Earth Day, meet Covid-19

This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In 1970 the environment was a mess: big cities were beset with pollution and industrial environments were creating literally unliveable surroundings; Los Angeles was thick with a choking smog; wastes in the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland were burning; the natural world was suffering from the effects of pesticide use; chemical dumps seemed to be everywhere.

That first Earth Day was a huge success. Millions of people participated in parades, teach-ins, tree plantings, and other activities in a show of support for a cleaner, healthier world. In 1990 Earth Day became an international observance. It’s the most widely observed secular holiday on the planet. But have we made progress in those 50 years?

In some areas, we’ve done pretty well. Air pollution, for example, is less prevalent in urban environments than in past times. But air pollution is a comparatively easy target for mitigation--just turn down the source! Catalytic mufflers and limits on emissions from smokestacks have made a big difference, but we still have a long way to go.

Solid and liquid waste dumpsites scattered across the nation are not so conveniently dispensed with. The federal law officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, termed the federal Superfund program, mandates the identification and cleanup of contaminated sites. The parties responsible for the contamination are required to pay for the cleanup or reimburse the Environmental Protection Agency for doing the job. About 40,000 federal Superfund sites, large and small, across the country have been targeted for cleanup. Approximately 1,600 of those sites considered the most highly contaminated have been listed on a National Priorities List (NPL).

As a cynic would have predicted, the government has found it difficult or inconvenient to dun the polluters for cleaning up their messes. Corporations come and go, right? It’s not clear who should receive the cleanup bill. The result has been that lately, taxpayers are paying for most of the cleanup. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for this work has declined. During 2000-2015, Congress allocated about $1.26 billion of general revenue to the Superfund program each year. That’s chump change in comparison with the magnitude of the problem, and it’s been reduced still further under the Trump administration. After all these years, cleanup is proceeding on a mere handful of the more than 1200 sites on the NPL list that await cleaning. By the way, the US government may be the largest polluter, with the most intractable sites.

It will come as no surprise that low income and minority populations have suffered most from the adverse effects of toxic waste dumping. Back in the day, local authorities found it easy to grant permits for waste disposal on lands in proximity to low-income neighborhoods. In 1994, President Bill Clinton proposed a new Superfund reform bill, Executive Order (E.O) 12898, which called for federal agencies to make achieving environmental justice a requirement by addressing low-income populations and minority populations that have experienced disproportionate adverse health and environmental effects. The work goes on--at a snail’s pace.


While slow progress is being made in cleaning up past environmental messes, new ones appear. They don’t look like most of the old ones, those piles of full barrels, ground sites soaked with toxic materials, poisonous ponds. Consider the aftereffects of the frenzied drilling for gas and oil in the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania. This is not old stuff; it’s a 21st-century story. It would take more space and patience than I have to recite the litany of environmental misdeeds done in the exploitation of this formation. What remains are thousands of played-out or abandoned wells, signified to the passerby by a mere stub of iron piping or an abandoned pumping station. But those thousands of wells, with their networks of horizontal drilling holes, will continue to leak oil, gas, and brines contaminated with a host of chemicals, spoiling the water in aquifers that people have depended on as their primary water source. Potential problems were evident from the very beginnings of the Marcellus development, but in the rush to make a financial killing, residents’ concerns were ignored by regulators and politicians. Now, people are often unknowingly living virtually on top of abandoned, plugged wells that leak inflammable methane. Who is responsible for cleaning up these messes? We seem not to have learned how to head off environmental disasters in the rush to make money.

Here’s another example: The covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has produced upheavals in global markets for petroleum products. Overcapacity has driven the price of oil to near zero. Not only is the market saturated with available stocks, but there is also a lack of storage capacity. Texas, the nation’s largest oil and gas producer, has seen thousands of layoffs and there will be more to come.
The flaring of excess methane gas at the wellheads is wasting billions of cubic feet of methane because it’s uneconomical to ship to market. Uneconomical? The message clearly is that if it isn’t economical, we’re just going to flare away, and in the process increase greenhouse gas concentrations. They could stop these affronts to the environment with strong regulation, but we’re talking Texas politics. "Environment" doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary.

Yet another one: What do we do when chemicals widely used in various applications come to be regarded as profoundly toxic? The family of chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) developed largely at 3M and DuPont chemical companies seemed like miracle substances because of their ability to repel water, protect surfaces, resist heat, and many other useful properties. They were soon found everywhere: nonstick cooking ware, repellents in fabric, firefighting foams, shaving cream, the list goes on. These compounds are useful largely because they’re chemically quite inert. But the downside of that useful characteristic is that when they enter a living system they take something like 5 years to excrete. Early studies of toxicity in animals did not reveal toxic effects in chemical workers exposed to low concentrations in manufacturing facilities. But prolonged exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), one of them in particular, known as C8, was eventually seen as harming health: developmental damage to fetuses during pregnancy, low birth weight, accelerated puberty and distorted bones. The EPA website links PFASs to kidney and testicular cancer, liver tissue damage, impaired production of antibodies, and cholesterol changes. This presents a tough challenge; a family of chemicals that persist in the environment for long times, and are everywhere. They’re not very toxic, but enough so that over time they cause medical issues. Getting the genie back in the bottle looks like an intractable problem. We can’t undo what has been done, much of it without an understanding of how these substances could prove to be toxic. But we can be aggressive about not allowing the problem to get worse. While we’re at it, we might want to ask whether such problems can be anticipated. It’s strange: a search of the web turns up a lot of hits for the prudential rule as it applies to financial decision- and rule-making, but none found a prudential rule for environmental rule-making. Maybe I’m just not searching assiduously enough.

The global profit-oriented capitalist system that has called the shots for decades has brought the world to a bad place. Neoliberal capitalists want to run their shows with minimal regulation, and in the US they’ve pretty much had their way. But corporations’ frequent disregard for the larger social welfare as they focus on profits has begun to arouse palpable resentment. The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the indifference of corporations and many of the ultra-rich to the economic stresses many people face. People have begun to ask why society should run as it does. When people are being forced out of the labor market and pressed into homelessness and hunger, who comes to rescue them? When the environment teeters on the brink of runaway global warming, who will call a halt to continued pumping out of greenhouse warming gases? 

Some people have the notion that the new generation of really big business is comparatively innocent in terms of producing adverse environmental effects. What environmental harm could Google, Facebook, or Amazon produce? Aren’t some of them actively at work in addressing environmental problems? We know for sure that they are all enormous consumers of energy. The “absurdly quick delivery” madness among large sellers, particularly Amazon, but including copycat services from Target, eBay and Walmart, is sure to have negative impacts in terms of global warming. Google presents itself as embracing sustainability and environmental stewardship, but it is a massive consumer of energy.

The company is no doubt running its data centers as efficiently as possible, but the sheer enormity of their energy consumption requires millions of gallons of water per day. Water is becoming a critically stressed resource; some Google’s facilities are located in locales in Texas and South Carolina where water is already scarce. Legal battles over water rights have ensued. What will take priority, water for a data center, or water for peoples’ homes? Facebook seems to have a strong vision of how to minimize its environmental footprint, though, like Google's, it’s data centers are large consumers of energy. I’m making these points about the new giants simply to point out that they, like all large commercial enterprises, entail strong impacts on the environment. It would be too bad if they become the images of the bad guys in the poster for Earth Day 2030.

In many respects, it’s a scary time for ordinary people--financially, in terms of health, and the prospects of young people coming up through the school systems. We’re being prompted to ask questions about our personal lives and the society we’ve been living in. This viral disruption will require more than a patchwork response. We’re in the early days for the covid-19 pandemic. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm points out that in the US only about 3% of the population has shown itself to be infected. Before the infection plays itself out probably 60% or so will have been infected. As he says, “we’re only in the second inning of a nine-inning game”. A long way to go and a lot we will have to learn. 

Back to the title of this blog: What would Earth Day have looked like environmentally on its 50th anniversary if the Covid-19 pandemic had not occurred? The almost magical effects of the virus have been remarked upon everywhere. My local paper, The Fort Myers News-Press, rhapsodizes on the clarity of the urban skies; wild animals allowing themselves to be seen; the eerie quiet. As the paper writes: “When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.”

Will humans get the message?

Coronavirus, Climate Change and Ecclesiasticus

Jerry Regovoy, born in 1930, was an American songwriter and record producer.  He wrote “Piece of My Heart”, associated with Janis Joplin, but he’s probably better known for “Time Is on My Side”, made famous by The Rolling Stones in 1964.  Jerry died in 2011 following a stroke. I like the way Mick Jagger did that song--his characteristic swagger, his surety that things would come his way if he just waited. 

Like everyone else, I’m preoccupied with the 2019-nCoV pandemic. This latest version of a class of viruses known as coronaviruses, which I’m going to call covid-19, seems to be highly contagious, and it’s nasty in other ways.  Except for the priapic young men and aphroditic sex objects on Florida’s beaches, we’re avoiding close social contacts and taking other precautionary measures. It’s no fun, really.  I’m not a fearful person, but I accept the prevailing medical advice: the temporal development of this infection is such that we are in for a rough period. The federal government seems to be finally beginning to do what it must to slow the spread of the infection, hoping to avoid a disastrous run on medical capacities, of both people and stuff. But the hourly totals of the infected tell a grim tale. Time is not on our side, Mick. 

The enormous attention given to this pandemic has convinced everyone that the sooner we act, the greater our chances for mitigation. This is true for individuals, organizations and governments alike. Everyone needs to buy-in.  The rate at which essential domestic products  evaporate from grocery store shelves is stark evidence that the media have the capacity to get peoples’ attention and stimulate action. Individuals are more likely to act if they feel they can do something concrete that makes a difference, especially when it affects them personally. It’s hard, though, when it means you should do next to nothing.

The almost universal preoccupation with the pandemic can't be ascribed merely to the heavy media coverage. Pandemics are spooky, and rightly so.  You just don’t see it coming. A tiny number of infectious virus units manage to infect one luckless person in a population. The virus begins with a stealth approach, multiplying slowly at first, not making a fuss. Then, at a certain point in its exponential growth in the victim, the infection suddenly announces itself with a roar and spreads at a mad rate. Meantime, the infected person is unwittingly distributing copies of the virus to the outside world, like mail addressed to “whomever”.  A lot of biology is going on and we don’t see or feel it.  If only we could detect an infection early and take steps to curtail the spread--tests, anyone?  

For most of us, right now it’s a matter of self-protection, anything from obsessive hand-washing to social distancing, to prevent contact with the virus,    Individuals take steps in their self-interest, but in taking them cooperatively we can hope to slow the virus’s spread, and maybe also reduce the total number infected. Time is not on our side, either as individuals or as a community, so we do what we can, now.

It’s not unreasonable to be fearful of what might be in store for the spread of covid-19, or for the mortalities it will produce.  It seems still early to make more than a rough guess at how virulent this nemesis will prove to be. Different populations will exhibit differing mortality rates, depending on age distribution, general state of health, availability of medical care and so on.  However, the preliminary estimates based on moralities in nations that have been hard hit are ominously high.  Wikipedia has a table showing the numbers of cases and deaths worldwide, nation by nation.  The total number of confirmed cases across all nations as of March 21, 2020, is 282,000, resulting in about 12,000 deaths.  That works out to a mortality rate of about 0.04, a truly horrible number.  The vast majority of those deaths have occurred in China, Italy and Iran, in that order. 

To put those numbers into perspective, consider the famous Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.  With the exception of the Black Plague in the 14th century and beyond, it was the most deadly infestation in human history. It infected 500 million and killed an estimated 17 to 50 million people worldwide.  If we take the lowest estimate of deaths, that amounts to an overall 0.035 mortality rate. Is it possible that we now face something with that power to kill?  We can see from the numbers that we’re in the very early stages of the current pandemic; we can hope that mortality rates will decline as nations come to grips with containment measures such as social distancing.  On the other hand, when covid-19 makes its way into highly populated population centers, many of them with only the most basic and limited medical facilities--well, it will not be pretty. In 1918 the world population was about 1.8 billion; today we’re about 7.7  billion.

I’ve been writing this blog for the past couple of years and attempting in various other ways to raise awareness of the dangers posed by climate change. Scientists with many different special skills, working with different tools and models, have been steadily building a model of the global climate system. The myriad of studies, coming from all parts of Earth’s environment: land surface, atmosphere and the ocean, all point to a global warming in full swing and growing faster with each passing year. Nearly all scientific experts are confident that the changes to come will cause the extinction of many of the planet’s species and lead to the widespread suffering of humans. The science has grown increasingly clear and more precise over time. And yet, societal responses have been slow, not even close to matching the urgency we should be feeling. 

Why is it that we can really get going on an urgent crisis such as the covid-19 pandemic and at the same time be slow to react to the threats of climate change?  The answer lies in our evolutionary heritage, which has endowed us with a capacity to respond to immediate threats to ourselves or the communities in which we live. The spectacle of heavily clad medical workers moving infected patients into special isolation units, hourly updates on those infected or dead, the need for self-isolation, governmental mandates to close down commerce, and the endless drum of media coverage are enough to provoke us into action to ward off an invisible viral infection that can kill within a few weeks of infection. In contrast, our attention is drawn to climate change via stories about faraway places: floods in Nebraska, drought in Ethiopia, a hurricane of unprecedented fury hitting Japan.  The climate crisis announces itself in bits and pieces, in slowly deteriorating weather conditions in California, drought on the Australian subcontinent, in the loss of Solomon Island nations to sea-level rise.  By comparison with a viral pandemic, climate change is slow. As Lise Van Susteren wrote recently, “The climate crisis is much more psychologically demanding. ... It requires compassion to imagine what is going to be down the road and to drive ourselves to take action now for the benefits that we may not personally receive.”

But focusing on the notion that humans are not programmed to think long-term misses the most important causes of our responses as a nation to the covid-19 pandemic and global warming: the growth of global neoliberalism, an economic model that aims to pare away unwanted governmental oversight and regulation to make way for an unfettered capitalism operating largely free of governmental control. Many economists have been warning over the past few decades about the rise of neoliberalism. I recall reading a book by Dan Shiller, Digital Capitalism, copyright 2000, in which the development of global networks is linked to neoliberalism.  Shiller’s warnings and those of many of the world’s most eminent economists, have not been heeded. It can fairly be said that

Gordon Gekko’s motto, “Greed is Good” has been allowed to make a home in the hearts of the big corporations and banks.  The Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that to cure what ails us, “we need reform at both the national and global levels. The US, for example, clearly needs a new social contract that is capable of fostering solidarity among all demographic groups and across generations. The new social contract, in turn, will require a larger and revised economic role for government. We need less corporate welfare and more progressive taxation with which to fund social policies for those in need and investments in the welfare of all. Most important, we must rewrite the basic rules of the economy to reverse the toxic legacy of neoliberalism – which made its own revisions to the rules during its long reign of error.  Looking back, there is no denying that the neoliberal era increased inequality, accelerated many forms of environmental destruction – not least climate change – polarized electorates, and sowed the seeds for pervasive discontent. ….The obsession with quarterly earnings and executive compensation led corporations to direct their energy toward creating more unemployment and holding down wages for unskilled workers.”

Because capitalism works on the notion of maximizing profits, it’s about driving down costs.  The American and global economies undergo periodic crises arising from greedy reaching that goes astray for any number of reasons.  Here’s Stiglitz again: “Indeed, research in behavioral economics has shown that bankers, particularly traders and investment bankers, tend to be less honest than their colleagues in less competitive areas of finance; they become even less honest when they are primed to think of themselves as bankers. Behavioral research has also identified why economies with extreme levels of inequality have deficient social solidarity.” 

Because we have been operating in an economic system grounded in the philosophy of maximizing profits and minimizing contributions to the common good, we find ourselves with a government unprepared for the covid-19 emergency we face.  The Trump administration, following the edicts of greedy capitalism, has systematically stripped the agencies in the executive branch of many offices and programs, such as the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense.  There’s been no one there to point out our vulnerability to a pandemic, nor were any of the many unqualified political appointees put in charge of major agencies inclined to think in those terms. The president often replies to questions about how his domain is run with the claim that, “I don’t know anything about that”.  Sadly, it usually seems to be true.

The twin challenges of the viral pandemic and impending climate change call for a time of truth-telling. We will be hearing and reading a lot of it from sources that have been pretty quiet heretofore. Here’s a recent example from Peter Georgescu, writing in  Forbes magazine:

“Economically, we are not one nation. And this pandemic is screaming at us to recognize this truth and act accordingly. If we are willfully denying or flat out ignoring the existential problem of inequality we now face, how are we going to demand the actions necessary to preserve our democracy and any sense of justice?”

Amen.  At the moment all is focused on how the viral pandemic has highlighted the cracks in our social structure.  The focus on short-term profits and marginalization of the public good, will continue to be stumbling blocks as we confront climate change. As it bears down on us in the decades to come, who will suffer the most?  

To end on the question of how we use our time in the days ahead, here are a few lines from a spiritual, Ain’t Got Time to Die,  by the African-American choir director and composer, Hall Johnson:

                Aint got time

                Cause when Im healin de sick

                When Im healin de sick

                When Im healin de sick

                Cause it takes all o ma time

                All o ma time

           

           

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.