Boiled Frog

We're Getting a New Look!

Look for a design overhaul and relaunch of Boiled Frog around Columbus Day. For now, I'm off to the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas....

Eight Years to Midnight

What has the US government done about climate change in the last seven years? A painful question at best, since the answer is "worse than nothing." And we will be deciding the next eight years come this November, eight years which may be our last chance to avoid real global catastrophe.

An Op-Ed in this morning's Washington Post lays it out pretty clearly.

That catastrophe won't happen between 2008 and 2015 -- this is a slo-mo crisis -- but what we do in that period -- what kinds of energy facilties we build, how we build our homes and offices and cars and all the infrastructure on which our "lifestyle" is dependent -- will determine our energy budget through the middle of the next century, and once in place will not be easy to change.

And that infrastructure will set the pace of change, slowing the growth of energy use and warming of the globe, or accelerating it even further and endangering our children and grandchildren. There are more than 75 million Americans younger than 8 years old...citizens who will be in their forties and fifties when our choices now play out.

The most unsettling aspect of the whole global warming controversy is that it is controversial.  The logic is so obvious, so inescapable once the numbers are crunched...and the solutions -- though painful perhaps, in short term -- equally so.

We need to reduce our energy use, and get that energy from more renewable sources. And we need to creat carbon sinks to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that have already accumulated. And we need to do both now.

Both Sides Now

Much in the way that the Republi-Fox network works both sides, the Grand Old Party is doing the same thing with oil (and energy generally) and the question is whether they will get away with it (again). A bunch of recent articles scattered around in the Washington Post over the past week or so show the trend. But we'll get to that in a minute.

First, I am compelled to note how it has always amazed me that the Republicans managed to convince blue collar voters to vote against their own interests. Of course there is always a reason. Back in 1968 -- a war and security time much like today, as I keep reminding my son who has just finished his sophomore year at the same University I attended at that time -- it was guts, guns and God...and today it is, guess what:  God, guns and guts. And gas prices.

I guess that is at least a change, if not any progress.

Oh, and the flag! Let's not forget that true sign of the patriot. Wear it or wave it and you are home free, a born again American, absolved of all sins against the Bill of Rights (damned secular Ten Commandments that they are).What the hell is that habeas corpus anyway? It sounds like something from some Euro-language...Euro-Speak. Let 'em keep it. If you are law abiding citizen you have nothing to worry about from the government...long as you got your gun! (Now there is an amendment I can get behind! <G>)

So let's see:  we don't need any of those amendments about speech, or assembly, or privacy because the government is (at least for the next six months or so) being run by God-fearing patriots...but we have to make sure that we can keep our guns because you can't trust the government. Oooookay! The statement on the other side of this paper is false. No, true. No....wait!

Sorry about the rant. I get into this, and the incidences of hyprocrisy (or blind denial) at the top, and stupidity (or gullibility, or enablement) at the bottom of our political pig pile just flood in.

What this post is atually about is the way that Senate Republicans are doing the same thing that Fox News does:  create a problem (at great profit) and then thunder in the pundi-sphere (for a second profit) about how great a problem it is.

In the case of Fox, their entertainment division produces some of the raunchiest (and funniest) shows on TV (only a partial compliment since I included the phrase "on TV") while their news (read: commentary / opinion) division blasts the liberal / democrat / atheistic America haters in Hollywood, New York and Washington (have I missed any place that matters?) for the destruction of our once proud Christian nation.

In the case of the Republican campaign machine (the only thing more 24/365 than spam) we have, on the one hand,

• a group of senators blocking the bill to assist the poor with their heating bills this winter -- which will cause an economic hardship that will raise the emotional temperature of the electorate right about the time that election day arrrives, and
• the McCain campaign strategists (who are desperately looking for an issue to replace Iraq, preferably with an economic "tone") who think that oil prices may be that issue because McCain has suddenly changed his earlier stance against offshore drilling, and is now for it, while Obama is still against it.

There are cascading effects to McCain's flip-flop.

• Money -- which he is desperate for -- is now flowing into his campaign from the oil industry, which would, of course love to do that drilling. Of course, not all. Just as the Iraqi president al Maliki turned out to favor Obama's position on the war more than McCain's -- after McCain taunted Obama to go to Iraq -- it turns out that one of the biggest of the big Oil men,
• T. Boone Pickens -- a solid Republican who helped pay for the Swift Boating of John Kerry four years ago -- turns out  to think that this time around the oil crisis is different, and "we can't drill our way out of this." (He, instead, is investing in renewables...)

So the Republi-Foxes will scurry around playing both sides: making people suffer and then trying to convince that their suffering is caused by those pointy headed liberals who don't know what it is like to work for a living...all the while making huge profits on the spread and further reducing the very people who vote for them to economic servitude. Ah!  Give them God, guns and flags! (Oh, and plenty of commericialized Roman gladitorial sports as an opiate...but don't tell them that that habeas corpus stuff language stuff came from the same place...).

I gotta get to work!

Glomalin and Global Warming

I received an interesting article this morning from the USDA about some new research into glomalin, a sugar-protein produced by beneficial soil fungi. Here a few interesting tidbits I picked up.

1. Soils with native grasses had higher levels of glomalin than those planted with non-native grasses. This makes perfect sense since glomalin is produced by beneficial soil fungi (known as arbuscular mycorrhizae) that have a symbiotic relationship with plant roots. (Fact is more than 80% of the plant species benefit from symbiotic interaction with soil microbial life.)
2. Soils with high glomalin content are richer (in terms of plant nutrition) and less erosion prone than soils with lower glomalin content. This is because the glomalin helps soil particles stick together, forming aggregates that are more stabile in the presence of wind and water pressure.
3. But there is also a carbon sequestration effect that is significant. Plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (just as mammals like us remove oxygen) to fuel photosynthesis. Some of the results of this process -- on which all higher life on Earth is dependent -- end up in the plant roots, where the root fungi process some of the resulting organic compounds into glomalin.

General estimates have about 1,500 gigatons (yes, that is billion of tons) of carbon is stored in the soil. If the efficiency of that storage process could be improved by even 10%, that is another 150 billion gigatons removed from the atmosphere, which would have a more profound effect on the greenhouse gas content than just about any other action. Not all of it will remain in the soil of course -- especially in the case of switchgrass, on which the article focuses, because it would be converted into ethanol and then burned to feed our passion for the (formerly) open highway -- but still, it would be a help.

That is why restoring wetlands, prairies and savannahs -- as well as degraded forests -- especially in the tropic latitudes, where growth is fastest -- is so important.

To read the whole report, see the online version of the July Issue of Agricultural Research.

Carbon "Rights"

While doing some background reading for a freelance gig I came across a paper presented by a Mr. John Sheehan at an Australian climate change conference in May 2007 which traces the concept of "carbon property rights," or more properly, carbon rights as one of a class of rights derivative of land property rights. (He also mentions, water, salt, development and biota rights as sub-classes.)

The part that interests me here is a few pages in (page 4).

"[...] the biophysical environment requires that a regime of property rights in natural resources such as biota must be an endogenous enterprise derived from the reality of the natural resource in its milleu. if the commodification of biota is to be extended to carbon wit hthe aim to produce a true market in the emerging commodity, then security of tenure must be available in order for that market to function."

The reason this interests me is that I am, in general, against what I think of as commodification (and have written about it before...see my paper on Beta-Carotene) but this paper's discussion makes me realize that there are probably (at least) two ways of conceiving of commodification in terms of our relation to natural systems (and their "services"). 

The whole problem of environmental degradation stems from the inadequacy of economics to the task of self regulation by feedback loops that characterizes natural systems (and that has been conceptualized in a least on form by the theory of evolution). Within market systems those loops purport to exist and function -- though hardly with the consistency we might wish -- but the interface between natural systems and market systems has not proven to be a trivial issue.

In essence we have either tried to encase nature within the market -- which necessarily leads to the kind of commodification I have discussed before -- or we have tried to subsume the market economy within what Wendell Berry called "the great economy" in his 1983 essay Two Economies. I am generally inclined toward the latter view but not convinced that it is a complete and functional method, so I am still actively looking for ways to understand how we can meet the day to day needs (instead of the mere "wants" we have grown to prefer) of humanity satisfied without degrading the system long term, i.e. achieve some sort of sustainability (at least...and perhaps -- oh to wish for! -- in the end, a bit of nobility as a species as well).

What I realized upon reading the above quoted passage is that Sheehan is not using that word commodification in quite the same way. He is not talking about creating some sort of mass produced industrial homologue for a natural product and then foisting it on the market as a (almost always poor) substitute for the original, but essentially trying to enfranchise ecosystems by quantfying their services...or in the way Christopher Stone suggested twenty some years ago in Should Trees Have Standing? and Gary Snyder evoked with his famous passage in Earth House Hold (remember what economics actually means!) quoting the summit book entry in Glacier Peak Ascent where someone had written "You mean there's a senator for all this?" he is trying to inculcate a sense of value for the ground (metaphorically) on which we live into all social (and therefore economic) analyses.

This is a different movement, a different direction. It is expansive, not reductive, as where you take something like the class of natural carotenoids (hundreds of them, in their wonderful variations) and replace them with the single one you decide is most powerful (in this case, beta-carotene) and then mass produce that as a silver bullet commodity that can be easily traded within the market, and you pretend it will solve the problem that prompted your search. You reduce natural variety and commit the sin of idolatry, embracing mindless materialism.

This second kind -- the expansive -- sense of commodification that Sheehan is talking about seems instead to be descriptive more than destructive, and while it quantifies -- and depends on quantification to succeed -- it keeps logic, quantification and other techmemes where they belong, in the service of needs of our humanity rather than forcing us (and the rest of nature) to reduce that humanity (or that animality, or plantality -- our diversity) and adapt our selves to it, in some sort of limited way, in order to "enjoy" the new "comforts" of industrial modernity that the more limited, reductive, materialist form promises.

Do Plants Cause Global Warming?

Probably not...A recent report in "Nature" suggested land plants were a significant source of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. In "New Phytologist" two Dutch scientists report the results of a heavy-carbon study that suggests plants do not emit enough methane to contribute significantly to global warming. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. press release at EurekAlert.org (27 Apr. 2007).

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/bpl-pdn042707.php

Farmers Know Best

...at least when they stop listening to the suits. A little AP piece on the 12th notes that wheat stubble is being looked at as a source of cellulose for biofuels. The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) seems all for it (after all, they have the GMO microbes to digest the stuff and need to prove their value to a skeptical public) but there is a little problem.

The writer notes that the "leftover material is viewed as everything from a natural fertilizer to a nuisance." Need we guess which group sees it which way?

He notes further on that "Farmers currently use crop residue as an integral part of their soil conservation process." That is a little more to the point than calling it a "natural fertilizer," which subtly compares it to the stuff that comes in a bag, which is a costly semantic switch.

BIO would love to 1) scrape the ground clean, 2) ship the stubble to a processing plant, 3) process it into a biofuel (probably ethanol), and then 4) burn the fuel.

What's wrong with this picture....aside from the laws of Thermodynamics and entropy?

#1 uses energy (fuel);

#2 uses energy (fuel);

#3 (guess! <G>) uses energy (fuel) to get

#4 which is fuel, which is what they were after, and which -- minus all the energy used to create it -- could be used to power the first three steps (once it is shipped back from the fuel plant!) and some substantial portion perhaps used to manufacture synthetic fertilizers that could be used to replace the nutrients that would have been supplied by the stubble.

Bingo! How creative we are! And how profitable it will be for all those non-farmers that have inserted themselves into the process, especially the ones that are receiving the government subsidies to build the ethanol plants that will process all that stubble (and corn, and soybeans, grown on increasingly marginal lands so that we can all drive -- I should say "have the right to drive" SUVs).

How much energy does it take to leave the stubble where it is...as part of the system?

And who profits from that? Maybe the farmer? Wildlife? The life of the soil? (On which the wheat, and thus the farmer, and thus we, are absolutely dependent to survive, not just drive...)

Oh, and what about the soil organic matter that stubble provided? The erosion control over winter? The trapping of snow to feed the water table? Are BIO's buddies going to provide those "services" as well? How much are they going to charge? I sure hope I have some biotech stocks in my IRA!

Face it:  natural systems provide many services cheaper than the industrial process can ever hope to. The apparent profits and efficiencies of the industrial system are usually illusory and "created" by entropic trash stashed somewhere out of sight (though as we fill the world with trash and tailings, and the sky with ozone and CO2 it is getting harder and harder to hide).

I looked at the original story at  http://www.kxly.com/index.php?story_id=8451 and I agree with Colton, Idaho farmer Lee Druffel, who "says he wants all the residue in his fields to stay there."

The system doesn't work without it, not long term. You can't just always take and never give.

Shit Out Of Place

One of the hallmarks of reductionist, expansionist thinking is the way it takes the parts of a system and qualifies them -- in the sense of limiting, or clarifying, or -- dare we say -- reducing them to mere parts, with little thought to the whole of which they once were part. And then, with grand assurance, substitutes (what they think constitutes) a new whole, far more elegant than mere nature or biology could hope to imagine -- we are after all the only thinking animal...the most creative beings to walk the earth! And let's not forget this is why (our own...NO, not merely ours!) God gave us dominion, the right to do with as we please these little elements of soul-less materiality. The Amish can beat their horses  or toss the carcasses of a puppy mill in a pile out in the field for just this reason: the puppies have no soul and thus no rights. And the abstract person known as the corporation -- incorporated, forever, and truly incorporeal -- so soul-less itself can, and will do even worse, loosed of the moral restraints placed on mere morals.

What is this rant all about? Manure. Shit. So the guy in his lab coat -- the boy ascendant -- takes the system apart, and doesn't even try to put it back together, but rather takes the pieces from that and from ten other things he's dismantled (don't worry girls, you're learning how, and will be just as culpable soon enough) and Voila! finds new uses for them.

Hence the AP story this morning about how scientists (I spare you the priesthood thing, as that little meme is well ensconced by now) are experimenting with taking dried, sterilized manure and using it as the filler for the fibreboard that used to be made from sawdust. Hey just imagine what IKEA can do with that!

("Manure: You may be walking on it soon" By DAVID N. GOODMAN, Associated Press, Feb 10, 2007) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070210/ap_on_sc/building_with_manure_5

Think about it: once all the forests are gone we'll be back to building our houses out of dung! How modern, how advanced! Gee, I guess what goes around really does come around -- I'm not sure if that is the earth, or history, or the Buddhist wheel of suffering, but it does seem to be picking up speed these days. Look! There's Ahab, coming up for another breath!

"The researchers hope it could be part of the solution to the nation's 1.5-trillion- to 2-trillion pound annual farm waste disposal problem," Mr. Goodman writes.  Let me see...that would be the manure that used to be spread back on the fields to fertilize them, but now that our (OUR, damn it! OURS!!!!) animals are raised in confined animal feeding operations -- CAFO is the lovely acronym for this latest abomination -- there is no way to do that without contaminating the water beside or beneath whatever unbuilt land might be in the neighborhood, so what used to be a resource is now a problem, a source of pollution, disease and disodor -- not to mention evidence of disorder!

But no matter, we can burn natural gas and electricity to extract nitrogen from the atmosphere and mine phosphate in huge open pits, and dredge postassium from off the coast of New Jersey, then hit those last two with some sulfuric acid we cooked up there along I-95 -- beautiful I-95, such a marvel of human ingenuity! -- and refine it all (to hell with micronutrients...there's no money in those suckers!) and put it in bags with the damned analysis printed right on the outside with the instructions on how to load it in the machine, and all that, and then sit back in the air conditioned cab of the 350 HP tractor drinking a cold Budweiser made with RO-d river water and GMO grains while we enjoy the highlights of American Idol on our satellite radio. Oh, life! How did you ever become so sweet?

"We really need to think outside the box on what uses for manure are," said Wendy Powers, a professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.

Here's one:  why don't we figure out how to use it as fertilizer! DAMN! Why don't we put all that brain power and money into refining the natural system that has worked for millenia -- for billenia or trillenia, or what ever the whole damn history of the biosphere ought to be called...Hunh? Duuhh! It's called nature, people...you scientists and evolution types think it created us, remember? So it must be smart, right?

But nobody gives a shit about how we used to do things. The scientists will figure it out! (In this greatest of all posssible worlds, where Polonius has become Polonium and growing food an industrial process). Who cares that when the animals and the crops were grown on the same farm they were part of an integrated system and that system supported a family and that family over the course of a hundred years grew in real wealth from a small wood or stone or sod shack to live in a substantial house, with barns and fences, and generations of children that grew up to be above average in the Woebegon sense? Life moves forward. We are making history! What? Me Worry?

But you know, history will make us once the fossil fuels are gone. There will be no mercy for our lack of forethought, our profligate ignorance. We will boil like frogs in a rising sea.

But, before you accuse me of bashing capitalism, consider this. I went to the Czech Republic back in the early nineties -- just after its emergence from a half century of socialism -- to lecture on organic / sustainable vegetable production (my day job for many years). I was driven around the country by a newly minted Deputy Minister of Agriculture who was also my translator. At one point, out in the east of the country, we passed by the largest hay pile I had ever seen: it must have been fifty standard bales high, a hundred across, and probably five hundred long...and it was neither in a building or covered...and for those of you unfamiliar with such things, that meant it was surely to rot once it got rained on.

I asked how long it had been there (thinking it was going to be a push to get it indoors before rain) and was told that it was from two seasons previous. I asked why it had not been protected and was told that there was not really fuel available to transport it nor a place to put it. Ten miles later we came upon a huge manure pile -- same kind of scale -- that my host, whose training was in wate quality, noted was polluting a local river via rain runoff. When I asked, I got the same answer, essentially: the pile was there, left untended, because there were not sufficient "resources" to deal with it. And the surrounding fields -- almost throughout the country -- looked starved, poorly maintained and unproductive. Of course, the fertilizers and pesticides needed for their care were too expensive now that the faltering Soviet Union no longer subsidized their purchase, so they were left nearly fallow.

In twenty minutes we had passed by two huge (wasted and polluting) outputs of socialist agriculture -- the peoples agriculture! -- which combined, even as wastes, make one of the best fertilizers (an input they needed) ever developed. All they needed was to be combined...but there was not the fuel or the equipment to do so, given the scale on which they had been produced. And this scale had been the result not of a difference in ownership -- capitalism or socialism -- but because socialism, like capitalism, had embraced industrialism and applied it to agriculture, an essentially biological system. That is / was / will be the error, the category error (which see).

Here is a link to the AP article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070210/ap_on_sc/building_with_manure_5