"The only 'sustainable' thing to do with the Convention is to cancel it"

Commenter Rich on Matthew Yglesias' site is right on. The Democratic and Republican conventions are wasteful PR events. If they were meetings on my electronic calendar, I would Decline them. The only way to make them "sustainable" is to cancel them outright.

Moving Closer to Your Job

The Seattle Times focuses on some folks who are abandoning the suburbs of Seattle for the city itself. My family has made the same choice, opting to be in the city rather than the 'burbs this time around. That's partly a lifestyle choice (we detest the barren 'burbs), and partly a choice mandated by environmental concern.

It's great to see people fleeing the suburbs. I want to see city neighborhoods become all-inclusive enclaves again. That said, there are other alternatives to the new reality of expensive oil, including 4-day work weeks and telecommuting. Moving is under the control of the individual employee; 4-day work weeks and telecommuting are options that businesses must be pressed to support.

In the end, all three strategies will do more than just save gas: by shaving time off of our commutes and giving us more time at home, they provide the opportunity for us to build community and strengthen our families. Aren't those goals that politicians on both sides of the political spectrum could support?

Praying for Dollar Gasoline

I know I'm a latte-sipping liberal elitist for saying it, but these people are just plain stupid.

When you folks are ready to get up off your knees and inconvenience yourselves by doing something useful about our energy crisis, give us a holler, eh?

Obama to McCain: Screw Your X-Prize for Car Batteries!

I knew there was something amiss about McCain's $300 million free-market incentive to the individual (or monolithic corporation) who could invent a better electric car battery. Yes, such an achievement deserves reward. But I imagine many engineers and scientists already want to do this, and for nobler reasons. Dean Kamen could make tons of money cranking out cheap gee-whiz gadgets; instead, he's invented a device to bring cheap drinking water to impoverished nations.

That Wired comment thread brings up an excellent point vis a vis commercialization of necessary technologies. One commenter urged Kamen to turn his machine over to "greedy capitalists" to drive its production costs down to the $1,000-$2,000 target range needed to make Kamen's Slingshot viable for worldwide distribution. Another reader astutely noted that this is exactly what Kamen attempted with the Segway, an expensive toy whose real purpose was to drive down the costs of parts needed to make the iBot, Kamen's wheelchair that traverses stairs and puts disabled people at the same height as the abled. Markets aren't omnipotent; they're often short-sighted and blind to our higher motives.

Barack Obama, to his immense credit, recognizes this, and has called McCain out:

When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn't put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win -- he put the full resources of the United States government behind the project and called on the ingenuity and innovation of the American people.

Other Gristmill readers take Obama to tack, however, for not going further than the traditional, free-market-oriented approaches. Still, after a horrid week in which Obama backtracked on both NAFTA and FISA, this was nice to see.

McCain Back-Tracks His Party on The "Personal Virtue" of Energy Efficiency

This is laughable:

"Energy efficiency is no longer just a moral luxury or a personal virtue," he told a crowd gathered at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in California on Tuesday morning, echoing language from his June 17 energy speech. "A smarter use of energy is part of a critical national effort to regain control of our own energy future."

It makes you wonder what ne'er-do-wells have been running around the country decrying energy efficiency as simply a matter of "personal virtue."

Oh, yes. That's right. Thanks, Google!

The fact is, conservation never was a matter of "personal virtue." While Republicans have been crafting plans to save the incandescent light bulb from extinction, we've brought our planet perilously closer to collapse. How bad is it? Well...so bad that even the Republican candidate for President can no longer deny the gravity of the problem.

Nader to Dems: Don't 'Scape Me, Bro!

Ralph Nader is pissed that Democrats are still pissed at him.

He said voters have allowed government to become overrun by corporate interests with no competing force to pull it in the other direction.

“If you don’t have a breaking point, you have no moral imperative in your attitude and that’s the one question they hate to be asked,” he said. “They have eternity working for them because forever there will be a least-worst party between the Democrats and the Republicans.”

I'm (partially) with Nader on this. If you take the angry Democratic logic to its extreme, this country will never have more than two dominant political parties. There will always be a "close election" that demands not "splitting" the vote. (Case in point: 2008 will be the third consecutive "close" election demanding party unity.)

And yet...sigh.

Mr. Nader called presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama a "waffler" who has abandoned principle to try to win. He added that the senator from Illinois offers little different from his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Prodded by The Times as to whether things would improve under a Democratic president, Mr. Nader stood firm.

Democrats aren't just angry at Nader for blowing the 2000 election (which is as much Al Gore's fault as anyone's). They're angry over his artless, tactically tone-deaf approach to politics.

Let's be honest: on one level, Nader's dead right. Obama's doled out some heavy panders to the coal industry and AIPAC, among others. But on another level, this is what politicians do. They dissemble. They suppress their real feelings and opinions on an issue if they feel the time isn't right to press for real change.

In reading Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che Guevara, I've been surprised how even Fidel Castro, up until the moment he consolidated power, toed a moderate line to hold together his fragile alliances with other anti-Batista groups. Castro also disavowed any Communist connection for years - even as one of his top comandantes, Che Guevara, was writing Marxist epistles - in order to keep the United States confused and sidelined. (It worked: CIA and State found themselves at odds over whether to support one or more rebel groups, or back Batista until the bitter end.) He only became a fire-breathing demagogue after he'd tightened his military grip on the island and shut out his allies.

My point isn't that Obama is Castro. (Goddess forbid.) My point is that this is what you do in a democracy, where power is shared across legislatures and throughout branches of the government. Demagoguery is the language of dictatorship. In a democracy, you pick your battles. For those of us who dedicate ourselves more to the causes than the candidates, that's painful to watch. There's wisdom behind that old adage about laws and sausages.

The questions isn't whether Obama does or doesn't pander. The question is, what will he do in the long haul? For example, is "clean coal" a serious policy initiative - or a tactical feint to keep the coal industry happy while he presses for real change? What does he really mean by an "undivided Jerusalem"? Will he really fight to strip the FISA bill of the telecom immunity provision, after abandoning his previous promise to filibuster immunity outright? Are these panders enough reason to hand John McCain the privilege of stacking the Supreme Court with conservatives, building permanent bases in Iraq, and presiding over the continued desecration of the environment? Those are serious questions, undeserving of the flip attitude with which Nader bats them aside.

Nader's right about the "least-worst" mentality, and the ossification of our two-party system. It'd be wonderful to have some serious thinkers and politicians spend their credibility on third-party candidacies. Unfortunately for Nader, he's already squandered all of his.

Paul Roberts Speaks in Seattle on "The End of Food"

I vowed that, once I got back to Seattle, I would take greater advantage of this city's intellectual offerings. Less drinking, more thinking. I made good on that promise last night by going to hear Paul Roberts speak at Seattle Town Hall about his new book, The End of Food.

Today's Solutions Becoming Tomorrow's Problems?

From the reviews I'd read, Roberts' book sounded like little more than a re-capitulation of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Whether consciously or not, Roberts laid out immediately how his work differed. His curiosity lay, he said, in researching how our current food system grew from the seeds of seemingly fortunate accidents. He cited some fishermen in the 1940s who noticed that the fish they were catching were getting bigger every year. Given that they were fishing downstream from a pharmaceuticals company, this concerned them. They alerted the company, who assigned biologist Thomas Jukes to ferret out the solution. It turns out the company had been dumping the mash used in making Tetracycline - an antibiotic - into the river. Jukes correctly hypothesized that the antibiotics were killing gut bacteria in the fish, which freed up calories that were normally diverted to immune system functions. Tada - bigger fish.

The rest is history: Jukes' discovery led to slaughter operations across the country feeding Tetracycline feed to their livestock to create cheap supplies of large meat.

At the time, Roberts emphasizes, this was a good thing. It was shortly after WWII; there was a meat shortage in the US, and hunger worldwide. These weren't "bad people"; these were good people making what seemed like good decisions that ended up having unintended consequences. (On the other hand, Jukes was known for his anti-environmentalist and libertarian streak, having defended the use of DDT in the 60s. Jukes defended the use of antibiotics in feed at late as 1980, crying that if it were truly a harmful practice the market would eventually sort it out. Like many of his ilk, Jukes couldn't accept that the market does a shitty job of accounting for secondary consequences.)

Roberts used this story to pronounce two insights: (1) yesterday's solutions have become today's problems; and (2) we mustn't let today's solutions become tomorrow's problems.

Corn Ethanol and Slaughterhouses

Roberts gave two examples of how today's solutions are becoming tomorrow's problems. The first was "biofuels" - by which he meant not all biofuels, but specifically corn ethanol. When the government began paying a $1.50 subsidy on bushels of corn to divert more of that resource into ethanol production, it contributed to today's crop price problems. Roberts refuses to believe that our quadrupling of corn ethanol production has had minimal effect on crop prices.

I lean toward believing Roberts. I'm more convinced by Michael Grunwald's article in Time, where he points out that "[t]he grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves." We need to switch rapidly to alternative modes of transport and to denser urban populations - not find new paths to "cheap gas". (Note: Grunwald says we've quadrupled our production of ethanol. I swear that Roberts said "quadrupled". Not sure who's right. It's a staggering increase either way.)

The second example brought Roberts back to antibiotics. Companies are now feeding less antibiotics to the captives in their CAFOs. This means the animals are smaller - i.e., are "yielding" less. (And yes, I find it disturbing to talk about another living creature in terms of its "yield".) But the machines that dice 'em and slice 'em are expecting larger animals. The result: more fecal contamination in our meat.

So Why Not Go Vegetarian, Mr. Roberts?

The current system was devised to be "scalable." But that's a laugh, says Roberts. He points to the 2007 beef recall by Topps Foods. Because a single batch of e. coli-contaminated beef got into our food supply, this massive distributor had to go out of business. Forget environmental sustainability, says Roberts - that's not even economically sustainable!

Unfortunately, like Michael Pollan and others, Roberts makes a great implicit case for going vegetarian or vegan - but is unwilling to make it explicitly. He did call on us to reduce our meat consumption, eliminating meat from our diet at least three days out of the week. Three cheers for that. But during the Q&A session, he derided the idea of using the currenty food crisis to promote one's own "ideology."

This was the same speaker who, 20 minutes before, had his audience audibly groaning as he described how Tyson and other large chicken distributors used the process of "mechanical separation" to turn chickens into a slurry, which was then shaped into patties and nuggets. The thought of turning living beings into Soylent White was obviously distasteful, both to him and his audience. So why defend it? Why not go for The Full Monty? Roberts was fully aware that "manufacturing" (ugh) a pound of beef requires 20 lbs. of grain - what he called "an enormous storehouse of calories locked away" inside of animals. If ceasing to eat meat three days a week is good, then ceasing to eat meat seven days a week is better, no? In the absence of an assertive defense of meat-eating, Roberts' refusal to endorse vegetarianism for those ready to make that leap rang hollow.

Conclusion

As for solutions, Roberts didn't have much of anything new to add. But who does? The real solutions lay in action, not in speaking or writing.

One interesting observation he did have was that we needed to find ways to make farming fun again. Farmers love to farm; they quit not because they hate it, but because agribusiness has rendered farming both dull and unprofitable. He lauded Farmer's Markets as being one of the only means that urban kids can have to meet real farmers, and learn more about how their food is made and where it comes from.

Roberts begged us all to learn to cook for ourselves - a recommendation I can't second strongly enough. He scoffed at the idea that we don't have time to cook. How can that be true, he said, when the average American watches TV four hours a day - some of which consists of watching cooking shows?! If you want time to cook, he scoffed, it's easy: spend less time watching other people do it.

I'm ashamed to say that, despite having lived in this city previously for eight years, this was my first time at a Town Hall event. It won't be my last. Although he was something of a rapid-fire speaker, Roberts was still fun to listen to - a knowledgeable author who could rattle off interesting facts and insights effortlessly. It's heartening to see folks like him fighting the good fight.