MoJo Blogs and Articles

Wasted: 40 Percent of Food

By Julia Whitty — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:19:59 -0800

Americans, obviously, are eating more than ever before. A new study suggests we're also throwing away more than ever before. About 50 percent more per person since 1974.

According to the new calculations, food waste contributes to greenhouse gas emissions in the form of methane and CO2 from decomposing food. In the US, it also accounts for:

More than one-quarter of total freshwater use
Some 300 million barrels of oil a year (~4 percent of total American oil consumption)

Until now, studies of food waste have depended on interviews with consumers and inspections of garbage. Neither is particularly accurate.

In this study, researchers analyzed the amount of food consumed by tracking average body weight in the US from 1974 to 2003. They assumed that exercise levels hadn't changed in that period (an admittedly conservative approach). They compared these data with estimates of the total food available in the US as reported by the USDA to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN.

The difference between calories available and calories consumed (what the researchers call the missing mass of American food) equals food wasted. Here's how it breaks down per person per day in 2003:

3750 calories available
2300 consumed
1450 wasted

That's 39 percent of the American food supply that is never consumed by human beings. Multiply the individual waste by 300 million Americans and you get enough to feed the people of the Philippines.

The 39-percent estimate significantly exceeds the 27-percent estimate of the USDA, based on consumer and producer interviews.

The new study is out of the Laboratory of Biological Modeling, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, in Maryland. The paper is open access at PLoS ONE.

A little something to chew on as we head to Copenhagen.

The Inevitability of Afghanistan

By Kevin Drum — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:14:12 -0800

Like me, Fred Kaplan is glad he's not president right now. Why? Because he can't figure out what he thinks we ought to do in Afghanistan:

As with confronting most messes in life, the initial impulse is to flee. But if we simply pulled out, it's a near-certain bet that the Taliban would march into Kabul, and most other Afghan towns they'd care to, in a matter of weeks....Another problem with withdrawing is that it would signal, correctly or not, a huge victory for anti-American forces generally. If we left Afghanistan to the Taliban (and, by extension, al-Qaida), especially after such a prolonged commitment (at least rhetorically), what other embattled people would trust the United States (or the other putative allies in this war) to come in and protect them from insurgents? None, and they could hardly be blamed.

....I am uncomfortable making this case for two reasons. First, it's reminiscent of the bankrupt rationales, involving "credibility" and the "domino theory," for staying in Vietnam long after that war was widely viewed as a horrible mistake. But Afghanistan is different. The Taliban are not the Viet Cong, and Osama Bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh; there is no case, this time, that the enemy has a just claim to power. And the stakes are much higher: Communists ruling South Vietnam was never a serious threat to our security;¹ al-Qaida controlling a huge swath of South Asia is.

The second reason I'm uncomfortable about even saying this is that the argument can, and almost certainly will, be used to justify staying in Afghanistan if it turns out that this war is futile, too. It's easy to hear the generals saying, a year from now, "Three more brigades should do the trick, Mr. President" and "If we pull out now, Mr. President, our credibility will be severely compromised."

It's pretty hard to see how this ends well. But I think what it demonstrates most strongly is the fantastic political nightmare involved in ever pulling out of a war that hasn't been decisively won. Vietnam is the big-ticket example here, of course, but there are better ones. Take Somalia. After the Black Hawk Down incident in 1993, conservatives demanded that Bill Clinton pull out immediately. Not another American life was worth risking for a barren patch of dirt on the Horn of Africa. Clinton refused, insisting that we "finish the work we set out to do," and kept troops in country for another six months before withdrawing in an orderly way.

And what happened? Conservatives turned around and immediately started building up a mythology that Clinton had lacked spine and immediately ran for the exits at the first sign of trouble. Just like a Democrat to be so weak-kneed! What's more, it's now received wisdom on the right that it was this panicky withdrawal that first convinced Muslim fanatics that America was weak and could be attacked with impunity. In the end, Clinton took a hit for withdrawal even though he was the one who insisted on not cutting and running.

If that's what happens to a Democratic president who played a hawkish role in a small, unimportant war, what would happen to a Democratic president who played a dovish role in a big, important war? Nothing good. Pulling out of Afghanistan would have all the actual effects Kaplan talks about, but it would also be a political disaster.

I still plan to wait for Obama's speech tomorrow before I decide if his Afghanistan strategy is smart or not. But even if it is, it was probably sadly inevitable. The institutional support for war among the American chattering classes is just too powerful.

¹Hoo boy. That's easy to say now, but at the time it sure seemed every bit as important as al-Qaeda controlling a big chunk of Afghanistan seems to us.

The "Black Jail"

By Nick Baumann — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:09:47 -0800

One big news item from the weekend was the stories in the Post and the Times about a "black" detention site at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The stories fill in some details about what's going on at the jail, which previous reporting had suggested is a separate, Special Operations-run interrogation facility that has been kept off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross. According to the Post, detainees there have claimed they were "beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement."

I asked Jonathan Horowitz, a human rights researcher at the Open Society Institute who was quoted in both stories, whether he thought the Times and the Post had upped the pressure on President Barack Obama to address detainee access issues. Yes and no: While "there's a greater willingness to have dialogue on the story than there's been in the past," Horowitz says, he's "yet to see whether that will lead to any tangible results." Horowitz also said that the ICRC and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission should be given access to the site and that allegations of abuse should be investigated. It's not surprising to hear such things from a human rights researcher, but it will be interesting to see if he gets what he wants.

Fight Over Climate Aid Threatens to Derail Copenhagen Talks

By Kate Sheppard — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:38:00 -0800

Less than a week before the Copenhagen climate conference begins, confidential documents reveal that the EU is pushing to use existing aid money, not new funds, to help poorer nations reduce emissions and adapt to climate change—a stance that NGOs say could derail the entire summit.

According to documents obtained by The Guardian, EU negotiators have removed lines from a proposed draft agreement that call for a new climate fund for poor countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The text says the EU "cannot accept" proposed language that would call for climate aid to be "additional to" and "separate from" other development assistance funds.

If climate funds were to come entirely from existing pools of money, that would pose a huge problem for international negotiations. The United Nations has estimated that poor countries need as much as $170 billion per year to adapt to climate change. That's $50 billion more than developed countries spent on aid last year.

In public, Britain and Holland have argued that climate funds should be additional, while Germany, France and other smaller nations have said the money should come from existing aid. However, the Guardian also obtained an email from an official in the UK's Department for International Development making it clear that all money pledged for climate change so far is drawn from existing programs. (Most of it is pledged via the World Bank, which doesn't have a reputation for being all that clean when it comes to financing energy development.) This conflicts with public statements from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who just last Friday proposed a new $10 billion global fund to help poor countries with climate change to much fanfare. As it turns out, that money, too, would also come almost entirely from other aid budgets. The United States, meanwhile, has been even less generous.

For poorer countries, financial aid is a dealbreaker issue. Developing nations—especially places like Tuvalu, the drowning island nation that Rachel Morris reported on for the current issue of Mother Jones—are demanding new, additional funds to deal with the climate problems caused by rich nations. They have called for a minimum of $400 billion each year by 2020 to help curb emissions, expand clean energy development, and adapt to climatic changes that are already occurring.

So far, rich countries have suggested they may be prepared to offer around $100 billion annually, although finance ministers failed to agree on a concrete funding scheme in a meeting earlier this month. If that sum were to be drawn from existing aid, poverty and hunger alleviation programs, public health, agriculture, and other extremely important projects would suffer. "No developing country will sign up to an agreement that could give them no extra money at all," Oxfam senior policy adviser Rob Bailey told The Guardian. "The EU and other rich countries must provide new and additional finance, otherwise there will be no deal at all."

Wal-Mart: The Grinch That Stole Thanksgiving

By James Ridgeway — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:49:39 -0800

Few American spectacles are as grotesque as the one we witness every year on what’s known as “Black Friday.” Before dawn on the morning after Thanksgiving, throngs of shoppers stampede the nation’s retail stores, trying to grab up bargains before somebody else does. Last year, one such feeding frenzy took the life of Jdimytai Damour, the 34-year-old son of Haitian immigrants, who was working as a temporary employee at a Wal-Mart on Long Island. Witnesses said that many members of the crowd kept on shopping after they forced their way through the store’s doors and trampled Damour to death.

Marlene Lang, writing in Chicago’s Southtown Star, sums up the fallout from this gruesome tragedy:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration conducted an inspection and found that the New York store “fail(ed) to implement reasonable and effective crowd management principles,” including training that was “inadequate” to accommodate the advertised “Blitz Friday” that offered cheap-o electronics for all. OSHA slapped Wal-Mart with a “serious citation” and the maximum fine of $7,000. Uh, no, I’m not missing any zeros. That’s seven thousand dollars. Wal-Mart Stores promised to implement a crowd management plan for its New York stores and went to work consulting with big-event security firms.

Meanwhile, the deceased employee’s family sued for wrongful death, and Wal-Mart put out statements saying Damour had been part of the Wal-Mart family. Touching. The retail supergiant then cut a no-prosecution deal with the district attorney, promising beefed-up Black Friday crowd control along with generous contributions to the community–$1.5 million worth of local generosity and $400,000 in compensation to the victims of the incident.

Wal-Mart never admitted any guilt in Damour’s death. But the chain did cite its devotion to ”customer and associate safety” this year in announcing its novel approach to Black Friday overcrowding: To prevent the dangers posed by throngs of bargain hunters waiting for their stores to open, Wal-Mart would simply never close at all.

So on Thanksgiving 2009, nearly all Wal-Mart stores remained open all day, and all through the night into Black Friday. Recession-strapped Americans desperate for bargains could leave their dinner tables to spend Thanksgiving Day at Wal-Mart. And if they liked, they could stay there all night, wandering bleary-eyed through the aisles as they waited for special blow-out sales to surface at 5 a.m. on Friday. Wal-Mart workers, of course, had no choice but to join in the fun. Not that working on holidays is anything new for most employees of this notorious union-busting company, which has faced multiple class-action lawsuits for shorting its workers on wages and discriminating against women, minorities, and people with disabilities. (You can read about these, and much more, at Wal-Mart Watch.)

According to news reports, there’s another reason why Wal-Mart had to stay open during what’s supposed to be a heartwarming family holiday. As the story goes, the recession has driven Wal-Mart and other chains to desperation. ABC News depicted the extended hours as a last-ditch response to projected “anemic” holiday sales:

“They’re trying to eke every penny out of every day of the selling season,” says Wendy Liebmann, president of the consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail. “The more days they’re open, the more chance they have of pulling money out of our pockets.”

They’ve got good reason. Holiday spending likely will fall 1% in 2009 to $437.6 billion, the National Retail Federation projects. “Retailers need to be competitive,” says NRF spokeswoman Ellen Davis. “There’s a lot riding on the success of November and December retail sales.”

There’s just one thing wrong with this picture. As NPR reported earlier this month, “Unlike other big retail chains, Walmart has continued to report hefty profits during the recession. If anything, it’s becoming more competitive by lowering prices and remodeling stores to entice shoppers to spend more time.” Wal-Mart has a long history of driving local businesses into the ground, and this latest round of price-cutting is hurting everything from grocery stores to bookstores, as well as challenging the chain’s longtime rival, Target. As a result, Wal-Mart is likely to end up with an even bigger piece of the retail pie after the recession is over. And it’s doing quite well in the meantime, too: In 2008, Wal-Mart’s profits were up 7.2 percent over the previous year, and in the most recently completed quarter of 2009 alone, the company made morethan $3 billion.

There’s something both pathetic and obscene about the idea of hard-working (or worse still, unemployed) Americans battling for the last discounted blender or plasma TV in the middle of the night, while Wal-Mart’s execs sit in their backwater enclave in Arkansas raking in billions in profits. This year, at least, there were no reported deaths on Black Friday, in Wal-Mart or any other store. But extended hours couldn’t do away with a number of shopper brawls. At 4:03 on Friday morning, for example, sheriff’s deputies were called to a Wal-Mart in Rancho Cucamonga, California, where unknown subjects were said to be engaged in a fistfight ”near the electronics area.”

Protectionism

By Kevin Drum — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:49:29 -0800

I think Matt Yglesias makes a pretty good political point here about trade policy:

If you convince people that it’s not possible for monetary authorities to boost employment, and that it’s unwise to use fiscal policy to boost employment, then it starts to look irresponsible for politicians not to use trade restrictions to protect the jobs of people in their state/district. When an economy is near full employment you can say trade makes the pie bigger and people who lose their jobs will get new jobs. But [if] we’re years away from full employment — which both the Fed and the White House seem to think — then getting laid-off is catastrophic.

The Fed is obviously more concerned about inflation than it is about unemployment right now, and Congress likewise seems unwilling to do very much more to help create jobs. In an environment like that, public pressure for trade restrictions becomes hard to resist. So if free traders really want to keep protectionist sentiment tamped down, they'd be well advised to start supporting domestic policies that create jobs, bring down unemployment, and reduce the kind of financial fear that drives protectonist sentiment in the first place.

Brodner's Cartoon du Jour: You Betcha!

By Steve Brodner — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:19:45 -0800

For the last two weeks Sarah Palin has been blitzing the media with her blame-all, victim-athon book tour (my take on her tends toward the extra-toony). It used to be that a candidate who aspired to higher office would struggle to prove her knowledge of issues and ideas on new directions for the country. Instead, in order to solidify her standing with a sector of the boobwazee, she struggles to show how wrapped in paranoia she can be.

Sam Tannenhause puts it this way in today's New Yorker piece:

It happened...in 1976, when Ronald Reagan battled the incumbent Gerald Ford all the way to the National Convention; and in 1992, when Pat Buchanan harried George H.W. Bush during the primaries and then, in a televised address at the Convention, in Houston, thundered, "There is a religious war going on in this country." A similar revolt is under way today, though as yet no insurgent tribune has emerged—except, possibly, Sarah Palin. Polls taken last November showed that she had alienated centrists, and a majority of people still eye her with mistrust. But this is beside the point. Populists, from William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long through Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, have always been divisive and polarizing. Their job is not to win national elections but to carry the torch and inspire the faithful, and this Palin seems poised to do. That she is the first woman to generate populist fervor on such a scale enhances her appeal—and makes her, potentially, a figure of historic consequence.

ClimateGate

By Kevin Drum — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:15:53 -0800

As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup. Among the stash of emails recently hacked from computers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, one mentioned a "trick" for producing a nice looking graph, but the word "trick" was plainly used in the sense of "technique," not chicanery. There's nothing questionable there. Another bunch of emails shows that when scientists are communicating privately they can be as catty and nasty as anyone else. It's good gossip fodder, but nothing more. Another set of emails deals with outraged reaction to a particular journal article, but this isn't news. It was an entirely public incident when it happened a few years ago, and half the board of the journal resigned in protest. The emailers were determined not to have shoddy science published in peer-reviewed journals, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Then there are some emails about which research should and shouldn't be included in the next IPCC report, which, again, is entirely normal. Every scientist who worked on the IPCC report surely had opinions about which research was on point and which was shoddy. Finally, there's the revelation that CRU has destroyed some raw temperature data, but this happened back in the 1980s, before global warming was even on anyone's radar screen, and was obviously motivated by space considerations (they were paper records), not any kind of coverup. What's more, the raw data is still available from the original sources that provided it to CRU anyway.

Unfortunately, there are also a couple of messages that suggest an effort to destroy emails that might have been subject to a Freedom of Information request. That's a genuine problem, though it's not clear to me just how big a problem it is.

So on a substantive level, there's really very little to this. Certainly nothing that changes the actual science of climate change even a little. The earth is still warming and disaster is still highly likely if we sit around and do nothing. But George Monbiot thinks we lefties have our heads in the sand if we think that makes any difference:

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

....The crisis has been exacerbated by the university's handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond....When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU's opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped "no comment" and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean "guilty as charged".

....The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they're up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

It's hard to argue with this. Climate change skeptics have gotten fantastic mileage out of this affair, but that's only partly because technical explanations of facially damaging statements are never very convincing to the general public. An even bigger part of the problem is that a lot of the scientists involved haven't even been providing the technical explanations, leaving that up to others who are trying to get a handle on what's going on. From a PR standpoint, it's been a disaster so far.

For years the CRU has resisted public release of its underlying datasets, partly for the understandable reason that they're tired of dealing with amateurs who comb though raw data looking for ways to pretend that warming isn't really happening, and partly because they don't have the authority to release it all. Still, science is all about transparency, and annoying or not, the data should be available. Now it probably will be, and under the worst possible circumstances. It's going to be rough sledding for the next couple of years against the fever swamp crowd, aided and abetted by the coal industry. Buckle up.

Hope For Copenhagen?

By Kate Sheppard — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:00:56 -0800

The climate summit that kicks off in Copenhagen next week may turn out to be more eventful than you might expect, thanks to significant promises from the US and China in recent days.

Last week, the White House confirmed that Obama will make a pit stop at the summit and announce that the United States is committing to reducing planet-warming emissions in the neighborhood of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.

The next day, the Chinese government announced a goal of reducing their carbon intensity—the amount of greenhouse gas emitted per unit of gross domestic product—by up to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Since the US and China together are responsible for 40 percent of the world's emissions, these commitments are expected to have a real impact on the negotiations.

That's not to say that these goals are as ambitious as they could be, though. The Chinese target doesn't represent an absolute reduction in emissions. It's based on reducing emissions in relation to GDP—meaning that total emissions can continue to rise as China's economy grows.

And the US target is still far lower than those set by our European counterparts and those that the developing world has called for. Most of the rest of the world is working to get emissions below 1990 levels. The EU, for instance, has committed to slashing emissions 20 percent under 1990 levels by 2020 and has said it would go to 30 percent if other nations follow suit. The US cuts are only around 4 percent below 1990 levels. When world leaders agreed on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Clinton administration promised to reduce emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, although of course the Senate later scuttled that plan.

Still, these are the first meaningful, concrete numbers that the US and China have put on the table, raising hopes that the summit will make some advances even in the absence of a binding treaty.

The summit's host government in Denmark released its draft proposal today outlining what an agreement at the end of the two-week summit should look like. The draft calls for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. The bulk of those cuts would come from industrialized nations, which would need to cut emissions roughly 80 percent by 2050. The draft also proposes that total worldwide emissions should peak in 2020, decline thereafter, and global average temperature should not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Farenheit).

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he expects a five to eight page "politically binding" agreement to emerge from the summit, ideally one that includes 2020 targets for rich nations. He's also calling for a 2010 deadline for a final treaty.

Housing Meltdown, Ground Zero

By Andy Kroll — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:58:10 -0800

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

I. Rescuing the Dream

At the end of a week in mid-October when the Dow Jones soared past 10,000, Goldman Sachs recorded "just another fantastic quarter" with a $3.2 billion quarterly profit, JPMorgan Chase raked in a cool $3.6 billion, and a New York Times headline declared "Bailout Helps Revive Banks, And Bonuses," I spent a Saturday evening with about 100 people camped out in a northern California parking lot. A passerby, stealing a quick glance, might have taken the crowd for avid concertgoers staked out for tickets. There was, however, no concert here—just weary, huddled souls, slouched in vinyl folding chairs, covered by blankets, windbreakers, and knit hats against a late autumn chill.

A ragged line of them wound through the lot outside the entrance to the Cow Palace, a dingy arena decades past its prime on the southern edge of San Francisco. These people, and thousands more like them who had streamed into the arena all day long from as far away as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, were unemployed, broke, bankrupt, or at their wit's end. They were here waiting for help—for their chance to make it inside the warm arena to participate in "America's Best Mortgage Program."

For these homeowners, the last shot at saving their homes—and their personal version of the American Dream—lay under the glow of the floodlights in a expanse where tiers of brown and yellow seats encircled a desk-lined floor more accustomed to livestock shows and rodeos. This was, in fact, the latest stop on the "Save the Dream" tour, a massive homeowner-relief event organized by a consumer advocate group, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA).