Rachel's News #972

0 Aufrufe
Direkt zur ersten ungelesenen Nachricht

news.omega

ungelesen,
15.08.2008, 16:27:4215.08.08
an omeg...@googlegroups.com

.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Rachel's Democracy & Health News #972

"Environment, health, jobs and justice--Who gets to decide?"

Thursday, August 14, 2008...............Printer-friendly version
www.rachel.org --
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Featured stories in this issue...

The Pink Oleo Saga
  Why would the Supreme Court throw out state laws requiring
  oleomargarine to be colored pink? Why would state legislators pass
  such seemingly silly laws to begin with?
A Green Status Quo?
  It is currently thought to be political suicide to directly tell
  people the truth that Western civilization is generally at odds with
  life. The Industrial Growth model in particular is completely
  at odds with life, and actually helps define the concept of
  sustainability by providing a perfect example of its complete
  opposite, or negation.
A Steady-state Economy
  A failed growth economy and a steady-state economy are not the same
  thing; they are the very different alternatives we face, Herman Daly
  explains.
Perfumed Mother's Milk
  A new study reveals that women who use a lot of perfume during
  pregnancy have high amounts of the synthetic musk HHCB in their milk.
  Levels of the musk AHTN are elevated in the milk of women who use
  perfumed laundry detergent.
'Dead Zones' Multiplying Fast, Coastal Water Study Says
  Dead zones are now "the key stressor on marine ecosystems" and
  "rank with overfishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as
  global environmental problems."
Dying Frogs a Sign of Biodiversity Crisis
  "There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right
  now," said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at University
  of California at Berkeley.
Carbon Sequestration Frustration
  Power plant emissions that cause acid rain, water pollution and
  destruction of the ozone layer may actually be made worse by capturing
  the CO2 and pumping it deep underground, a new study finds.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), Aug. 5, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

THE PINK OLEO SAGA

Why So Many Good State Laws Are "Unconstitutional" (and What We Should
Do About It)

By Jane Anne Morris

[This article is adapted from Gaveling Down the Rabble: How "Free
Trade" Is Stealing Our Democracy, Apex Press (POCLAD Books), 2008.
www.pocladbooks.org]

What's pink, French, and unconstitutional?

Hint: The story of this early "frankenfood" provides an advance script
for the current global "free trade" frenzy. Over a century ago, its
introduction was an occasion for greasing the skids toward
establishing a U.S. "free trade" zone, one that is as devastating to
local democracy as the WTO and NAFTA are to national sovereignty.

Why would the Supreme Court throw out state laws requiring
oleomargarine to be colored pink? Why would state legislators pass
such seemingly silly laws to begin with?

Why are provisions that protect citizens against fraud, safeguard
their health, and protect local industry unconstitutional in the eyes
of the Supreme Court? A recent example applies to corporate
agriculture. A South Dakota constitutional amendment -- passed by 59%
in 1998 -- prohibited most corporate ownership of land used for
agriculture. In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively threw it out.
Nebraska's even stronger anti-corporate agriculture constitutional
amendment, first passed in 1982, was ruled unconstitutional in 2006 by
a lower federal court -- citing the South Dakota case.[1] Why do such
measures garner the dreaded unconstitutional label?

Probably for the same reason that has stood for over a century: they
interfere with the care and feeding of large corporations. They
challenge the Supreme Court's policy, evident since at least the
1870s, of nurturing and protecting corporations against the very
states that created them. After corporate lawyers do the research and
outline possible arguments, the Court has only to cut-and-paste a
decision.

The myth that the Supreme Court began its turn toward "business
interests" only since the early Nader years (as claimed by Jeffrey
Rosen in the recent "Supreme Court, Inc." in the March 16, 2008 New
York Times Magazine) ignores the long history that fills the pages of
Gaveling Down the Rabble.

Commerce Clause to the Rescue

But even the Supreme Court needs to point to something in the
Constitution that justifies its consistent pro-corporate decisions.
The handy constitutional clause that has become a favorite is the
domestic version of international "trade barrier" language: the
commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"The Congress shall have power... to regulate Commerce with foreign
Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
[Article I, section 8, clause 3]

The late-nineteenth century Pink Oleo saga provides a perfect example
for a quickie workshop on how the Supreme Court uses "free trade" to
get rid of good state laws.

After the mid-nineteenth century, more than one inventor around the
world sought to turn slaughterhouse offal into something that people
could be convinced to eat. If it had a long shelf life and was cheap
to make, all the better. The successful solution came from Frenchman
Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, who obtained a U.S. patent for oleomargarine
in 1873. Its commercial potential was quickly appreciated, as Mark
Twain captured in a chapter of Life On the Mississippi written in
1883. The gleeful conversation takes place between two businessmen on
a riverboat.

"You can't tell it from butter; by George, even an expert can't!...
We're going to have that entire trade... You are going to see the day,
pretty soon, when you can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself
with... we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has got to
take it... There's more money in oleomargarine than -- why, you can't
imagine the business we do." [Emphasis in original.]

Oleomargarine's introduction into a nation long accustomed to the joys
of udder butter churned up controversy. The "Oleo Wars" that ensued
pitted state legislators against the growing power of meatpacking
corporations. Corporate efforts to put oleomargarine in the nation's
pantries tell the archetypal story; at issue was whether state and
local governments would determine their own laws, or have terms
dictated to them by distant corporations.

The original oleomargarine was made not from vegetable oils (as it is
today) but from slaughterhouse by products subjected to industrial
processes in a factory. Mere inspection of a firkin of manufactured
oleomargarine could not determine whether it had been made from
inferior, doctored, or even dangerous ingredients. To add insult to
possible injury, sometimes this easily adulterated industrial food
product was fraudulently sold as real dairy butter. In addition, many
feared that competition from oleomargarine would threaten the growing
dairy industry. Health, consumer protection, and economic concerns
were closely intertwined.

In response to citizen concerns, state legislatures started passing
laws against oleomargarine. At the time, protectionist measures of
this ilk were nothing out of the ordinary. In 1884, the New York state
legislature prohibited the sale or manufacture of oleomargarine. In
1885, Pennsylvania followed suit. These and other overtly
protectionist acts reflected the people's will to use their imperfect
representative democracies to keep out a product they feared would
endanger them.

Manufacturers and purveyors of oleomargarine as a cheap butter
substitute (and source of profits) were not pleased at this
legislative attention. A variety of laws and a matching variety of
corporate challenges evolved into a cat-and-mouse game between
legislature and court ostensibly over artificial butter.
Pennsylvania's outright ban on oleomargarine was an early target.

On the same day that the 1885 Pennsylvania law was passed, a
Harrisburg grocer (Powell) was arrested for selling oleomargarine.
Lawyers representing corporations that manufactured and sold
oleomargarine argued on his behalf that their product was clean, pure,
and yummy, and that the right to make and sell it was covered by the
Constitution. On the other side, defenders of the Pennsylvania ban
argued that its intent to protect health and prevent fraud made it a
legitimate exercise of a state's "police power," the legal term for
the power to pass whatever laws are necessary and appropriate to
protect its citizens.

State Courts Upheld Rights of Legislatures to Protect People

A Pennsylvania court found the ban to be well within legislative
powers. In 1888, the U.S. Supreme Court also upheld it, strongly
endorsing a state's police power. The Court affirmed that protecting
and preserving public health and morals was one of the main tasks of
legislation, and that public policy should be determined not by courts
but by legislatures. If some were dissatisfied with the legislative
outcome, then appeal should be "to the legislature, or to the ballot-
box, not to the judiciary."[2]

But "Big Oleomargarine" tried again a few years later. In 1893, a
Pennsylvania resident (Schollenberger) and registered agent for a
Rhode Island oleomargarine-manufacturing corporation sold a tub of
oleomargarine in Pennsylvania. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
again upheld the state's ban, the case was appealed to the U.S.
Supreme Court. Meanwhile, states were also trying out a more colorful
approach.

State legislatures that wanted to keep oleomargarine out of their
states -- and there were many of them -- did not give up when their
oleo bans were threatened by commerce clause arguments. Instead, they
started to see pink as a way to regulate oleomargarine.

In 1890, the Vermont legislature prohibited the manufacture of
oleomargarine in that state, and specified that it could be sold in
Vermont only if colored pink. In 1891 Minnesota, West Virginia, and
New Hampshire passed similar laws. Not long afterwards, an alert
Minnesota oleomargarine S.W.A.T. team carried out a pantry raid and
confiscated a quantity of not-pink oleomargarine that had been
imported from Missouri by Armour Packing Co., a New Jersey
corporation. A federal court upheld Minnesota's pink law as an
appropriate use of the state's police power. Things were looking good
for the "pink is beautiful" movement.

But it was not to last. Corporate lawyers challenged the "pink oleo"
laws just as they had challenged the oleomargarine bans. Both the
Minnesota Pink Law and the Pennsylvania Oleo Ban reached the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1898.

Because only ten years earlier the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld an
oleo ban as a legitimate use of a state's police power, defenders of
the Pennsylvania law reiterated tried-and-true arguments about
protecting and preserving public health. Little did they know that a
new argument would be offered and the Supreme Court would go for it.
This time, "Big Oleo" trumped arguments about state police power and
public health and welfare by playing the commerce card. The
oleomargarine corporation lawyers argued that the Pennsylvania
oleomargarine ban was what today the WTO tribunals would call an
illegal trade barrier. The U.S. Supreme Court was persuaded, and,
basing its decision on the U.S. Constitution's commerce clause, the
late nineteenth century analog of what today is touted as "free
trade," ruled the Pennsylvania law unconstitutional.

=========================================================

Sidebar: Why Don't We Hear More About the Commerce Clause?

At state and local levels, the body politic's democratic impulses have
been tightly constrained by commerce clause rivets, so that these
days, we rarely hear of the commerce clause or "trade barrier"
language. Two reasons explain this low profile.

First, the work has been done, the lessons learned, the precedents
established. Between 1910 and 1919, for instance, the Supreme Court
struck down 83 state laws under commerce. Since 1990, the number is
only 13. Legislators got the message. In time, there were fewer cases
heard or appealed, and fewer appeals accepted by the Supreme Court.
This is the justices' way of indicating, "Been there, done that;" the
domestic "free trade" zone is a fait accompli, rarely discussed, and
disputed only around the edges.

Second, the grab bag of pro-corporate doctrines available to the
Supreme Court is bulging with possibilities. For example,
Massachusetts' selective procurement law, the so-called "Burma Law,"
was thrown out in lower federal courts partly on commerce arguments,
but the Supreme Court chose other grounds to nix the law.

Recent mention of the commerce clause in the mainstream media has
involved state laws on medical marijuana and interstate wine sales,
and the fact that much federal environmental law is justified by a
"nexus" link to interstate commerce. (See Gaveling's Chapter Five.)

1. Morris counts, plus statistics from Bernard Gavit's 1932 book, The
Commerce Clause.

2. Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, 530 U.S. 303 (2000); NFTC
v. Natsios, 181 F. 3d 38 (1st Cir., 1999); NFTC v. Baker, 26 F. Supp.
2d 287 (D. Mass., 1998).

========================================================

The Supreme Court's reasoning had two steps. First, it determined that
oleo was included in the "interstate commerce" category. Inclusion in
this category had consequences, which were the second step. An item of
interstate commerce might be regulated by a state, but could not be
prohibited, said the Supreme Court. "Absolute prohibition of an
unadulterated, healthy, and pure article" goes beyond the allowable
use of the state police power. A state cannot prohibit the import from
another state of a "lawful article of commerce," because that amounts
to regulating interstate commerce, which is a power of the U.S.
Congress.[3]

The decision took a big bite out of a state's police power. The ban
that had been okay in 1888 was unconstitutional by 1898. Now, a state
would have difficulty banning the import of anything that the Supreme
Court could be persuaded was an article of commerce (and by the late
twentieth century, this included toxic waste, air pollution, and
nuclear waste, among many other things).

Pink wouldn't work either: again the high court sided with the
corporations against the states. States' pink oleo laws were
unconstitutional because the pinkness requirement was as much a burden
on commerce as a ban. The reasoning was that if a state lacked the
power to prohibit the import of something (in this case,
oleomargarine), then it also lacked the power to require that the
imported item be adulterated in such a way that it would be unsalable.
As for example, by requiring that oleomargarine be pink... or blue or
red or black (other colors mentioned by the Supreme Court)... or
impregnated with an "offensive smell."[4]

In ruling against blue or stinky oleomargarine laws, the Supreme Court
took another bite out of an already dwindling state police power.
Legislatures, responding to a new situation (in this case, the
appearance of a new product) acted to protect citizens against
inferior products, fraud, and economic disruption. In this, they were
supported by farmers and dairy corporations. So far, it sounds
democratic enough, a routine use of the police power.

But then lawyers working on behalf of corporations hoping to profit
from this new product challenged the states' power to take such
action.[5] These challenges, being constitutional in nature, brought
the matter before federal courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court.
In evaluating the issue and explaining their decision, the justices
had exactly the kinds of discussions that must have previously
occurred in state legislatures, and prior to that, on street corners
and in hayfields scattered throughout the states.

They discussed the invention, composition, and manufacture of
oleomargarine; methods of determining its purity; testimony from an
analytical chemist; the fact that it was used by armies and navies
throughout Europe; and what size and type of container it might be
packaged in. The justices then gave their opinion that oleomargarine
was obviously safe and widely recognized as a food item, and that
butter and oleomargarine were "substantially identical." In short,
they had the kind of discussion that we might want a legislature to
have. But they are not legislators.

"Free Trade" Constitutionalized in Commerce Clause

Using the commerce clause, the "free trade" mantra of the time, they
decided that states could not ban the manufacture, import, and sale of
a substance that obviously many states wanted to ban. In other words,
Supreme Court justices legislated their own opinions by declaring
unconstitutional those laws they disagreed with. The Supreme Court
acted as a legislature. If we step back from the Supreme Court's
musings on oleomargarine chemistry and pink dye as a burden on
commerce, we can see the oleomargarine rulings for what they were:
direct assaults on people's power to govern themselves and shape their
communities.

The language of commerce (or trade), shrouded in the gravitas of
constitutionality, is a ruse to disguise a corporate elite's efforts
to escape government actions taken to protect the public welfare. It
has long been understood that corporate interests use the judicial
lever to undo legislative deeds.

"The old fights of state against nation were largely smoke screens to
hide an attempt by some private interest to invoke the aid of the
Court in combating public regulation. In large measure, this is the
case today." [This was written in 1943.] [6]

The underlying issue is not whether butter is better, or whether pink
margarine is repulsive, or even whether food policy (or economic
policy) should be a local, state, or national matter. The issue is who
should decide public policy: the people acting through a legislature,
or a handful of judges.

Courts provided a more favorable forum than did legislatures for a
"rematch" between corporations and states. Commerce clause rulings
exempted corporations from the concrete exercise of state and local
power, while delivering them into the kinder and gentler hands of the
federal judiciary. In Gaveling Down the Rabble, I show how Supreme
Court Justices since the 1870s used trade barrier language based on
the Constitution's commerce clause to promote the corporate agenda by
invalidating state and local laws that threatened corporate power.

========================================================

Sidebar: What the Supreme Court thinks is "unconstitutional" under the
commerce clause "trade barrier" doctrine? A sampling includes:

** laws discouraging "chain stores" from wrecking local economies

** laws requiring food labels to include information about
ingredients, place of origin or organic standards,

** laws banning import of goods made with child labor, or under other
repressive labor conditions,

** laws favoring state residents' subsistence needs (from natural gas
to fish) over the desire of corporations seeking to export for profit.

** laws requiring imported toxic waste to be pretreated and inspected,

** laws requiring country-of-origin labels on meat,

** state constitutional provisions limiting corporate agriculture,

** laws limiting export of state water resources,

** laws requiring a corporation to adhere to certain conditions in
order to do business in your state.

For discussion of these examples and more, see Gaveling Down the
Rabble.

========================================================

Like the "Oleo Wars," other controversies decided under the commerce
clause amounted to corporate challenges of state and local laws, with
the role of arbiter falling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Analogous
struggles were played out over other staples, and in other industries,
with surprisingly few variations to this day.

The transformation of the commerce clause into a wish-fulfillment
machine for corporate lawyers was breathtaking. The harm to democracy
done by the commerce clause "doctrine" is as damaging to democracy as
the "separate but equal" doctrine was to human rights. Both deserve
the same fate.

If African-American schoolchildren in unheated schoolrooms could
understand "separate but equal" and in the face of horrible violence
courageously demand its rejection, then today, those of us striving
for justice and sustainability ought to be able to see the Supreme
Court's commerce clause doctrine for the anti-democratic pro-corporate
scam that it is. I can only hope that we can begin to show the same
courage in working to reject it.

==============

Jane Anne Morris is a corporate anthropologist who lives in Madison,
Wisconsin.

==============

Endnotes:

1. The Court refused to hear an appeal of a federal court's order
preventing enforcement of the South Dakota measure, on grounds that
included commerce (S.D. Farm Bureau v. Hazeltine (2004)). The Nebraska
case was Jones v. Gale, 470 R. 3d 1261 (2006) 8th Cir. Neb.

2. The state court case that found the law constitutional was Powell
v. Commonwealth, 114 Penn. St. 265 (1887). The U.S. Supreme Court case
that upheld the ban was Powell v. Pennsylvania (1888).

3. Schollenberger v. Pennsylvania (1898).

4. Collins v. New Hampshire (1898). The lower federal court case that
had previously upheld Minnesota's law was Armour Packing Co. v.
Snyder, 84 Fed. 136 (1897).

5. See Martha C. Howard's excellent work, The Margarine Industry in
the U.S.: Its Development Under Legislative Control (Columbia Univ.
dissertation, 1951).

6. George D. Braden, "Umpire to the Federal system," 10 Univ. of
Chicago Law Rev. 27 (1942-3).

7. Fargo v. Stevens (1887); Leloup v. Port of Mobile (1888); Fargo v.
Hart (1904); Ludwig v. Western Union Tel. Co. (1910); Atchison, T. &
S.F. Ry. v. O'Connor (1912); Looney v. Crane Co. (1917); N. J. Bell
Tel. Co. v. State Board (1930). State and local efforts to protect
their economies against things like chain stores and "big box" stores
continued, but tended to use more indirect means, such as zoning
details or parts-per-million regulations. Corporate strategies also
evolved, often using the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection and
due process clauses, or other corporate constitutional "rights," to
force their way into communities.

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: Natural Systems Solutions, Aug. 15, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

A GREEN STATUS QUO?

By Dave Ewoldt

One of the common critiques of Al Gore's July, 17 speech at a
Washington, DC energy conference that I've heard -- from those few
environmentalists who actually understand ecology -- is that Gore's
proposals, first and foremost, are directed to ensure the status quo
survives. Of course, Gore adroitly sidesteps any mention of how that
status quo is going to continue to improve their standard of living
without their servants to prepare their food and dress them, or
without an atmosphere and topsoil that can even grow their food, or
even that global warming is but one factor calling into serious
question the sanity of Western lifestyles predicated on infinite
economic growth and material accumulation that can only artificially
confer a status that is superficial at best.

But this critique leads us to a bit of a quandary when looking deeper
at what Gore said. It is currently thought to be political suicide to
directly tell people the truth that Western civilization is generally
at odds with life. The Industrial Growth model in particular is 
completely at odds with life, and actually helps define the
concept of sustainability by providing a perfect example of its
complete opposite, or negation.

So, when people who have actually taken the red pill (a small subset
of those toying with the idea as possibly being a good thing to do)
pick out and focus on statements from Gore's speech such as, "The
survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,"
and, "The future of human civilization is at stake," and use those
statements to dismiss his entire message based on their beliefs that
these outcomes would be beneficial, they might be shooting themselves
in the foot. For if these are the only statements of Gore's that we
concentrate on, we lose a perfect opportunity to bring up the viable
and realistic alternative of powering down, relocalizing, and
reconnecting. When looked at from a broader framework, Gore's speech
can actually be a jumping off point for what more and more people are
coming to realize needs to happen.

The American way of life and our understanding of Western civilization
(which Gore incorrectly equates with human civilization) do need to be
consigned to the dustbin of history, I won't argue with that. But I do
think using that as a starting point is to risk losing a large segment
of the population that we should be compassionately reaching out to
with an honest awareness raising campaign of what we're really facing
and what we must, and can, do.

There's nothing wrong with rightly pointing out that civilization as
we know it is what has to go away; that powering a culture that is
inherently destructive to life with renewable energy is neither the
brightest nor the most rational thing to do. In fact, considering how
far into overshoot we are as a species, powering our current Western
lifestyles with renewables won't even buy us all that much time before
the Earth's ecosystems tip into collapse.

But I don't intend to go into a complete critique of civilization
here. Besides, others such as Derrick Jensen have done a very thorough
job of that in works such as "The Culture of Make Believe" and
especially "Endgame, Vols. 1 and 2."

What I picked up on, and think we can constructively build on, were
statements Gore made, as reported in the New York Times, regarding
the "worse confluence of problems facing the country." Think about
this for a second. What Gore is doing here is publicly tying energy
depletion and high cost, job loss, high taxes on wage earners, and
financial meltdown not only together, but with war. Very few political
progressives have yet to make this leap.

Some of Gore's other statements, "We're borrowing money from China to
buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the
planet. Every bit of that's got to change," are great as well -- as
far as they go, anyway. He's still shying away from details. He's not
being frank with people about what this really means and what must be
done. But he is asking people to examine relationships that are
normally glossed over at best.

This becomes an opening to talk to people about the fact that our way
of life is based on an exploitive power-over structure that confers
status and success on accumulation. It is a way of being that is in
direct conflict with the principles natural systems use to nurture and
sustain healthy, vibrant, and resilient ecosystems. This means it is
in direct conflict with who we really are as a species and as
individuals. Since it's elementary school math to figure out that on a
finite planet, being a "winner" means less for everybody else -- plus
the hard upper boundary on material accumulation -- in order to
continue this economic game without inequity growing to the point that
armed revolution is the only possible outcome requires selling a story
of growth in the abstract concept of financial capital in which the
commodification of everything, both real and imagined, is necessary.

What is needed, as Herman Daly pointed out decades ago, at the very
least is to set limits to inequality in wealth and income. Orthodox
growth economists insist that growth is a perfect substitute for
income equality, for as long as there's growth, there's hope. Thus,
the solution for the poor is to let them feed on the hope of eating
growth in the future! This system is, of course, a symptom of a deeper
malaise, but let's take it one step at a time.

We can help people make the next logical step -- that a system based
entirely on economic growth is not only killing the planet, but is
anathema to progress and prosperity when looked at from a perspective
that includes the whole.

Because the fact of the matter is that Gore is correct. We could get
100% of the energy we actually need from renewables, not in 10 years,
but today. As I keep pointing out, all it basically requires is to
quit manufacturing the 99% of the stuff we don't need or want, build
the rest of it to last and be repairable, decentralize the energy
grid, and quit looking at efficiency from the narrow perspective of
what is necessary to increase profit. This is the perspective we must
get people to apply, not the assumption everyone immediately jumps to
that alternative energy sources must be ramped up to replace what
we're using fossil fuels for today.

And then we can go the next step. Start redesigning and rebuilding our
communities to be livable instead of auto-centric, start getting
population under control (in part by getting rid of excess), etc.
These are but two aspects of a much broader process to create a truly
sustainable future based on relocalizing our communities and
economies, and reconnecting our lives to what truly feeds our body,
mind, and spirit in the natural world -- which necessarily includes
each other.

If we can help people connect the dots, and realize that a systemic
alternative is available that stands a better than even chance of
improving quality of life -- that could actually stave off the widely
predicted social collapse and chaos the status quo is leading us to --
people will come to their own conclusion that civilization as we know
it is a bad idea.

==============

Dave Ewoldt is a practitioner and researcher in the field of
ecopsychology, and co-founder and Executive Director of Natural
Systems Solutions, a non-profit that uses natural systems principles
as the foundation for sustainable lifestyles, organizations, and
communities. He is currently working on a book titled, "Connecting the
Dots: Reversing Our Handbasket to Hell."

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: Sustainable Development Commission, U.K., Apr. 24, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

A STEADY-STATE ECONOMY

By Herman E. Daly

The Earth as a whole is approximately a steady state. Neither the
surface nor the mass of the earth is growing or shrinking; the inflow
of radiant energy to the Earth is equal to the outflow; and material
imports from space are roughly equal to exports (both negligible).
None of this means that the earth is static -- a great deal of
qualitative change can happen inside a steady state, and certainly has
happened on Earth. The most important change in recent times has been
the enormous growth of one subsystem of the Earth, namely the economy,
relative to the total system, the ecosphere. This huge shift from an
"empty" to a "full" world is truly "something new under the sun" as
historian J. R. McNeil calls it in his book of that title. The closer
the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth the more it will
have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth. That
behavior mode is a steady state -- a system that permits qualitative
development but not aggregate quantitative growth.

Growth is more of the same stuff; development is the same amount of
better stuff (or at least different stuff). The remaining natural
world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the
metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized
economy -- much less a growing one. Economists have focused too much
on the economy's circulatory system and have neglected to study its
digestive tract.

Throughput growth means pushing more of the same food through an ever
larger digestive tract; development means eating better food and
digesting it more thoroughly. Clearly the economy must conform to the
rules of a steady state -- seek qualitative development, but stop
aggregate quantitative growth. GDP increase conflates these two very
different things.

We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. That makes it hard to
imagine what a steady-state economy (SSE) would be like, even though
for most of our history mankind has lived in an economy in which
annual growth was negligible. Some think a SSE would mean freezing in
the dark under communist tyranny. Some say that huge improvements in
technology (energy efficiency, recycling) are so easy that it will
make the adjustment fun.

Regardless of whether it will be hard or easy we have to attempt a SSE
because we cannot continue growing, and in fact so-called "economic"
growth already has become uneconomic. The growth economy is failing.
In other words, the quantitative expansion of the economic subsystem
increases environmental and social costs faster than production
benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high-consumption
countries. And even new technology sometimes makes it worse. For
example, tetraethyl lead provided the benefit of reducing engine
knock, but at the cost of spreading a toxic heavy metal into the
biosphere; chlorofluorocarbons gave us the benefit of a nontoxic
propellant and refrigerant, but at the cost of creating a hole in the
ozone layer that protects us from too much ultraviolet radiation. It
is hard to know for sure that growth now increases costs faster than
benefits since we do not bother to separate costs from benefits in our
national accounts. Instead we lump them together as "activity" in the
calculation of GDP.

Ecological economists have offered empirical evidence that growth is
already uneconomic in high consumption countries (see Index of
Sustainable Economic Welfare, Genuine Progress Indicator,
Ecological Footprint, and Happy Planet Index). Since neoclassical
economists are unable to demonstrate that growth, either in throughput
or GDP, is currently making us better off rather than worse off, it is
blind arrogance on their part to continue preaching aggregate growth
as the solution to our problems. Yes, most of our problems (poverty,
unemployment, environmental degradation) would be easier to solve if
we were richer -- that is not the issue. The issue is: Does growth in
GDP any longer really make us richer? Or is it now making us poorer?

For poor countries GDP growth still increases welfare, at least if
reasonably distributed. The question is, What is the best thing for
rich countries to do to help the poor countries? The World Bank's
answer is that the rich should continue to grow as rapidly as possible
to provide markets for the poor and to accumulate capital to invest in
poor countries. The steady state answer is that the rich should reduce
their throughput growth to free up resources and ecological space for
use by the poor, while focusing their domestic efforts on development,
technical and social improvements, that can be freely shared with poor
countries.

The classical steady state takes the biophysical dimensions --
population and capital stock (all durable producer and consumer goods)
-- as given and adapts technology and tastes to these objective
conditions.

The neoclassical "steady state" (proportional growth of capital stock
and population) takes tastes and technology as given and adapts by
growth in biophysical dimensions, since it considers wants as
unlimited, and technology as powerful enough to make the world
effectively infinite.

At a more profound level the classical view is that man is a creature
who must ultimately adapt to the limits of the Creation of which he is
a part (finitude, entropy, ecological interdependence). The
neoclassical view is that man, the creator, will surpass all limits
and remake Creation to suit his subjective individualistic
preferences, which are considered the root of all value. In the end
economics is religion.

Accepting the necessity of a SSE, along with John Stuart Mill and the
other classical economists, let us imagine what it might look like.
First a caution -- a steady-state economy is not a failed growth
economy. An airplane is designed for forward motion. If it tries to
hover it crashes. It is not fruitful to conceive of a helicopter as an
airplane that fails to move forward. It is a different thing designed
to hover. Likewise a steady-state economy is not designed to grow.

Following Mill we might define a SSE as an economy with constant
population and constant stock of capital, maintained by a low rate of
throughput that is within the regenerative and assimilative capacities
of the ecosystem. This means low birth equal to low death rates, and
low production equal to low depreciation rates. Low throughput means
high life expectancy for people and high durability for goods.

Alternatively, and more operationally, we might define the SSE in
terms of a constant flow of throughput at a sustainable (low) level,
with population and capital stock free to adjust to whatever size can
be maintained by the constant throughput beginning with depletion and
ending with pollution.

How could we limit throughput, and thus indirectly limit stocks of
capital and people in a SSE? Since depletion is spatially more
concentrated than pollution the main controls should be at the
depletion or input end. Raising resource prices at the depletion end
will indirectly limit pollution, and force greater efficiency at all
upstream stages of production. A cap-auction-trade system for
depletion of basic resources, especially fossil fuels, could
accomplish a lot, as could ecological tax reform, about which more
later.

If we must stop aggregate growth because it is uneconomic, then how do
we deal with poverty in the SSE? The simple answer is by
redistribution -- by limits to the range of permissible inequality, by
a minimum income and a maximum income. What is the proper range of
inequality -- one that rewards real differences and contributions
rather than just multiplying privilege? Plato thought it was a factor
of four.

Universities, civil services and the military seem to manage with a
factor of ten to twenty. In the US corporate sector it is over 500. As
a first step could we not try to lower the overall range to a factor
of, say, one hundred? Remember, we are no longer trying to provide
massive incentives to stimulate (uneconomic) growth! Also, since we
are not trying to stimulate aggregate growth, we no longer need to
spend billions on advertising. Instead of treating advertising as a
tax-deductible cost of production we should tax it heavily as a public
nuisance. If economists really believe that the consumer is sovereign
then she should be obeyed rather than manipulated, cajoled, badgered,
and lied to.

Free trade would not be feasible for a SSE, since its producers would
necessarily count many costs to the environment and the future that
foreign firms located in growth economies are allowed to ignore.

The foreign firms would win in competition, not because they were more
efficient, but simply because they did not pay the cost of
sustainability.

Regulated international trade under rules that compensated for these
differences (compensating tariffs) could exist, as could "free trade"
among nations that were equally committed to sustainability in their
domestic cost accounting. One might expect the IMF [International
Monetary Fund], the World Bank [WB], and the WTO [World Trade
Organization] to be working toward such regulations. Instead they
vigorously push both free trade and free capital mobility (i.e.,
deregulation of international commerce). Protecting an efficient
national policy of cost internalization is very different from
protecting an inefficient firm.

The case for guaranteed mutual benefit in international trade, and
hence the reason for leaving it "free," is based on Ricardo's
comparative advantage argument. A country is supposed to produce the
goods that it produces more cheaply relative to other goods, than is
the case in other countries. By specializing according to their
comparative advantage both trading partners gain, regardless of
absolute costs (one country could produce all goods more cheaply, but
it would still benefit by specializing in what it produced relatively
more cheaply and trading for other goods).

This is logical, but like all logical arguments comparative advantage
is based on premises. The key premise is that while capital (and other
factors) moves freely between industries within a nation, it does not
move between nations. If capital could move abroad it would have no
reason to be content with a mere comparative advantage at home, but
would seek absolute advantage -- the absolutely lowest cost of
production anywhere in the world. Why not? With free trade the product
could be sold anywhere in the world, including the nation the capital
just left.

While there are certainly global gains from trade under absolute
advantage there is no guarantee of mutual benefit. Some countries
could lose.

Now comes the problem. The IMF preaches free trade based on
comparative advantage, and has done so for a long time. More recently
the IMF has started preaching the gospel of globalization, which, in
addition to free trade, means free capital mobility internationally --
exactly what comparative advantage forbids! When confronted with this
contradiction the IMF waves its hands, suggests that you might be a
xenophobe, and changes the subject.

The IMF-WB-WTO contradict themselves in service to the interests of
transnational corporations. International capital mobility, coupled
with free trade, allows corporations to escape from national
regulation in the public interest, playing one nation off against
another. Since there is no global government they are in effect
uncontrolled. The nearest thing we have to a global government (IMF-
WB-WTO) has shown no interest in regulating transnational capital for
the common good. Their goal is to help these corporations grow,
because growth is presumed good for all -- end of story. If the IMF
wanted to limit international capital mobility to keep the world safe
for comparative advantage, there are several things they could do.
They could promote minimum residence times for foreign investment to
limit capital flight and speculation; they could propose a small tax
on all foreign exchange transactions (Tobin tax); and most of all they
could revive Keynes' proposal for an international multilateral
clearing union that would directly penalize persistent imbalances in
current account (both deficit and surplus), and thereby indirectly
promote balance in the compensating capital account, reducing
international capital movements.

One problem for the SSE already raised by the demographic transition
to a non growing population is that it necessarily results in an
increase in the average age of the population -- more retirees
relative to workers. Adjustment requires either higher taxes, older
retirement age, or reduced retirement pensions. The system is hardly
in "crisis," but these adjustments are surely needed to achieve
sustainability. For many countries net immigration has become a larger
source of population growth than natural increase. Immigration may
temporarily ease the age structure problem, but the steady-state
population requires that births plus in-migrants equal deaths plus
out-migrants. It is hard to say which is more politically incorrect,
birth limits or immigration limits? Many prefer denial of arithmetic
to facing either one.

The SSE will also require a "demographic transition" in populations of
products towards longer-lived, more durable goods, maintained by lower
rates of throughput. A population of 1000 cars that last 10 years
requires new production of 100 cars per year. If more durable cars are
made to last 20 years then we need new production of only 50 cars per
year. To see the latter as in improvement requires a change in
perspective from emphasizing production as benefit to emphasizing
production as a cost of maintenance. Consider that if we can maintain
1000 cars and the transportation services thereof by replacing only 50
cars per year rather than 100 we are surely better off -- the same
capital stock yielding the same service with half the throughput. Yet
the idea that production is a maintenance cost to be minimized is
strange to most economists. One adaptation in this direction is the
service contract that leases the service of equipment (ranging from
carpets to copying machines), which the lessor/owner maintains,
reclaims, and recycles at the end of its useful life.

Although the main thrust of reforms for the SSE is to bring newly
scarce and truly rival natural capital and services under the market
discipline, we should not overlook the opposite problem, namely,
freeing truly non rival goods from their artificial enclosure by the
market.

There are some goods that are by nature non rival, and should be freed
from illegitimate enclosure by the price system. I refer especially to
knowledge.

Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but
multiplied.

Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero and
its allocative price should be zero. International development aid
should more and more take the form of freely and actively shared
knowledge, along with small grants, and less and less the form of
large interest-bearing loans. Sharing knowledge costs little, does not
create unrepayable debts, and it increases the productivity of the
truly rival and scarce factors of production. Existing knowledge is
the most important input to the production of new knowledge, and
keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse. Patent
monopolies (aka "intellectual property rights") should be given for
fewer "inventions," and for fewer years.

What would happen to the interest rate in a SSE? Would it not fall to
zero without growth? Not likely, because capital would still be
scarce, there would still be a positive time preference, and the value
of total production may still increase without growth in physical
throughput -- as a result of qualitative development. Investment in
qualitative improvement may yield a value increase out of which
interest could be paid.

However, the productivity of capital would surely be less without
throughput growth, so one would expect low interest rates in a SSE,
though not a zero rate.

Would it be possible to have qualitative improvement (e.g. increasing
efficiency) forever, resulting in GDP growth forever? GDP would become
ever less material-intensive. Environmentalists would be happy because
throughput is not growing; economists would be happy because GDP is
growing. I think this should be pushed as far as it will go, but how
far that is likely to be? Consider that sectors of the economy
generally thought to be more qualitative, such as information
technology, turn out on closer inspection to have a substantial
physical base, including a number of toxic metals.

Also, if expansion is to be mainly for the sake of the poor it must be
comprised of goods the poor need -- clothing, shelter, and food on the
plate, not ten thousand recipes on the Internet. In addition, as a
larger proportion of GDP becomes less material-intensive, the terms of
trade between more and less material-intensive goods will move against
the less material-intensive, limiting incentive to produce them. Even
providers of information services spend most of their income on cars,
houses, and trips, rather than the immaterial product of other symbol
manipulators.

Can a SSE maintain full employment? A tough question, but in fairness
one must also ask if full employment is achievable in a growth economy
driven by free trade, off-shoring practices, easy immigration of cheap
labor, and widespread automation? In a SSE maintenance and repair
become more important. Being more labor intensive than new production
and relatively protected from off-shoring, these services may provide
more employment. Yet a more radical rethinking of how people earn
income may be required. If automation and off-shoring of jobs increase
profits but not wages, then the principle of distributing income
through jobs becomes less tenable. A practical solution (in addition
to slowing automation and off-shoring) may be to have wider
participation in the ownership of businesses, so that individuals earn
income through their share of the business instead of through fulltime
employment. Also the gains from technical progress should be taken in
the form of more leisure rather than more production -- a long
expected but under-realized possibility.

What sort of tax system would best fit a SSE? Ecological tax reform,
already mentioned, suggests shifting the tax base away from value
added (income earned by labor and capital), and on to "that to which
value is added," namely the throughput flow, preferably at the
depletion end (at the mine-mouth or well-head, the point of
"severance" from the ground). Many states have severance taxes. Taxing
the origin and narrowest point in the throughput flow, induces more
efficient resource use in production as well as consumption, and
facilitates monitoring and collection. Taxing what we want less of
(depletion and pollution), and ceasing to tax what we want more of
(income, value added) would seem reasonable -- as the bumper sticker
puts it, "tax bads, not goods". The shift could be revenue neutral and
gradual. Begin for example by forgoing $x revenue from the worst
income tax we have.

Simultaneously collect $x from the best resource severance tax we
could devise. Next period get rid of the second worst income tax, and
substitute the second best resource tax, etc. Such a policy would
raise resource prices and induce efficiency in resource use. The
regressivity of such a consumption tax could be offset by spending the
proceeds progressively, by the limited range of inequality already
mentioned, and by the fact that the mafia and other former income tax
cheaters would have to pay it. Cap-auction-trade systems will also
increase government revenue, and auction revenue can be distributed
progressively.

Could a SSE support the enormous superstructure of finance built
around future growth expectations? Probably not, since interest rates
and growth rates would be low. Investment would be mainly for
replacement and qualitative improvement. There would likely be a
healthy shrinkage of the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously
balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash. Additionally the
SSE could benefit from a move away from our fractional reserve banking
system toward 100% reserve requirements.

One hundred percent reserves would put our money supply back under the
control of the government rather than the private banking sector.
Money would be a true public utility, rather than the by-product of
commercial lending and borrowing in pursuit of growth. Under the
existing fractional reserve system the money supply expands during a
boom, and contracts during a slump, reinforcing the cyclical tendency
of the economy. The profit (seigniorage) from creating (at negligible
cost) and being the first to spend new money and receive its full
exchange value, would accrue to the public rather than the private
sector. The reserve requirement, something the Central Bank
manipulates anyway, could be raised from current very low levels
gradually to 100%. Commercial banks would make their income by
financial intermediation (lending savers' money for them) as well as
by service charges on checking accounts, rather than by lending at
interest money they create out of nothing.

Lending only money that has actually been saved by someone
reestablishes the classical balance between abstinence and investment.

This extra discipline in lending and borrowing likely would prevent
such debacles as the current "sub-prime mortgage" crisis. 100%
reserves would both stabilize the economy and slow down the Ponzi-like
credit leveraging.

A SSE should not have a system of national income accounts, GDP, in
which nothing is ever subtracted. Ideally we should have two accounts,
one that measures the benefits of physical growth in scale, and one
that measures the costs of that growth. Our policy should be to stop
growing where marginal costs equal marginal benefits. Or if we want to
maintain the single national income concept we should adopt Nobel
laureate economist J. R. Hicks' concept of income, namely, the maximum
amount that a community can consume in a year, and still be able to
produce and consume the same amount next year. In other words, income
is the maximum that can be consumed while keeping productive capacity
(capital) intact. Any consumption of capital, manmade or natural, must
be subtracted in the calculation of income. Also we must stop the
asymmetry of adding to GDP the production of anti-bads without first
having subtracted the generation of the bads that made the anti-bads
necessary. Note that Hicks' conception of income is sustainable by
definition. National accounts in a sustainable economy should try to
approximate Hicksian income and abandon GDP. Correcting GDP to measure
income is less ambitious than converting it into a measure of welfare,
discussed earlier.

The logic of the SSE is reinforced by the recent finding of economists
and psychologists that the correlation between absolute income and
happiness extends only up to some threshold of "sufficiency," and
beyond that point only relative income influences self-evaluated
happiness. This result seems to hold both for cross-section data
(comparing rich to poor countries at a given date), and for time
series (comparing a single country before and after significant growth
in income). Growth cannot increase everyone's relative income. The
welfare gain of people whose relative income increases as a result of
further growth would be offset by the loss of others whose relative
income falls.

And if everyone's income increases proportionally, no one's relative
income would rise and no one would feel happier. Growth becomes like
an arms race in which the two sides cancel each other's gains. A happy
corollary is that for societies that have reached sufficiency, moving
to a SSE may cost little in terms of forgone happiness. The "political
impossibility" of a SSE may be less impossible than it previously
appeared.

==============

Herman Daly, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College
Park, MD 20742 USA

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: Science News, Aug. 8, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

PERFUMED MOTHER'S MILK

By Rachel Ehrenberg

Mothers pass many things on to their babies -- including chemicals
from soaps and personal care products. A new study of Swedish moms
finds that those who used scented laundry detergent or lots of perfume
had elevated amounts of synthetic musks in their breast milk. How
these synthetic musks act in the body still isn't clear, says study
coauthor Anders Glynn of the Swedish National Food Administration and
Uppsala University in Sweden. Scientists have found other fat-loving
compounds in breast milk, including PCBs and certain pesticides with
clearly detrimental health effects. While finding chemicals in breast
milk raises concern about childhood exposure, most experts agree that
the benefits of nursing still far outweigh the risks.

The new study, published online in Environmental Science & Technology,
looked for trends in the amounts of seven synthetic musks in new moms'
breast milk over a seven-year period. These artificial compounds give
scent to many products and also act as longevity enhancers, or
"carriers," for other smells. Manufacturers favor synthetics over
natural musks, which are expensive and often come from endangered
animals.

Previous research has documented synthetic musks in breast milk in
women from the United States, Denmark and Germany, but this new work
is the first to correlate quantities of musks with the women's product
use. The team found that women who used a lot of perfume during
pregnancy had high amounts of the musk HHCB in their milk. Levels of
the musk AHTN were elevated in the milk of women who used perfumed
laundry detergent.

The researchers also assessed infant exposure to three of the musks.
Calculations suggest that Swedish breastfed infants are exposed to
quantities similar to those reported in U.S. infants. These levels are
well below the suggested tolerable amounts, which range from 7 to 500
micrograms per kilogram of body weight, depending on the musk. But
Glynn and his colleagues note that the tolerable amounts were set for
adults, so the comparison is questionable. Infants probably inhale and
absorb these synthetic compounds through their skin, as well as
getting the musks in milk, so total exposure to infants remains
unknown, Glynn says.

Citations & References:

Sanna Lignell, Per Ola Darnerud, Marie Aune, Sven Cnattingius, Jana
Hajslova, Lucie Setkova and Anders Glynn. 2008. Temporal Trends of
Synthetic Musk Compounds in Mother's Milk and Associations with
Personal Use of Perfumed Products. Environmental Science &
Technology. Online ahead of print. DOI: 10.1021/es800626n

Reiner, J. L.; Wong, C. M.; Arcaro, K. F.; Kannan, K. 2007. Synthetic
musk fragrances in human milk from the United States. Environmental
Science & Technology. 41, 3815-3820. DOI: 10.1021/es063088a

Copyright Society for Science & the Public 2000

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: National Geographic, Aug. 14, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

'DEAD ZONES' MULTIPLYING FAST, COASTAL WATER STUDY SAYS

By Anne Minard for National Geographic News

"Dead zones" are on the rise, says a new study that identified stark
growth in the number of coastal areas where the water has too little
oxygen to sustain marine life.

There are now more than 400 known dead zones in coastal waters
worldwide, compared to 305 in the 1990s, according to study author
Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Those numbers are up from 162 in the 1980s, 87 in the 1970s, and 49 in
the 1960s, Diaz said. In the 1910s, four dead zones had been
identified.

Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg, of the University of Gothenburg
in Sweden, said in a press release that dead zones are now "the key
stressor on marine ecosystems" and "rank with overfishing, habitat
loss, and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems."

Their study appears in the August 15 issue of the journal Science.

Dead Zones

Dead zones occur when excess nutrients -- usually nitrogen and
phosphorus -- from agriculture or the burning of fossil fuels seep
into
the water system and fertilize blooms of algae along the coast.

As the microscopic plants die and sink to the ocean floor, they feed
bacteria, which consume dissolved oxygen from surrounding waters. This
limits oxygen availability for bottom-dwelling organisms and the fish
that eat them.

(Related story: "Ocean Dead Zones Growing; May Be Linked to Warming"
[May 1, 2008])

Many marine ecosystems experience low oxygen levels between spring and
fall, Diaz said. But the lack of oxygen becomes persistent if nutrient
levels stay high.

Earth's largest dead zone, in the Baltic Sea, experiences oxygen
deprivation year-round, the press release said.

The second largest dead zone surrounds the mouth of the Mississippi
River in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite decades of efforts to clean up
U.S. rivers and lakes, high nitrogen levels are currently combining
with strong water flow to make that dead zone larger than it has ever
been.

Government-supported scientists not involved with Diaz's review are
forecasting an expansion of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone to a record
8,800 square miles (23,000 square kilometers), an area larger than New
Jersey.

(Related story: "Gulf of Mexico "Dead Zone" Is Size of New Jersey"
[May 25, 2005])

Nancy Rabalais, executive director and professor at the Louisiana
Universities Marine Consortium, said the paper "shows that there is a
lot of lost production of [seafloor] animals -- those living in the
sediments -- that could be food" for fishery stocks.

Diaz and Rosenberg note in the press release that dead zones tend to
be overlooked until they start to affect organisms that people eat.

Another researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, fish
pathologist Wolfgang Vogelbein, said high rates of disease [missing
word?] Bay stripers are due to the stress they encounter trying to
escape the Chesapeake Bay's summertime dead zone.

Mixed Efforts

Some local and regional governments have stepped in with conservation
and cleanup efforts to combat dead zones.

Maryland, for instance, gives $18 million a year in grants to farmers
who plant additional crops after their harvest to absorb leftover
fertilizer before it ends up in the Chesapeake Bay.

Rabalais, who was not involved in the Diaz review, said she has seen
little sustained effort to combat nutrient runoff in the Mississippi
River.

"In the recent years of increased acreage of corn and biofuels, the
amount of fertilizer used and the amount of nitrogen per volume of
Mississippi River water has increased dramatically," Rabalais said.

"What we have is this pulse of nutrients that are coming down our
rivers every year," Diaz added. "Somehow we have to find a way to stop
that.

"The loss of fertilizer is an economic drain on the industry. It is
not something the farming community wants to happen, and controlling
it is the key to controlling the spread of dead zones."

Copyright 1996-2008 National Geographic Society.

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: University of California at Berkeley, Aug. 12, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

DYING FROGS A SIGN OF BIODIVERSITY CRISIS

By Rachel Tompa

Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign
of a biodiversity disaster larger than just frogs, salamanders and
their ilk, according to researchers from the University of California,
Berkeley.

In an article published online this week in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers argue that
substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species
add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet.

"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right
now," said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC
Berkeley. "Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years.
They made it through when the dinosaurs didn't. The fact that they're
cutting out now should be a lesson for us."

The study, co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research
associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and
assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University, will
appear in a special supplement to the journal featuring papers based
on presentations from the December 2007 Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium
of the National Academy of Sciences, "In the Light of Evolution II:
Biodiversity and Extinction."

New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes
the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species.
Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events, and there
have been only five in our planet's history, until now.

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is
happening currently, is different from the past events. "My feeling is
that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens," Wake said.

There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the
current mass extinction started, Wake said. It may have been 10,000
years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted
many of the large mammals to extinction. It may have started after the
Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we
might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

But no matter what the start date, empirical data clearly show that
extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few
decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of
this drastic decline. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third
of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened
species are on the wane.

Our own backyard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his
colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is
grim there, as well.

"We have these great national parks here that are about as close as
you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really
startling drops in amphibian populations there, too," Wake said.

Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra
Nevada, five are threatened. Wake and his colleagues observed that,
for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the
Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years
declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as
Yosemite National Park. This means that each local frog population has
dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size. Originally, frogs
living atop the highest, most remote peaks seemed to thrive, but
recently, they also succumbed.

There are several frog killers in the Sierra Nevada, Wake said. The
first hint of frog decline in this area came in the 1990s, and
researchers originally thought that rainbow trout introduced to this
area were the culprits -- they like to snack on tadpoles and frog
eggs.
The UC Berkeley team did experiments in which it physically removed
trout from some areas, and the result was that frog populations
started to recover.

"But then they disappeared again, and this time there were carcasses,"
Wake said.

The culprit is a nasty pathogenic fungus that causes the disease
chytridiomycosis. Researchers discovered the fungus in Sierra Nevada
frogs in 2001. Scientists have documented over the last five years
mass die-offs and population collapses due to the fungus in the
mountain range.

But the fungus is not unique to California. It has been wiping out
amphibians around the world, including in the tropics, where amphibian
biodiversity is particularly high.

"It's been called the most devastating wildlife disease ever
recorded," Wake said.

Global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of
frogs around the world, Wake said. And the Sierra Nevada amphibians
are also susceptible to poisonous winds carrying pesticides from
Central Valley croplands. "The frogs have really been hit by a one-two
punch," Wake said, "although it's more like a one-two-three-four
punch."

The frogs are not the only victims in this mass extinction, Wake
emphasized. Scientists studying other organisms have seen similarly
dramatic effects.

"Our work needs to be seen in the context of all this other work, and
the news is very, very grim," Wake said.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health
helped support this study.

Audio files and slides of presentations from the Arthur M. Sackler
Colloquium on biodiversity and extinction are available online.

Copyright UC Regents

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

From: Science News, Aug. 13, 2008
[Printer-friendly version]

CARBON SEQUESTRATION FRUSTRATION

Burying carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants could increase other
pollutants

By Patrick Barry

As pollution bad guys go, carbon dioxide may be the media darling, but
trying to capture it and lock it away could allow other repeat
offenders to go free.

Power plant emissions that cause acid rain, water pollution and
destruction of the ozone layer may actually be made worse by capturing
the CO2 and pumping it deep underground, a new study [1.5 Mbyte PDF]
reported online and in an upcoming International Journal of Greenhouse
Gas Control suggests.

This increase of other emissions is largely because collecting and
burying CO2 -- a process called carbon sequestration -- requires
additional energy, new equipment and new chemical reactions at the
plants. And using current technology, meeting all of these
requirements releases extra pollutants.

"Other studies mostly just look at one aspect, the carbon capture,"
says study coauthor Joris Koornneef, an environmental scientist at
Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "This is a first step in trying
to quantify the [environmental] trade-offs."

Captured CO2 must be compressed to about 100 times atmospheric
pressure (which takes energy), transported to a suitable underground
reservoir (which takes energy) and pumped into the ground (which takes
energy). A coal-fired power plant that sequesters its CO2 must burn
about 30 percent more coal than conventional plants to cover these
energy needs. And that extra coal must first be mined (which has
environmental effects) and transported to the plant (which takes fuel)
-- the list goes on and on.

Even with this extra burden, a CO2-burying plant emits between 71 and
78 percent less CO2 than a normal coal-fired plant for each unit of
usable electricity produced, Koornneef and his colleagues report. But
when the researchers factored in all the "cradle to grave" pollution
of a CO2-burying plant, emissions of acid rain-causing gases like
nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides were up to 40 percent greater than
the total cradle-to-grave emissions of a modern plant that doesn't
capture its CO2.

If the mining, transportation and other supporting technologies become
greener in the future, the pollution penalty for carbon sequestration
would be reduced, the researchers note.

"The decision to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions is
going to be intertwined with decisions about how to deal with these
other emissions," comments Jim Dooley, an expert in carbon
sequestration at the Joint Global Change Research Institute in College
Park, Md., and one of the lead authors for a major 2005 report on
carbon sequestration by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That IPCC study concluded that nearly all properly buried CO2 would
probably remain underground for centuries.

"People are turning their attention to this, which is great," Dooley
adds, referring to the environmental costs of sequestration.

At the time that IPCC scientists were writing the 2005 report,
"everyone was thinking what are the environmental benefits of [carbon
capture], not so much the environmental costs," comments Ken Caldeira,
an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford,
Calif., and another lead author of the IPCC report. "The costs people
talked about were mostly economic costs."

Citation: Koornneef, J., et al. In press. Life cycle assessment of a
pulverized coal power plant with post-combustion capture, transport
and storage of CO2. International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2008.06.008

Return to Table of Contents

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  Rachel's Democracy & Health News (formerly Rachel's Environment &
  Health News) highlights the connections between issues that are
  often considered separately or not at all.

  The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining  
  because those who make the important decisions aren't the ones who
  bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human
  health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the
  rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among
  workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy,
  intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and
  therefore ruled by the few.  

  In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, "Who
  gets to decide?" And, "How do the few control the many, and what
  might be done about it?"

  As you come across stories that might help people connect the dots,
  please Email them to us at d...@rachel.org.
  
  Rachel's Democracy & Health News is published as often as
  necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the
  subject.

  Editor:
  Peter Montague - pe...@rachel.org
  
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

  
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 160, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903
d...@rachel.org
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Allen antworten
Antwort an Autor
Weiterleiten
0 neue Nachrichten