Everything that happens in congress now is assumed to bear on the crazily tight presidential race. So it makes sense that the House Dems just smashed through a compromise off-shore drilling bill, thus undermining a GOP line of attack. And it makes sense that the GOP lampooned it as a “figment of the imagination” (Rep. Don Young, Republican of Alaska).
Also predictable: Bush just vowed to veto it. Harder to predict is whether Senate Republicans will filibuster. They’ve been shouting “Drill baby drill” at conventions. Will they be able to get away with reading from a telephone book on the floor to block a bill that enables oil companies to do just that?
Image: flickr/PhillipC
The Democrats have been gradually retreating from their anti-off-shore-drilling stance ever since polls started to indicate that drilling is a winning issue for the GOP. Now they’re transitioning into all-out surrender. The bipartisan “Gang of 10″ congresspeople pushing for an energy bill that includes off-shore drilling has become the Gang of At Minimum 20. Even Pelosi has said she’ll let the oil companies drill near the southeastern US (far from her own California).
Pelosi has also been trying to find a way to partially salvage this apparently FUBAR piece of legislation. And she is being appropriately sneaky in her proposed compromise. Which is: in return for the ability to excavate for oil off-shore, oil companies have to contribute billions to the development of non-oil energy sources (wind, solar, etc). That allows America to try to fuel itself insofar as possible, but still forces Big Oil to contribute to its own obsolesence.
And the GOP can’t really oppose that aspect of a bill without looking completely in the pocket of Big Oil. Has that ever stopped them? Not that I know of. But it will at least force them to take the bait and lose face.
Image: flickr/barbwire55
As much as I love Prince Charles and his slow-food inclinations, I do have to admit the opposition has some pretty persuasive arguments. David King, a huge British scientist, just made a speech saying the West’s reluctance to bring genetically modified farming and other modes of “high-intensity” agriculture contributes to the continent’s 700,000 deaths from starvation every year.
It’s not clear, though, exactly how King squares his desire to help feed Africa through high-tech, ultra-efficient farming with his advocacy for carbon emissions cuts. (King is known for saying climate change is a greater threat than terrorism). The reason to like organic farming isn’t that it fits in better with a particular lifestyle; it’s that it’s comparatively low-emissions. If catastrophic temperature increases do take place, poor countries are going to be the ones who suffer the most from famine and disease.
So, yes, if the problem is that we’re not bringing genetically-modified crops to hungry Africa because they give us the heebie-jeebies, that is nigh-homicidally crazy. But if we’re trying not to industrialize their farming too rapidly in order to save them from pestilence and heat down the road, that’s more like a tough call.
Image: flickr/DavidDennis
My favorite quote from the Slow Food Nation conference this weekend came from Wendall Berry (poet, essayist, farmer, panelist).
He held up a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle piece that said the best advertisement for the Slow Food movement was the pleasure of carefully preparing and lingering over a meal, and then described what the article got wrong. The following account of what he said is from the Journal:
[Berry] said the reporter described pleasure, as it relates to the Slow Food movement, in a limited view — that the description treated pleasure as a specialty, “a form of idleness,” which leaves out the possibility that good work could also be pleasurable… By limiting the ideas behind Slow Food to just “tasteful consumption,” Mr. Berry argued, the movement is limited in its growth.
If the Slow Food movement is going to catch on outside the upper-middle class, it’s going to be a movement about making people want to farm and distribute food locally. Not making them want to drive to consulting gigs in the city, come home, put on Graceland, and cook said locally farmed and distributed food and sit around talking/blogging/referencing David Sedaris. We need more farmers, working less efficiently, in the sense of using less fossil-fuel burning, soil-eroding methods. (See my lionization of Prince Charles, who is admirably blighted with nostalgia for agrarian England.)
Image: Slowfoodnation.org
Two smaller stories combined to make this weekend interesting.
Saturday, Nancy Pelosi presented her compromise version of an energy bill permitting offshore drilling. Even Obama has been publically supporting offshore drilling these days, and the general consensus is the GOP’s been gaining some fans by saying, we drill offshore, your gas prices go down.
Tellingly, the part of the compromise bill the GOP got huffy about was the repeal of tex credits for oil companies. They hold it down for their friends, consistently.
The bright spot is more and more info circulated about the new animated comedy series about environmentalists by Mike Judge (the man who brought us Office Space). It’s called The Goode Family. It’s airing in November, and apparently the dog kept on a vegan diet attempts to eat other pets. Judge has hired the two King of the Hill writers who wrote Blades of Glory, a decision I support; a script that drops a reference to the Detroit underground figure-skating scene reflects the correct sensibility for lampooning my demographic.
Image: flickr/fluzo
Prince Charles ticked off the actual British government today by calling dependence on genetically-modified food grown by big corporations an environmental catastrophe. Some respected scientists were appalled, and cited the growing demand for food around the world as a good reason to keep trying to make agriculture as efficient and productive as possible.
But I’m sort of with the flighty aristocrat ignoramus on this one. Charles, who owns an organic farm, is trying to make the legitimate point (I think) that the more you industrialize farming and consolidate it, the less sustainable it tends to be. A multinational business generally tries to minimize the number of man-hours that go into tending its vast holdings. The fewer farmers required to create a truckload of crops, the better for management. This means lots of machines that burn fossil fuels, lots of pesticides with dubious Silent Spring side-effects, and the depletion of soil by growing one crop on it over and over again, rather than carefully rotating crops, preventing erosion, and taking the other measures you usually take to protect your land if your family farm is going to be your sole source of income your whole life. In the long term, that sort of thing can help create exactly the sort of food crisis we’re suffering right now.
Sure Charles’s affection for small, organic farms might be partly grounded in Brideshead Revisited nostalgia for the merrie olde days, and his rhetoric is overheated. But he’s basically right. Even if you think the monarchy is evil, this is like that scene in an action movie where the bad guy gets a speech and you realize he has a point.
Image: flickr/C’est moi!
The White House got caught scheming to dilute the endangered species act today, and the first volleys in a potentially fun Washington rhetoric battle have been fired. 
To summarize:
REPORTERS: Somebody leaked an early draft of this administration proposal to us and it says it will let the various federal agencies decide for themselves whether a road or tunnel, or whatever thing they want to build, will put rare wildlife at risk. They won’t have to consult with Fish and Wildlife anymore.
SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-CALIF): That’s illegal. If you want to do that, you’re going to have to try to hammer legislation through congress.
LOBBYIST FOR DEVELOPERS: We just want to be able to build things faster, and right now it really sucks for us how long we have to wait before we build things.
WILDLIFE CONSERVATION GROUP: If the government lets you do that, bald eagles may die.
DEPT. OF INTERIOR BUSH UNDERLING: We know that secretly this whole wildlife thing you guys are always talking about is actually about curbing carbon emissions. You just want to find a way to help halt global warming by stopping some developments that create emissions. You are obsessed with that or something.
One potential way for greens to stop this proposal would be to try to find a legal basis on which to stall it until later in the year. If we then got Obama, he’d be able to erase the proposed Bush changes no problem because such edicts take a little while to go into effect. But if we got McCain, we’d probably be screwed on this.
Image: flickr/graybeard763
Yesterday, congressional Republicans killed a Dem oil-drilling bill dead. Bush said earlier this week that he’d veto it if it came to his desk, so the Dems needed two-thirds of the vote and couldn’t get it. The bill would have made oil companies like the ultra-profitable Exxon explore for oil on land they’d already acquired before they started drilling on un
explored land.
The Republicans took an evil-looking position servicing their great donor, the energy industry. But they were able to get away with it in terms of PR fallout because all they had to do was say, “you really want to mess with where people can drill for oil when gas is at $4/gallon?” Democrats tried to get them with a “use it or lose it” motto. It’ll be interesting to see how each party tries to use the gas-prices issue to bludgeon the other this election year.
Image: flickr/Kanaka’s Paradise Life
If you’re a yellow perch or a walleye, native to the Great Lakes, the last fifty years have been something out of War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Earth Girls Are Easy et al. Strange alien species fiercer than their American and Canadian counterparts, like the Eurasian ruffe, have been arriving out of nowhere, taking your food, ruining your habitat. If you’re a smallmouth bass, the distinctly unattractive round goby, pictured below, eats your egg nests. As a result, humans in the area are suffering about $200 million worth of ecological damage every year, a new study says. 
This is a matter of ocean vessels accidentally dragging species from far away into the lakes through their ballast water. A big chunk of the estimated annual loss, $123.6 million, comes from the loss of recreational fishing money—those hobbyists love the bass.
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