael Mann, a prominent climatologist recently wrote in Time Magazine:

 “[F]ocusing on individual choices around air travel and beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. We need systemic changes that will reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, whether or not they care. The good news is we have tactics to bring environmentally friendly (and non-lifestyle-disrupting) options to fruition­: pricing carbon emissions and creating incentives for renewable energy and reduced consumption.”

Mann identifies two major initiatives that could lead to significant reductions in the emissions we see graphed above, but they’re not the only ones.  I keep fairly close track of the literature on climate change; everything from the science involved to the politics and economics.  It’s a veritable blizzard of stuff!  I have good friends working on initiatives different from those that preoccupy me, and I feel guilty that I don’t know more about those areas, or that I’m not  making contributions there. I’ve come to realize, though, that if I’m going to be effective I must look for just one or two areas in which to concentrate my attention and advocacy. That won’t mean ignoring all the others; I do  need to stay in community with many others whose goals with respect to combating climate change I share. 

So I’m going to try to focus in the near term on land conservation, agriculture, and food.  I acknowledge that isn’t really a sharp focus. Whole areas within those topics could call for intense inquiry, but anything I look at will be of sufficient breadth and depth to bear significantly on greenhouse gas emissions; for me that’s the coin of the realm.

So let’s dive into this complex, hugely important subject with a report published in December, 2019, by Politico, of a closed-door, highly selective meeting of the big wheels of American agriculture.  Hosted by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, about 100 attendees, including the current and past Secretaries of Agriculture, the American Farm Bureau Federation, CEOs of major food companies, representatives of green groups and anti-hunger advocates--a truly broad array of interests. The Politico article reported that the topics covered included many that would not have been on the table a couple of years ago.  Climate change has been a politically fraught topic in farm country, which tends to be strongly Republican. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reported in a survey conducted in November 2019 that although 73% of registered voters think that global warming is happening, only 41% of conservative Republicans agree. But for the Politico meeting, though heavily Republican and rural, climate change was in the room.

I’ve not been able to locate recent survey data on how farmers today view climate change.  A 2013 survey showed that at that time, farmers were strongly inclined to think of dramatic changes they’d recently experienced in the fields as a manifestation of just variable weather. It’s a safe bet that fewer farmers today accept that view. Though they don’t seem all that ready to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, they’re reluctantly coming to  recognize that large and persistent change is in progress. Recent insights into the views of rural America on the environment and conservation come from the Nicholas Institute of Duke University: “Broadly, our study suggests that the urban/rural divide on the environment is not a function of how much rural voters care about the environment. Nor is it a function of how knowledgeable they are—rural voters appear relatively sophisticated about environmental issues.”  

Then what are the important factors at work?  Interviews and surveys reveal that a key factor for those living in rural settings is their strong feeling of place. Where they live is an important part of how they define themselves, which in turn shapes their views. They’re rural, country--definitely not into an urban perspective. They don’t trust the federal government, even though it currently spends more than $20 billion a year on agricultural subsidies. At first this seems surprising, but consider this: about 39 percent of the nation's 2.1 million farms receive subsidies, with the lion's share going to the largest producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. Estimates vary, but it appears that more than 60 percent of farmers are not directly benefiting from subsidies. 

The story of how subsidies originated, and the rationales for them can be traced to the historical fact that as the nation expanded westward in the 19th century, agriculture was the major driver.  Through the Morrill Act of 1869, the Federal government took an active role. Agriculture was the dominant industry in  the expanding nation, but people needed help in learning how to farm and build farm-based communities.  Decades later, during the years of the Great Depression, the government enacted many programs that would sustain farm owners through complex, far-reaching legislation covering commodity price supports, supply regulations, import barriers, and crop insurance. Those programs have been expanded, modified, and expanded over the decades, even as agriculture has metamorphosed from small farm operations into ever-larger businesses and corporate operations. The result is that the huge amounts currently spent on agricultural subsidies have had distorting effects, and are a poor use of public funds.  But proposals to shift from practices supported by subsidies to more environmentally friendly, less polluting, alternatives are seen by powerful interests as an assault on a time-honored way of life, an economic threat. 

So what is the justification for farm subsidies as they are today?   I’ve drawn some figures from the Cato Institute blog, Downsizing the Federal Government. We’re going to get into a lot of numbers here, but bear with me. Subsidies go mainly to high-earning households. The average income of all farm households was about $118,000 in 2016, 42 percent higher than the $83,000 average of all U.S. households. In that same year, the median income of farm households was around $76,000, 29 percent higher than the U.S. median of about $59,000. It is sometimes claimed that farm subsidies help to alleviate rural poverty, but that’s obviously not the target of most of the  billions expended annually.  Just 2 percent of farm households fall below the poverty line, compared to 14 percent of all U.S. households.  USDA data show that while less than one-third of farms with revenues of less than $100,000 received federal subsidies, three-quarters of farms above that threshold did. I’m not a fan of the philosophy that informs the libertarian Cato Institute, but Chris Edwards’s blog seems to be well researched, with solid referencing. It has me convinced that the Federal Government’s agricultural policies as they apply to subsidies are misguided. The 2018 article in Forbes on agricultural millionaires, courtesy of the federal government, makes me grind my teeth. 

Most farm subsidies are wasteful of money and they’re largely bad for the environment. Climate change is producing ever more unpredictable weather phenomena, from flooding to drought. We’ve got to move away from past practices toward conservation, regeneration  of the soil, massive reductions in use of nitrogen fertilizer, and much more. The needed changes are slow in coming, in part because farmers can’t accept that widely accepted growing practices could be producing all the alleged environmental destruction, and in part out of a sense of being blamed unfairly. But the average farmer could, I believe, come to understand that federal programs designed to promote regenerative agricultural practices and the like would be to their advantage.  Our problem is to somehow force the millionaire beneficiaries to let go of  cushy subsidies designed to make wealthy interests even richer.

 Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is reported by the Des Moines Register as having received more than $367,000 in disaster, corn, oat and soybean commodity subsidies over a recent 21 year period. Grassley is one of six House and Senate leaders that sit on committees that draft the farm bill that renews every five years. Grassley’s take is not a lot in comparison with the $5.3 million haul taken in by California Representative Doug LaMalfa and his family.  I do wonder just what public good is served by paying subsidies to public servants who are already well paid, comparatively wealthy, and stand to eventually collect nice pensions from the federal government.   Grassley and LaMalfa, who have been farming (though not active farmers, obviously) most of their work lives, did nothing illegal; they just followed the rules.  And who made the rules?  There is a moral conflict of interest here that cannot be papered over by saying only that the laws are being strictly obeyed.  To Grassley’s credit,  he’s been espousing farm subsidy reforms that would cut into the profiteering of large corporations and wealthy absentee landlords who take in billions in federal money.  The fact remains that substantial reductions in farm subsidies will be an important step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

One final point:  That green area in the figure above, the emissions from developing and underdeveloped nations, is growing in part because of misdirected subsidies paid out to underdeveloped nations by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as I discussed in my previous blog of December 25.  Please read it if you haven’t done so. We have work to do on both the domestic and global fronts. 

Money, Power and Rebellion

On a recent December morning in Washington DC a large number of climate change activists blocked traffic in Washington DC. They were protesting in front of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquarters. Most of the protesters, largely young people but with a generous sprinkling of elders, were associated with a group called Extinction Rebellion. Many DC commuters were late for work, and let their ire show, but perhaps they were moved to wonder about what was being protested. 

At its heart, the protests were driven by a concern that the continued use of fossil fuels is leading to disastrous changes in Earth’s climate. Whereas we should be working to eliminate fossil fuels as an energy source, global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb. All the global climate models point to climate changes that will threaten the lives of billions and threaten the social order.  We’ve got to wake people up!  But why demonstrate in front of these world banks? Why not protest at the front gates of a large fossil fuel power plant instead? The answer lies in the response by the famous Willie Sutton to the question, “Why do you rob banks? He replied, “That's where the money is”. 

These protesters were aware of something that many people don't know about global economics: The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank subsidize fossil fuels in one way or another to the tune of about $1.9 trillion per year. That's a massive amount of money, equal to about four times the total annual budget of the United States of America. These protesters know that replacing those subsidies with carbon taxes or other means of reducing fossil fuel use would result in a very substantial decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

In an economic policy article written for the Washington Post a few years ago, Brad Plumer dissected the main strands of these fossil fuel subsidies. About $480 billion dollars are direct subsidies to developing nations, mostly in the Middle East and Africa. They are a form of assistance, by helping these nations lower the cost of petroleum, natural gas, coal and electricity for their citizens. The trouble is, the banks are paying the nations to pollute the planet with greenhouse gases!  The subsidies crowd out other expenditures in developing nations and depress private investment in renewable energies. Energy subsidies are often a huge portion of the budget. For example, Egypt, the most populous nation in the Mideast, spends up to 8% of its GDP in subsidizing fossil fuels--more than it spends on education and public health combined. Egypt runs budget deficits of about 8% of GDP.

So why not just stop with the direct subsidies? It's not easy in countries where the standard of living is pretty low and the subsidies impact strongly on people’s survival. When they are removed or lessened, considerable social unrest generally follows. The government of Iran recently raised the price of gasoline from about $0.15 per gallon to $0.50 per gallon, a price very low in comparison with most nations.  The move was met with rioting in the major cities. Over time, subsidies take on a legacy status; people believe they’re entitled to them.

Then there are the even larger indirect subsidies that run to about $1.4 trillion annually. These are found mainly in industrial nations.  They've existed in the United States for a long time. They typically come into place when new industries are being developed and the government wants to stimulate their growth. Subsidies to oil and gas producing corporations have been in place for many years, the products of lobbying and influence peddling.  They're tucked away in all sorts of places in the tax code. The rationales for many of them no longer exist, yet they continue to live on. Corporate influence is such that many new subsidies are created where there is no need for them. The federal government leases land at very low rates to corporations for the development of or extraction of fossil fuels. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute estimates that conservatively  U.S. subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are about $20 billion per year; 80 percent to natural gas and crude oil enterprises that are currently generating massive surplus supplies. Similarly, European Union subsidies are estimated to total 55 billion euros annually.

Aside from these subsidies, fossil fuel industries produce many external costs arising from their production and uses. Think of the high price paid in terms of human health and welfare involved in the mining of coal and of the environmental destruction that accompanies the mining process itself. Add to that the environmental damages and adverse human health effects accompanying the use of fossil fuels: air pollution, contamination of rivers, streams and water sources drawn upon for human consumption. Society pays a high price to address these problems. If the costs of remediating those external effects were charged to coal producers, coal would be much more expensive. Coal is obviously a bad choice of fuel, and it’s uses are declining rapidly, but Robert Murray, former CEO of the bankrupt Murray Coal Company, continues to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread misinformation about climate change and to influence legislation in critical states such as Ohio.  Oil, and especially natural gas, have their own sets of subsidies. No one is charging those industries for the special brands of environmental disasters they are producing: contaminated water systems, unstable geological structures leading to earthquakes, massive flaring of excess natural gas that adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and thousands of depleted wells, unplugged, still seeping, abandoned across the Permian basin. 

Inefficiencies in the markets magnify the environmental damages accompanying the development and production of fossil fuels.  Only a decade ago natural gas was being heralded as the fuel of the future and the making of US bragging rights to being the world’s leading producer of fossil fuels.  Now the industry is in decline, forcing refinancing of earlier operations as the current ones lose profitability.  Smaller companies are going out of business or seeking bankruptcy.  One might suppose that’s good riddance, but the surplus of natural gas is actually impeding the work of clamping down on the losses of methane, the principal component of natural gas. A New York Times report tells a tale of horrific levels of methane emissions from production at all levels, from storage, pipelines and especially venting. The Trump administration took the lid off all caps on the ability of fossil fuel producers to vent methane into the atmosphere. The replacement of coal by natural gas as the major fuel for electricity generation was acclaimed as a means of lowering the amounts of greenhouse gas for a given amount of power produced, but the wastage of methane from wellheads and in stages of production may completely erase the purported advantage of natural gas. We can’t be sure, though, because the Trump administration wants to eliminate the requirement that companies even estimate methane loss. This is a modern version of the creation of chemical dump sites in the era when chemical companies weren’t regulated.  The dump in this case consists of odorless, invisible molecules that just happen to be heating earth’s atmosphere and will be at their work for decades as the planet heats up.

The natural gas example I’ve just described is an example of an indirect subsidy to the producers in the sense that they are not being charged for the inevitable future costs to society of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It might be argued that we don’t know just what those costs are likely to be, so we can’t charge the producer for them. But there are many smart economists and scientists in this world who know how to create models, draw up scenarios and look a bit into the future to come up with estimates of the costs of remediating the damage that will be done.  That damage is likely to be so overwhelming that a proper tax on it would be so large as to put the producers out of business.  What we might hope for, though, are taxes on enterprises contributing to global warming and the destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems that are sufficiently large to serve as powerful disincentives.

There is a lot of talk about carbon taxes, but they may be a nightmare to establish, and people are not likely to see their value.   Something about taxation doesn’t sit right with many people, even when they’re not directly in the line of fire, which in fact they generally are. You really have to look closely when the plan is fostered by corporations. A business-driven organization, the Climate Leadership Council has an advocacy arm called Americans for Carbon Dividends that supports an economy-wide carbon fee, with a provision that the proceeds would be returned to the citizens in the form of a check. As Ellen Wald wrote in Forbes magazine when this plan was first announced, it looks like a sleight of hand to make to make the average American think he’s getting something for free.

About a decade ago my beloved son, Ian Ayres, Professor of Law at Yale University, wrote a book entitled Carrots and Sticks: unlock the power of incentives to get things done., in which he touches on the subject of conservation commitments.  Applied to the current topic, the general idea is that rather than punish the bad behavior of those emitting greenhouse gases with a tax, we should incentivize them to stop emitting, with funding that would be paid in proportion to their success in doing better. Governments do that now by providing subsidies for renewable energy development and deployment. We want money spent now to obviate in some measure future costs of coping with the adverse consequences of planetary heating. 

This is a big, difficult subject.  For now, I would be happy just to see reforms in the rule-making philosophies embraced by the Trump administration’s executive agencies, which so shamelessly encourage profligate waste of energy, and careless despoiling of the environment.   As I post this, we're coming up on a new year. If we can't begin to stop this in 2020, maybe beginning in 2021? 

Making change is the work of many hands

The large figure below is a product of the Prairie Rivers Network,  an organization of Illinois citizens founded in 1967 to block the plans of the Army Corp of Engineers to build an ill-advised reservoir near Decatur, Illinois. Over years of advocating for environmental causes the organization grew and became part of the Coalition of American Rivers, dedicated to resisting other Corps of Engineers projects throughout the Midwest. Under the leadership of John Marlin, the first paid Executive Director (1973-1983), the Coalition drew people from varied political and social backgrounds to protect rivers from federal water projects that threatened most of the nation’s rivers in the 1960s and ’70s.

Their figure is loaded with information that calls us to pay attention. Let’s start with the statement about nutrient pollution.  Illinois, like all the other midwest prairie states, is heavily into industrial agriculture. Corn and soybean crops dominate the landscape. Which of the crops dominates in a given year is determined by many factors; predominantly weather, market forces, the trade wars, government subsidies, crop insurance.  In any given year, most of the available land is planted in one of the two crops. The processes of plowing, planting, irrigating, fertilizing and keeping the bugs and weeds under control result in enormous runoffs, that flow into small streams, then flow into larger ones, eventually empty into the big rivers and thence into the Gulf of Mexico. That water, further enriched with the runoffs from animal feedlots, is seriously polluted. All along its long journey It infiltrates local aquifers and surface sources for municipal water systems, kills wildlife and--year by year--depletes the originally rich, loamy soil of its organic matter. When it arrives in the Gulf, it creates a huge nutrient-rich dead zone.

Very little of the corn and soybean grown on those Illinois fields goes directly into the food chain. A lot of it goes to feed animals that are converting it into manure and methane gas,  and another large fraction is converted into bioethanol, a transportation fuel. The entire system could not be more cleverly designed to convert enormous quantities of fossil fuels into greenhouse gases, notably  carbon dioxide and methane.  If we were to set out to poison the planet, we’d build something like present-day industrial agriculture as a prime element. 

 Agriculture is estimated to produce somewhere around 14 to 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. That makes it the single largest contributor to global warming.  Even more concerning is the fact that nations around the world seem to be eagerly looking to emulate US agricultural practices. We have a  great challenge before us: to feed a growing global population. It's become evident, though, that we’re going about it in the wrong ways.  Fortunately, there are solutions to the problem.  One of them is indicated at the top right of the figure. Regenerative agriculture practices can reverse the path we’re on. The problem is, what society should do as a matter of great urgency  isn’t consistent with the business plans of corporate agriculture. It will take a lot of hard politicking and good government to make progress in shifting from the wasteful, poisonous farming methods of today to no-till farming, use of cover crops, and more thoughtful management of water systems. 

Cover crops are a big factor in making the system work.  As the large figure at the top shows, there is movement; in Illinois, more than 700,000 acres devoted to corn and soybeans are utilizing cover crops.  Ah, but it’s going too slowly!  We need to get to about 18 million acres. Data from an Illinois EPA analysis indicates that at the current rate of adoption, we’re 200 to 500 years away from where we need to be. Time is running out!  Similar states of affairs are found in the other midwestern states, even in the face of wonderful examples of what can be achieved using regenerative agriculture.  Gabe Brown’s Youtube video talk on his experiences in North Dakota provides an inspiring example of how effective regenerative agriculture can be.  

Five years ago, as part of the Paris Accords, a $100 billion multilateral Green Climate Fund was established within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The United States committed $3 billion to the initial creation but has to date paid in only $1 billion.  With the Trump administration moving to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, there is no prospect that the US will pay any of its shortfall, let alone contribute more funds to the cash-strapped fund. These monies are intended to assist with climate adaptation in poor countries.  The goal for the Green Climate Fund was $100 billion per year.  At this point, commitments are falling far short of what was promised. Still, nations are responding, and one can hope that over time the urgency of the situation will impress itself.  

It will take a great deal of hard work and determination to buck the established ways of doing things, and brilliant new science and engineering to create a way forward.  Here are two examples of promising new technologies that could play a role:

• The company Indigo Ag was founded to develop technologies around using microbes living within a plant to help plants protect themselves from insects, disease, and drought. That description does not do justice, however, to the range of the company's activities, which stretch across virtually all aspects of the agricultural enterprise. They are off to a fast start and have operations running in many parts of the globe.  The CNBC interview with CEO David Perry gives an idea of the breadth of their vision.  They are moving toward a radical disruption of modern agricultural practices for producing the major grains that feed the world.

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced additional support for a project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign entitled Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE). A key aim of the RIPE project is to provide farmers, particularly those in some of the world’s poorest countries, with seed that will yield substantially more without requiring more inputs. Scientists working in RIPE take advantage of a long history of scientific research, coupled with the latest discoveries in plant biology, to tweak photosynthesis to produce improvements. According to the project director, Professor Stephen Long, seen here with co-Director Donald Ort,
  

  

  “Our models predict that by combining several strategies we could achieve a 50 percent yield increase, which will go a long way to meeting the demands of this century.”  The RIPE project has a long way to go before it can be transferred to food crops, tested for safety and widely deployed on a global scale.  The scientists are all too well aware that they are racing against the increasing effects of climate change. Government needs to increase its support of this and other promising research efforts.  

It's inspiring to see that there's a kind of two-pronged system at work. The Prairie Rivers Network advocates at the local level for sustainable agricultural practices, lobbying legislators, educating in the school systems and in the public sphere generally about what is at stake, and what individuals can do to build support for effective legislation. Those folks are living in the same community as the researchers at the University of Illinois engaged in world-class research with the aim of finding technological solutions.  And the people at Indigo Ag are engaged in developing commercially successful answers that will be applicable globally.

So what can you and I do?  We can read and learn; use the Internet to ask questions and find answers; find the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of state and federal legislators and make calls; lobby regulatory agencies when we see examples of counter-productive cancellation or relaxation of effective rules ( In this regards, try following Huffpost Agriculture for a daily feed that can be interesting and surprising).  What we mustn't do is give up, or get too busy with other things.

Wake up time! Let's get contagious!

After a painfully long time during which shortsightedness with respect to global warming ruled the public domain, changes are afoot. This is a fun topic to write about. Start with two quotes from the November 5, 2019 issue of the Policy Alert of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

“State legislators in Florida are starting to evaluate the state’s exposure to climate risks for the first time since former Gov. Rick Scott ® reportedly forbade the use of the phrase “climate change” in state publications in 2011. In a recent hearing of the Florida Legislature’s Committee on Infrastructure and Security, State Sen. Tom Lee (R) acknowledged that lengthy delays in evaluating climate risks and exposures have amounted to a “lost decade” of time within which opportunities to craft solutions had been squandered.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) has issued an order requiring the state to begin evaluating climate risks and planning for resiliency measures. The order calls for a multi-agency effort, led by the Department of Environmental Protection, to evaluate and report on climate risks to the state. An initial report to address opportunities for New Jersey to avert the consequences of rising and warming seas, as well as more frequent and intense extreme weather, is due by September 1, 2020.

Many such announcements are to be found on the web these days, but should we be cheered by them? They don’t as yet amount to more than assessing and planning for a worrisome future. The bank of Norway, which is heavily invested in fossil fuel enterprises, is worried but doesn’t have any good ideas about how to cope with the coming demise of fossil fuel enterprises. To Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist all this awakening seems pitifully slow. The time for action is now!

Many writers have commented on our human propensity for shortsightedness. It’s wired into our brains! There’s a lot of gloomy stuff in this literature, but Bina Venkataraman, an experienced and highly respected former climate change advisor in the Obama White House and currently Director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has a more balanced view. As she writes in her new book, The Optimist’s Telescope, “The future is an idea we have to conjure in our minds, not something that we perceive with our senses. What we want today, by contrast, we can often feel in our guts as a craving."

She goes on to talk about behavioral contagion, a concept born at the turn of the 19th century to account for undesirable behaviors of people in crowds. Venkataraman argues that there is a positive side to this; cases in which individual courses of action have collectively brought about substantial changes. Small actions may in themselves seem insignificant, but through the influence of behavioral contagion, they can lead to sweeping changes: My neighbor installed solar panels, and hey, so did that guy down the block. I should check it out. My friend Alice sent me a link yesterday to a new website, Protecting Florida Together, put up by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, that looks good. It could be a place where I’m reminded of what’s going on, and maybe express my concerns. I should let my friends and neighbors know of this site.

Many public expressions and actions of individuals ripple out into a community. An apparently oddball idea becomes a meme; a municipal election turns out to be a harbinger of larger-scale shifts. The governor of Maine vows that her state will work to meet the Paris Accords in spite of the perverse actions of the Trump administration in pulling out. And the Democratic sweep in Virginia promises aggressive actions to address climate change.

I’ve often written in earlier blogs about how little time we humans have to take actions that could head off climate disasters in the decades ahead. When I reread some of those entries I see that shifts in public perceptions are underway, but progress is so damned slow! Now that there seems to be some movement, and global warming has risen to be a more visible topic in public discourse, how do we go from talking about it to acting? Remember Andrew Marvel, the English poet who pleaded with his coy mistress about the fleeting nature of time?

Here are a few ideas on what each of us can do, depending on our capacities for acting for those of us who can’t get out much, but probably have cell phones, tablets or laptop computers, all of which have a search engine of some sort. If you don’t have one, sign up with Google, and you’ll be all set. If you can’t manage that, ask one of your friends to lend you one of their grandkids when they’re visiting. You’d be surprised how eager your friends are to show off their grandkids’ amazing abilities. Ask your search engine, or Alexa or Siri, whatever you have: Who are my representatives in the state legislature? When I did that, my search led me to the names of my two representatives, one each in the Florida upper and lower house. When I click on Kathleen Passidomo I find her email address and the names of her committee assignments. I notice that she represents big chunks of Hendry, Collier, and part of Lee counties. That means that her constituents cover a lot of agricultural interests in all three counties here in southwest Florida. Collier county includes the city of Naples, which by some measures has the highest per capita income in the state. She’s the majority leader and has a very safe seat in the Florida Senate, after serving for several terms in the lower house.

I can check on how Passidomo voted in recent bills. She’s a Repubican, representing a wealthy district. I need to let her know of my opposition to the excessive development occurring in her district, of my support for legislation reforming Florida agriculture in areas she represents. And when opportunities arise, I should mention my actions to my friends. And for good measure, if I call her office or write her, I can tweet on my account that I did so, with a few words on what message I was delivering. And for good measure, on my Facebook page. These actions are pretty easy to do, and they don’t take a lot of time. They could count for something, especially if I let others know what I've done. My behavior could be contagious. Isn’t it great to think of contagion as a good thing?! I keep in mind that that though I don’t have the wealth and clout of some of her constituents, I have just as many votes on a per capita basis, possibly many more if I spread my view and actions contagiously.

The same approach should apply to contacting your US House and Senate representatives. And by the way, I asked Cortana about State Senator Tom Lee of Florida, whom I quoted in the opening paragraph, got his office phone number and called to tell him that I admired his remarks about the squandered opportunities of the past decades. His staff person seemed glad to hear from me. So easy, a little nudge in the right direction.  Maybe you can help me make this blog contagious.

Will new generations lead the way to plant-based eating?

I recently returned from a memorable visit to the campus of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where our family lived when I was a member of the faculty. We participated in Homecoming Weekend festivities and had many conversations with undergraduate students.  I was impressed with their intellectual attainments, their energy, and purpose, their sense of where they were going in life. Most of the events we were attending involved food, from breakfast, lunch or dinner to hors d'oeuvres. There was a surprising amount of talk about food. Many students told me that they were vegetarian or—even more commonly—following a vegan diet.  A few said their dietary choices were prompted by health considerations, but more generally they expressed ethical concerns for the future of our nation and global society. I was encouraged by what I heard from these young people. Since returning home (we live in Florida),  I’ve been feeling that it may be time once again to reflect on the importance of moving to a plant-based diet.  So here are some thoughts, in part abstracted from Project Drawdown materials. (Be sure to watch Paul Hawken’s great presentation at this site.)

Much depends on making people aware that our dependence on meat as a major component of the Western diet comes at a steep price in terms of global emissions of greenhouse gases.  Present practices of industrial-scale livestock production account for somewhere between 15 percent and 50 percent of global emissions, primarily carbon dioxide and methane. Ruminants such as cows are the most prolific offenders, as they digest their food.  But that’s only part of the story. Agricultural land use and associated energy consumption to grow livestock feed also produce carbon dioxide emissions.  On a per-calorie of food produced basis, industrial livestock agriculture generates much larger emissions than vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. 

It’s actually much worse than it needs to be. According to the World Health Organization, only 10 to 15 percent of one’s daily calories need to come from protein, and a plant-based diet primarily can easily meet that threshold.  On average, adult males require about 56 grams of protein each day, and women about 46, but in the United States and Canada, the average adult consumes more than 90 grams of protein per day. Where plant-based protein is abundant, human beings do not need animal protein.  It’s interesting to compare the Protein Scorecards of various foods.  One sees that beans and whole grains are much more effective at delivering protein at lower greenhouse gas emissions. Vegetables generally score much higher than animal sources.

Vegetarians and vegans don’t need to sacrifice the pleasures of tasty food by switching away from animal-based protein. If you have concerns about changing your diet away from animal protein, there are many websites worth visiting.  One classic introduction is the film,“Forks over Knives”.  The Forks over Knives recipe website is great! Dr. Michael Greger’s  NutritionFacts.org is a treasure trove of references and good advice on diet and nutrition. The students I spoke with at Illinois were all well aware that one can eat well, in terms of both nutrition and pleasure.  A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes cheese, milk, and eggs).  The potential health impact on millions of lives translates into trillions of dollars in savings: dietary shifts could be worth as much as 13 percent of the worldwide gross domestic product in 2050.

If western society and newly affluent societies worldwide could just become less piggish about their consumption of animal protein, that would be a major step in the right direction. A 2018 World Resources Institute report analyzes a variety of possible dietary modifications and finds that “ambitious animal protein reduction” — focused on reducing overconsumption of animal-based foods in regions where people devour more than 60 grams of protein and 2,500 calories per day — holds the greatest promise for ensuring a sustainable future for global food supply and the planet. “In a world that is on a course to demand more than 70 percent more food, nearly 80 percent more animal-based foods, and 95 percent more beef between 2006 and 2050,” its authors argue, altering meat consumption patterns is critical to achieving a host of global goals related to hunger, healthy lives, water management, terrestrial ecosystems, and, of course, climate change.

The case for a plant-based diet is robust. That said, bringing about substantial dietary change is not simple, because eating is profoundly personal and cultural. Meat is laden with meaning, blended into customs, and appealing to taste buds. Meat substitutes made from plants are one way to help shift established ways of cooking and eating.  They can mimic the flavor, texture, and aroma of animal protein and even replicate its amino acids, fats, carbohydrates, and trace minerals. With nutritious alternatives that appeal to meat-centric palates and practices, companies are actively leading that charge, proving that it is possible to swap out proteins in painless ways. Select plant-based alternatives such as those marketed by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are now in grocery meat shelves.  It’s a rapidly growing development in the food industry. Food columnists such as Mark Bittman, journalist and author of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Yotam Ottolenghi, restaurateur and author of Plenty are helping introducing new dietary norms. And hey! If Tom Brady of the New England Patriots can eat vegetarian, why can’t the rest of us? 

A key step in reducing the impacts of animal husbandry on climate is ending price-distorting government subsidies of the U.S. livestock industry, so that the wholesale and resale prices of animal protein would more accurately reflect their true cost. It is not easy to get a grip on the total subsidies that undergird livestock production, but when all the various components of the enterprise are taken into account, it’s a heap of money.  Some critics of the present system have proposed levying taxes on meat production that reflect its social and environmental externalities. We’re a long way from that happening, but the social incentives for reducing the scope of industrial livestock production are clear: less contamination of municipal water resources, lower rates of chronic disease, less damage to freshwater resources and ecosystems — for example, smaller aquatic “dead zones” created by farm runoff. Plant-based diets also open opportunities to restore land now being used for livestock production to other, carbon-sequestering uses.

Global warming is putting pressure on humanity’s capacity to fend off disastrous changes in climate.  Figuring out how to feed a growing population is perhaps the most urgent. What is certain is that we can’t continue on the paths we’ve been following.  But we can’t make effective changes until people come to grips with the urgency of our situation, until they understand how corporate and political special interests work to maintain the status quo. There are many questions begging for answers.  For example, why are so many of the livestock operations in this country owned by, or supported by, Chinese interests? Is that in our national interest? More on that in a future blog.

In the meantime, what’s on your dinner menu? If it’s plant-based, tell your friends and family about it. Come on, people, let’s get together!

On not losing faith in climate action

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management recently filed a final impact statement (EIS) related to oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Predictably, it doesn’t foresee that drilling will have substantial environmental effects on the Alaskan wildlife and environment.  Those would come largely downstream, in the form of burning of the extracted oil and gas. However, the EIS, more or less in spite of its natural inclinations, had quite a bit to say, buried near the back of the report, on the expected long-term effects of climate change on the Arctic ecology:  "The large magnitude of climate change effects, accompanied by increases in already high climate variability in the Arctic, are likely to overshadow smaller magnitude impacts of oil development. ... many species that nest on the refuge's coastal plain already are experiencing decreasing populations, and many could suffer catastrophic consequences from the effects of global climate change in one or more of their seasonal continental or even global habitats…”.   In short, extinction of species can be expected to occur on a massive scale as global warming marches on. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is finalizing regulations that could make it harder to protect wildlife at a time when scientists say the threats against it are growing.

Habitat loss continues apace, while climate change is predicted to increase pressure against species as temperatures climb. In the administration’s new-speak, plants and animals are considered threatened when they're at risk of becoming endangered "in the foreseeable future." The administration wants to limit what counts as “foreseeable future”, and only considers factors it deems "probable," according to its proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act. I could fill this entire blog with examples of the ways that barriers are being formed to listing species as endangered, slowing up the process to the point that the species may become extinct even before being acknowledged as endangered.  

In the prologue to his book, Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, E. O. Wilson writes that our human sensory system and capacity for moral reasoning are deficient for the purposes of modern humanity:  “Like it or not, we remain a biological species in a biological world, wondrously well adapted to the conditions of the planet’s former living environment, albeit tragically not this environment or the one we are creating. In body and soul we are the children of the Holocene, the epoch that created us, yet far from well adapted to its successor, the Anthropocene.”  Wilson is a wise and learned man. Given what he knows about his fellow humans, and about the deep perils that face all the species on the planet, I admire his persistent efforts to enlighten and inspire the rest of us to action. But what actions? Greta Thunberg, and George Monbiot urge us in an excellent short video to PROTECT, RESTORE, FUND.  Yes! Let’s do those things! But most of us don’t know how.  We are, most of us, trapped in our wondrous adaptations to the rapidly disappearing Holocene.  

The physicist Gilbert N.Plass first made me aware of the influence of greenhouse gases on Earth's climate when  I heard him speak at Michigan State University in 1954.  Plass was one of the early pioneers of the modern movement to rigorously compute the effects of greenhouse gases on the planet’s surface temperature.  His work drew a fair amount of attention; Time magazine did a story on him in 1958. I became fascinated by what I learned from Plass, and over the years spent time away from my major research interests as a Chemistry Professor to delve into atmospheric sciences. I wrote about global warming in a short general audience type of book, Energy and the Environment, published in 1971, which received a modest level of use in special topics courses; spent a sabbatical leave at the International Meteorological Institute in Stockholm in 1972, during which time I attended the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm;  a discussion of “water vapor, carbon dioxide and climate” was included in the first edition of Chemistry: The Central Science, a general chemistry text I coauthored with H. Eugene LeMay, which appeared in 1977. I taught myself a lot about climate change during those years, but I also came to recognize, regrettably, that global warming has been a subject of small interest. In a January 22, 2019 report, Climate Change in the American Mind, about 71% of American respondents indicated a belief that climate change is happening. That’s the same percentage reported in 2008. It went down after 2008, and has only slowly crept back up. Further, the percentage of respondents that believe that global warming has a human cause, is only 56%, the same as in 2008. There’s not much to be happy about in those numbers, though I expect that there’s more awareness globally than there is in the US.  

The novelist Jonathan Franzen made a lot of people unhappy with an opinion piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker.  One of his sins in the eyes of his critics is that he promotes what they see as a defeatist view: there’s scant evidence that humans will successfully prevent climate catastrophe. But Franzen isn’t arguing that we should do nothing, he’s cautioning against unrealistic hope. Despite widespread claims that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon a collective will, annual global emissions of carbon dioxide have continued to increase. With the major economies of the world fixated largely on GDP, with neoliberalism still a reigning economic doctrine, what other outcomes can we expect? The Business Roundtable recently issued a revised Purpose of a Corporation.  As reported in the New York Times, the statement says increasing shareholder value should no longer be the sole and exclusive focus of an incorporated business. Companies must also invest in their employees, deliver value to their customers, and deal fairly and ethically with their communities, It may look good, but isn’t it just more temporizing by Jamie Dimon and his ilk?  We have good reasons to be skeptical as to whether corporations will be motivated to mount an effective counter to the threats of global warming.

How, I wonder, will corporations, government and all of us respond to the powerful remarks of 16 year-old Greta Thunberg at the U.N. Climate Action Summit on  September 23^rd? I was in the midst of writing this blog when I heard them. Greta will not be able to persuade politicians and corporations that promote continued use of fossil fuel to work toward

rapid deployment of alternative energy sources. She will not succeed in bringing to a halt the continued destructive practices of an industrialized food industry. But this young woman moved me. I had begun this blog with the weary feeling that after all these years I might be just wasting my time. After listening to Greta, I know that I should stay active, however small my contribution may be.  My spouse Audrey and I have ten great-grandchildren. We are responsible for the fact that they exist. Don't we have an obligation to do what we can to maintain a habitable planet for them? To push, with our voices, money, and energy for a new politics in which change is possible? If like me you’re an elder, climate change is not so much a burden we will bear as a situation we’ll leave our progeny. We need to answer the call for ethics tailored to the Anthropocene.