Why is this man smiling?

G-8 photo, NYT 7/9/08

Because the rest of the G-8 joined him in stupidity and intransigence this week, offering a spineless and vague “pledge” to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by… 2050.  Oh, the courage!  The leadership!  The vision!

No wonder ”the White House painted the document as a victory.”

I wonder if Cheney got his hands on it first.

Update: Makes you so proud, doesn’t he?

$4.99/gallon

That’s what we paid for gasoline at a stop on the way back from a weekend wedding in Pasadena.  Next time you consider stopping at a Petro station, think twice.  I was so disgusted, I would gladly have driven on and taken our chances.  But we compromised and bought a few gallons, so that the engine wouldn’t begin sucking grit and grime off the walls of the fuel tank while we drove to the next station.  There was absolutely no reason for charging $4.99; they did it because they could.  Just a few miles north on Interstate 5, gas was about 40 cents cheaper.  At the most far-flung, “last gas for 40 miles” stations on the highway, gas was cheaper.  But Petro is a big truck and  travel stop at the northern foot of The Grapevine, and they simply took the opportunity to gouge.  Talk about highway robbery.  Next time you see this sign, drive on.

On further reflection: By the way, I have always been one of those party-poopers arguing that Americans have long paid too little for gasoline, and I am not averse to my own medicine.  I’ve already paid over $5.00/gallon for biodiesel (made from recycled veggie oil, not the virgin stuff).  But gouging for the simple sake of gouging is another matter.  Considering the prices in the area around that Petro station, gouging is exactly what they were doing.  Maybe they’ll be plowing the weekend profits into the development of alternative energy sources and flex-fuel technologies.

I crack myself up.

I like this guy’s plan for his DIY electric car:

Lefteris now wants to cover his roof in solar panels and recharge his car batteries from the sun.

“We have so much energy falling on our heads,” he said “and we are not doing anything with it.”

What’s my beef with meat?

Here I go again.  You may be wondering, perhaps with increasing irritability, why I keep posting about meat.  Short version: The bottomless American appetite for cheap and abundant meat is starving much of the world and contributing to global environmental destruction.  And the economies of scale that yield cheap meat are based on warehousing and slaughtering methods that are cruel and abusive to living animals, and that endanger our food supply.

If you prefer a longer version of the story, go read these links:

• Carnivores Like Us (the source of that great photo above)  (Aside: I follow this stuff fairly closely, but was stunned to read in a sidebar in ”Carnivores Like Us” that “70% of the total antibiotics consumed in the US are used to enhance growth and promote weight gain in livestock.”)
• Face it, we aren’t all going to become vegetarians
• Bad Cow Disease
• Health Risks Outweight Farming Cost Cuts

If you don’t want to think about ethics or economy at all, but still want to reduce your meat consumption, perhaps just for health reasons, read Mark Bittman’s tips, “Putting Meat in its Place.”

And if you prefer the cartoon version of this whole discussion, check out the Simpson’s episode, “Apocalypse Cow,” free on Hulu.  (Deep and grateful bow to The Ethicurean for calling that to our attention.  If you have any interest at all in food ethics and economics, you should be reading that blog.)

Open season on wolves

Many apologies for the long, dry spells around here! It’s a pretty nutty semester. Nutty enough that I barely registered the delisting of Gray Wolves from the Endangered Species List until a week after it happened. And during that first week, 10 wolves were shot in Wyoming alone - and the number had risen to 13 after 10 days. I wonder how many will be gone by Earth Day (Saturday)? How many “fierce, green fires” snuffed?

Oh, so many directions to direct a rant — toward a grotesquely oversubsidized western ranching industry that gets government assistance to extirpate top predators and wreak further havoc with our dwindling biodiversity, toward the the nearly-irrational hatreds and suspicions directed at individuals who wish to protect the nation’s wildlife, toward an Administration hell-bent on crippling the Endangered Species Act and every creature it protects (OK, that’s an easy choice)…

If you haven’t read Barry Lopez’s classic, Of Wolves and Men, treat yourself.

(Image to the right is St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio.  Story here.)

On a peripheral note, the Bushies will be suspending 30 or more environmental laws in order to complete work on The Fence this year.  What does a Homeland Security Fence have to do with the environment?  More than you probably realize.

Just as Bush is unilaterally dismantling the Endangered Species Act (yep, that’s the same link as above - in case you skipped it!), he is trying to “disappear” the EPA (that link will probably change next month, so I’ll quote one passage at length):

“Meat Out”

Late note: I started this post several weeks ago when the news broke, but forgot to finish it! So I’m finishing the thoughts and putting it up in honor of Meat Out day.

The HSUS investigation into abuses of cattle and protocol at the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse has now led to the largest beef recall in the United States — 143 million pounds.

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

“Because the cattle did not receive complete and proper inspection, Food Safety and Inspection Service has determined them to be unfit for human food and the company is conducting a recall,” Schafer said in a statement.

They say 37 million pounds went to the National School Lunch Program, and that most of the meat has probably been eaten. (So what’s the point of the recall?) And here’s the thing: this is just one processing facility, and it happened to get caught - thanks to an undercover investigator. Just how widespread and longstanding might these practices be? Notes Anna Lappe’:

This incident — including the abuse and questionable food safety of the meat from this slaughterhouse — is not just a case of a few bad apples. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system in which animal abuse and health concerns are predictable by-products of following the prime directive — maximizing profit — in a context of inadequate oversight.

The brutality captured in the video may be particularly extreme, but the nature of slaughterhouse’s ramped-up production inexorably leads to such animal suffering. With pressure to keep lines moving fast, for example, workers often fail to completely stun animals, so that cows can be conscious during slaughter. And those production levels? They’re soaring. Tyson, the largest processor in the country, slaughters 222,000 head of cattle a week, the equivalent of 1,321 an hour, seven days a week.

This high-octane production threatens eaters’ health, too. Under such conditions, meat can become tainted with fecal matter, increasing the likelihood of contamination with the potentially deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria. Since April 2007, concerns about E. coli instigated recalls of at least 30 million pounds of beef — enough to have provided a burger to every man, woman, and child in the nation. With this week’s recall, add another four for each of us.

Wrong again

You know all those Freeper and Newsmax and dittohead-type climate change skeptics who like to pronounce, with a “gotcha!” smirk, that just 30 years ago scientists were worried about global cooling? (…a talking point they undoubtedly picked up from one of those esteemed publications, or O’Reilly or Limbaugh or Senator James Dummkopf.) Well, they’re wrong about that, too:

Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

But never let the facts get in the way of a good story. While we’re on the subject, it will probably come as no surprise to you, given their steadfast refusal to acknowledge consumer demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles, that the Vice Chairman of GM calls global warming “a total crock of shit.” He also says just because he thinks so doesn’t mean GM isn’t committed to manufacturing environmentally friendly cars (that would be…um… when?): “My thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors…”

(I think it’s been awhile since I recommended The Republican War on Science, so let me just take this opportunity to say that if you haven’t read it, you should. But read it with a bottle of Maalox at your side. Or Wild Turkey.)

The world’s oceans: “no area is unaffected by human influence”

A study in the journal Science this week analyzed the ecological impact of 17 different human-caused factors on the world’s oceans. The factors included such things as agricultural run-off (pesticides, fertilizers), industrial and artisanal fishing, off-shore oil rigs, commercial shipping, pollution, invasive species, climate change in temperature and acidification, etc. “Our analysis indicates that no area is unaffected by human influence and that a large fraction (41%) is strongly affected by multiple drivers.” But if it’s any comfort, “…large areas of relatively little human impact remain, particularly near the poles.”

I grabbed the map above from the AOL News summary (sent by a student) of the Science article. The colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue represent - in that order - decreasing intensity of human impact. You’ll need a subscription to read the full article in Science, but the abstract is free, as are the technical details of methods and results.

Meat guzzling

Coincidental to my dairy musings yesterday is today’s NYT feature on the impending “sea change” in the economics of meat consumption. It’s a very good piece; I hope you’ll look at the whole thing, but here’s a “meaty” excerpt:

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.