fowl
Trump’s Puerto Rico video tells positive story but leaves a lot on cutting-room floor.
The footage shows the extent to which the Trump administration is portraying the federal government’s response in the best possible light, despite the island’s ongoing power, water and health problems.
A few minutes into a video about Puerto Rico relief efforts that President Trump tweeted out this week is a short clip about U.S. Forest Service workers clearing fallen trees off a road in the rural interior.
Over the sound of chain saws, the Forest Service’s fire chief explains how this will allow for the easier distribution of food, medical supplies and other aid. But his full comments are cut off by a shift to footage of a ship used as a hospital.
Had the road-clearing clip continued for 15 seconds, the president’s millions of Twitter followers would have heard the fire chief praise the people of Puerto Rico for successfully clearing many roads before the federal government arrived. The sentiment seems contrary to the president’s repeated criticism of local efforts and his claim in the tweet accompanying the video: “Nobody could have done what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!”
In the full clip, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency posted on its Twitter account Saturday, Jaime Gamboa says: “So the citizens of Puerto Rico were doing an outstanding job coming out and clearing roads to help get the aid that’s needed. Because that’s occurring, we’re bringing our folks in and they’re just making the roads wider, more usable.”
The 8-minute-48-second video provides the kind of narrow, positive view of relief efforts in Puerto Rico that the president has been trying to convey amid the humanitarian crisis there — a montage of stacks of bottled water, helicopters moving concrete slabs and supplies, boats carrying medical items and trucks hauling diesel. There are many more federal workers and military members featured than Puerto Ricans in need of aid, and there is no mention of the fact that 84 percent of the island is still without power and more than one-third of residents do not have access to clean drinking water. The last 81 seconds are devoted to documenting Trump’s four-hour visit to the island last week.
The selectively edited compilation shows the extent to which Trump and his administration are portraying the federal government’s handling of the disaster in Puerto Rico in the best possible light, despite the enduring power, water and health problems there nearly three weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall. The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the video and its formation.
During Trump’s trip on Oct. 3, he visited San Juan and a nearby municipality that were not as heavily hit as other parts of the island. Trump characterized the territory as being in full recovery mode, told locals they no longer needed flashlights, made a disgusted face when told how water purification works, playfully tossed paper-towel rolls to residents as if they were basketballs and noted that Puerto Rico’s death toll was much lower than that of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After his trip, statistics about access to power and drinking water in Puerto Rico disappeared from FEMA’s main information page about Hurricane Maria but were restored following a Washington Post report.
Trump’s tweet of the video landed at 7:37 p.m. Sunday, when those close to Trump say he had grown increasingly frustrated that his administration was being criticized, not praised, for its handling of Hurricane Maria. Earlier in the day, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, attacked by Trump for earlier criticism, tweeted that power had collapsed in a San Juan hospital and the federal government did “NOTHING!”
“Increasingly painful to undestand the american people want to help and US Gov does not want to help. WE NEED WATER!” she repeatedly tweeted early Sunday.
The video tweeted by Trump hours later opened with the message: “What the fake news media will not show you in Puerto Rico . . .”
The production pulls together a hodgepodge of videos from a variety of sources, mostly within the government but also including a charity and a media outlet. All the footage is aimed at an upbeat message.
Some of the footage had previously been highlighted by the White House’s social media operation, such as a short news-style package of the Coast Guard delivering medicine to an island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast on Oct. 4. The video shows roads that appear easily traveled — along with a woman in shorts and a tank top who hugs a Coast Guard member and profusely thanks him and others for bringing insulin and other medication. Trump’s director of social media, Daniel Scavino Jr., tweeted it Sunday afternoon with the message, “Amazing stories like this, all over Puerto Rico.”
There is a Pentagon video about relief efforts, narrated by white and purple text, that was posted Friday on Twitter. The video, produced by DOD News Now, features troops carrying and delivering aid, more helicopters, relief being distributed in a municipality east of San Juan, heavy equipment clearing brush, and footage of the Puerto Rican governor.
Other parts are not clearly labeled. There is footage of two trucks hauling supplies near an airplane hangar like the one Trump visited last week, although it’s unclear when and where the clip was made, or who made the clip, which is repeated later in the video.
One clip features work by the American Red Cross, which is not a part of the federal government. It shows the charity’s effort to bring wireless Internet to Ponce, a major city along Puerto Rico’s southern coast.
“Thank you to the Red Cross for connecting me with my whole family,” a young woman says in the video, which was posted on the Red Cross’s Twitter account last Wednesday.
Many of the clips are missing context. Unlabeled footage of workers emptying fuel out of a tanker truck, for example, was filmed on Sept. 29 as Puerto Rican National Guard members delivered diesel to hospitals relying on generator power. Another series of clips shows Ohio National Guard members passing bottled water and loading a pallet onto a military cargo plan; the footage, posted Oct. 3 on Twitter, was shot as the troops were headed to Puerto Rico and not yet on the island, as might be assumed from the rest of the video.
There is also footage of the Coast Guard delivering supplies to a residence for the elderly in Ponce and members of the military delivering food and water to Utuado, the same inner-island municipality where forest workers were working to clear the road. And there is a shot of a helicopter heavy-lift operation filmed by the Independent, a British publication, and published on Oct. 4 before being tweeted out by the Pentagon two days later.
The final part of the video is an 81-second documentary that the White House released following Trump’s visit last Tuesday. The quality is higher than the rest of the production, and there is a soaring soundtrack and footage taken from various angles.
The president and first lady step off Air Force One waving. Trump chats with some of those at the airport as a horde of reporters records his every move. There is brief footage of fallen trees in San Juan and Trump meeting with local officials in an Air National Guard hangar. Trump arrives on the USS Kearsarge off the coast of Puerto Rico in a helicopter and salutes members of the military. Then the video jolts back in time to Trump touring a neighborhood just outside San Juan — which was easily reached by motorcade and did not require helicopter travel — and visiting an evangelical church.
Calvary Chapel is the largest English-speaking church on the island, and many of its members are in the military, federal workers or transplants from the mainland. Jason Dennett, the church’s pastor, said a Secret Service agent who used to live in Puerto Rico suggested Trump visit the church about a week before his visit. The day that Trump visited, Dennett said, there were about 150 locals at the church, although many seemed more interested in getting a photo with Trump than obtaining canned food or paper towels.
On the video, the footage goes into slow-motion as Trump hands a can of chicken into the crowd at the church. The camera also zooms in on pro-Trump signs in the church, including one that reads “Let’s Make Puerto Rico Great Again,” a play on the president’s campaign slogan.
At the end, it’s back to the helicopter ride to the Kearsarge, into a briefing with members of the military and on to the deck, where Trump shook hands with those aboard.
The video then fades to black, and a white icon of the White House pops onto the screen.
Joyce Koh, Dan Lamothe and Arelis R. Hernández contributed to this report.
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Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off
Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST
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The Independent Online
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“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”
To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.
Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species.
“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”
Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”
Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)
When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.
Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.
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More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices.
The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.
“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet.
Wildlife under attack
The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.
Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate.
In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years.
Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”
Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)
The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.
The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.”
And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.
The link with food
Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.
Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.
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What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.
One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.
It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)
According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos.
It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.
But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat.
According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.
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Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.
In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.
The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”.
Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)
“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.
Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline.
CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.
And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”
Solutions
Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.
Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”
Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)
Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed.
Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.
Less meat
Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.
Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.”
He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.
Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)
He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.
By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard.
“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”
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Investor Jeremy Grantham is worried about the world.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“
BARRON'S MFQ
Jeremy Grantham is Worried About the World
The veteran investor now runs a $900 million foundation focused on protecting the environment. What he supports, where he invests.
By SARAH MAX
Oct. 6, 2017 11:42 p.m. ET
Tony Luong for Barron's
Investors know Jeremy Grantham as the chief investment strategist of GMO, the $77 billion Boston-based asset management firm he co-founded in 1977. The venerable value investor is praised for his prescient market calls, including predicting the 2000 and 2008 downturns. He also told investors to “reinvest when terrified” in a piece published in 2009 on the very day the market hit its postfinancial crisis low.
In environmental circles, Grantham, who just turned 79, is equally esteemed. In 1997 he and his wife, Hannelore, converted their foundation to focus exclusively on the environment. The $900 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment gives money to organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and World Wildlife Fund, and supports climate-related research and communication at four academic institutions. It has contributed to the training of more than a hundred Ph.Ds in climate-related work, and funded two Pulitzer-winning projects and one recipient of an Emmy. Last year Grantham, who is British, was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his philanthropic contributions to the environment.
As an investor, Grantham’s priority is earning the best return. Still, he says, it’s impossible to separate what he knows about the environment and how he thinks about risk and opportunity. “If you believe, as I do, that climate change is so severe that it’s an actual question about survival as a well functioning global society, then you know that I take it extremely seriously,” he says.
If we don’t solve climate change, he warns, “all the other things we are trying to protect and encourage are a waste of money and energy.”
Barron’s: What sparked your interest in climate change?
Grantham: Twenty-eight years ago, I had a series of fairly epic summer vacations with my wife and three kids. The first trip was in the Amazon, the Galapagos, and the Andes, and involved taking dugout canoes up rivers in pouring rain with my four-year-old daughter hiding under my poncho. The next one was in Rwanda, during a pause in the civil war, and on to Tanzania. The final one was to Borneo. We sailed up to the middle of nowhere and stayed in longhouses that had one visitor a year.
This exposed us to the masses of clear-cut forests and the interminable piles of logs lying along the side of the rivers. We all became increasingly obsessed by the significance of climate change and the damage to the environment.
What is one of your biggest concerns?
Acceleration. Carbon dioxide is going up at an increasing rate, with the three biggest increases occurring in the last three years; the climate is warming at an increasing rate; and the water is warming at an increasing rate; and therefore, the level at which oceans are rising is increasing at an accelerating rate. It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.
“It’s one thing for the world to be deteriorating, but deteriorating at an increasingly fast rate is particularly dangerous and scary.“ —Jeremy Grantham Tony Luong for Barron's
Tell us about your foundation.
Total annual giving runs about $25 million to $30 million. About 30% is in the U.K., where, all things being equal, research costs half as much as it does in the U.S.
We fund four climate-change institutes—at Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and Sheffield University, as well as a related investment at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
We give 20% to about a dozen small organizations engaged in communications. We allocate about 40% of our giving to some of the usual suspects, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife Fund, and a fourth group called RARE, which is U.S.-based but spends everything abroad protecting the environment.
The remaining part is an army of 15 or 20 more specialized enterprises, one of which is based on population. Population is a massive problem, particularly in Africa. All the safety margins, the resilience of these countries, has been chewed up by having so many people. Resources are a threat in the long run. Overpopulation is a threat. Climate change interacts with all of them in a rather pernicious way.
What is the foundation’s approach to grant-making?
We try to look at critical areas for the future. We require that grantees are urgent in their style and have fire in their bellies. We are especially focused on areas that are important but haven’t yet been recognized—and where the need for speed is critical. We also look for important areas that are politically incorrect and have a hard time attracting money because they are so controversial—like population growth.
How does the foundation invest its assets?
We have $900 million spread across a family foundation, a public trust, and, to a substantially lesser degree, my personal assets. The three pieces are run as one with the help of Cambridge Associates [an investment consultant]. We have a stunningly large amount, about 45% of assets, in early-stage venture capital funds chosen by Cambridge.
We’ve got 35% in what I modestly call world-class, very conservative hedge funds, including GMO. The remaining 20% is invested by the foundation’s executive director, Ramsay Ravenel, and myself. About 12% is in emerging markets, 5% in cash, and 3% is in our GMO Resources IV [ticker: GOVIX] in 2013, and GMO Climate Change III [GCCHX].
How has your insight into climate change influenced your investment decisions at GMO?
I’m not doing any direct investing at GMO. For the last 10 years, I have spent my time thinking about the big picture—productivity, economic booms and busts, climate change, and resource limitations. But, as an investor, you can never know too much. I can’t separate how my investing instincts were affected by knowing a lot more about resource limitations and the effects of climate change. It was part of the background music, like everything else I know.
The two funds you mentioned, GMO Resources and GMO Climate Change, are for institutional investors. Tell us about them.
We launched Resources in 2013, and Climate Change this year. Lucas White is the portfolio manager of both funds. One of the advantages for the Resources fund is that, because resource prices are volatile, most investors hate them. Value managers who might normally buy them shy away; they outperform over time because they’re cheap. Meanwhile, these stocks tend to have a low correlation with most other investments.
How do you reconcile your views on climate change with investments in the Resources fund?
It’s complicated because the biggest resources are fossil fuels. New technology is an arrow aimed at the heart of fossil fuels; after a decent one or two years, the slow burn of green energy will substitute them away. They will have to manage a long, slow decline. [About 30% of the portfolio is in oil and gas, versus nearly 70% for most market-cap-weighted resource benchmarks.] We would expect over the next 10 years to be handsomely underweighted. That does not mean that there may not be a time when the fund will choose to invest.
And the Climate Change fund?
The goal is to make money by understanding the bewildering amount of change going on. We’re not pretending that every holding is ESG. Our job is to understand this rapidly changing world and make an attractive fund for clients who would like to be investing on the right side of climate change. For example, copper mining can be a dirty business, but it’s hugely critical for electric cars. [ Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is one of the fund’s top holdings.]
Where else does it invest?
Clean energy is almost a third of the portfolio, including companies focused on solar and wind power, and storage. [The fund owns Vestas Wind Systems (VWS), First Solar (FSLR), and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), which mines lithium used for storage.]
Energy efficiency is 24% of the portfolio. One aspect of this is transportation, which includes companies that are making items to increase the efficiency of motors and cars themselves. It also includes energy efficiency in buildings, as well as diversified efficiency enterprises. [Two holdings, Schneider Electric (SU.France) and Eaton (ETN), have multiple businesses tied to energy efficiency.]
There is also a fair amount in timber, fish farming, and suppliers of farming materials and equipment, such as Deere [DE], right?
We have, by other people’s standards, a stunningly large allocation of more than 17% to agriculture.
Can technology help feed more people?
Technology in agriculture is much harder, because it comes up against the laws of physics. There is just so much energy you can get out of the sun if you are a plant. We have spent a few thousand years boosting that efficiency level. We are approaching a theoretical limit.
On top of that, you have to throw in the increasing effects of storms, droughts, and temperature. Higher temperatures carry more water vapor, 4% to 5% more up in the air than there used to be. You don’t get more storms, but when you get them, they’re heavier. If you chart the incidence of heavy storms, say one inch in an hour, you will find that they are doubly grown over the last 40 years. That is so obviously the case when you read the news.
What about new food sources or agricultural methods?
There is steady progress on agriculture and feeding the public. We may have to change what we eat. To take a very tough example for Westerners, insects are incredibly nutritious and much, much more efficient sources of energy than chicken. They’re eaten a lot in Africa and the East.
Fish are being overfished, but there are great opportunities in seaweed, which is entirely edible. Seaweed can grow 10 to 20 inches a day, four times faster than the fastest-growing land plant. In that context, the sea is amazingly underoptimized. We’ve squeezed the common grains as much as they can be squeezed, but there are plenty of secondary grains important in Africa and Asia that have much more productivity potential.
Humans have all the skills and technology required to have a perfectly recyclable world that doesn’t face imminent danger from climate change, and doesn’t have massive poverty. But we have chosen to go on a rather more chaotic and help-yourself route.
Capitalism does a brilliant job on millions of decisions balancing supply and demand and so on, but on a handful of issues, it seems, it is clearly ill-equipped to deal with the problem. How do you handle global overfishing? How do you handle long-term erosion of soil and the overdevelopment of underground water, each of which is owned by an individual farmer, or an individual? These require more global cooperation and more concrete internal cooperation, and thinking and planning.
Can capitalism help with some of that? Using ESG criteria to choose securities is becoming more common.
Interest in ESG isn’t necessarily because of the rush of blood to being good. It could be just good business. If you’re a producer of consumer goods, and people become worried about the plastics in your product, or botulism in your food, you lose business.
There’s quite a lot of work that suggests that people who are early movers on good behavior are demonstrating that they are simply thinking more about the future, how it will look, how it will play out over 10 or 15 years. A study by Harvard Business School concluded that in the past, the companies that were good on ESG did exactly that, and they were outperformers.
But the heavy lifting [in combating climate change] will still be technological. By the early stage of the next decade, solar and wind will be three cents per kilowatt hour and by the middle of next decade—which is just seven years away—it will be cheaper than the marginal cost of nuclear and coal. The cost of running [a coal plant] and mining will be more than building a solar plant or wind farm from ground zero.
When that point is reached you’re talking economics. People who would have stood their ground until the end of time will be eagerly signing up for solar farms, storage facilities, etc.
Thank you, Jeremy.
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Goodbye - and good riddance - to livestock farming.
The suffering inherent in mass meat production can't be justified. And as the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsed.
What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?
There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.
The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat. Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m deal China signed last month to buy lab-grown meat marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But it won’t happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many years.
The answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers, is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free-range beef or lamb, not battery pork. But all this does is to swap one disaster – mass cruelty – for another: mass destruction. Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage, but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency. Grazing is not just slightly inefficient, it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is used for grazing as for growing crops, yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81g of protein consumed per person per day.
A paper in Science of the Total Environment reports that “livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss”. Grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them on to the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.
In the UK, for example, sheep supply around 1% of our diet in terms of calories. Yet they occupy around 4m hectares of the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7m hectares). The rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all proportion to the meat produced.
Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a plant-based diet, 15m hectares of land in Britain currently used for farming could be returned to nature. Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and magnificent habitats.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet.
Understandably, those who keep animals have pushed back against such facts, using an ingenious argument. Livestock grazing, they claim, can suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil, reducing or even reversing global warming. In a TED talk watched by 4 million people, the rancher Allan Savory claims that his “holistic” grazing could absorb enough carbon to return the world’s atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. His inability, when I interviewed him, to substantiate his claims has done nothing to dent their popularity.
Similar statements have been made by Graham Harvey, the agricultural story editor of the BBC Radio 4 serial The Archers – he claims that the prairies in the US could absorb all the carbon “that’s gone into the atmosphere for the whole planet since we industrialised” – and amplified by the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Farmers’ organisations all over the world now noisily promote this view.
A report this week by the Food Climate Research Network, called Grazed and Confused, seeks to resolve the question: can keeping livestock outdoors cause a net reduction in greenhouse gases? The authors spent two years investigating the issue. They cite 300 sources. Their answer is unequivocal. No.
It is true, they find, that some grazing systems are better than others. Under some circumstances, plants growing on pastures will accumulate carbon under the ground, through the expansion of their root systems and the laying down of leaf litter. But the claims of people such as Savory and Harvey are “dangerously misleading”. The evidence supporting additional carbon storage through the special systems these livestock crusaders propose (variously described as “holistic”, “regenerative”, “mob”, or “adaptive” grazing) is weak and contradictory, and suggests that if there’s an effect at all, it is small.
The best that can be done is to remove between 20% and 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions grazing livestock produce. Even this might be an overestimate: a paper published this week in the journal Carbon Balance and Management suggests that the amount of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) farm animals produce has been understated. In either case, carbon storage in pastures cannot compensate for the animals’ own climate impacts, let alone those of industrial civilisation. I would like to see the TED team post a warning on Savory’s video, before even more people are misled.
As the final argument crumbles, we are left facing an uncomfortable fact: animal farming looks as incompatible with a sustained future for humans and other species as mining coal.
That vast expanse of pastureland, from which we obtain so little at such great environmental cost, would be better used for rewilding: the mass restoration of nature. Not only would this help to reverse the catastrophic decline in habitats and the diversity and abundance of wildlife, but the returning forests, wetlands and savannahs are likely to absorb far more carbon than even the most sophisticated forms of grazing.
The end of animal farming might be hard to swallow. But we are a resilient and adaptable species. We have undergone a series of astonishing changes: the adoption of sedentarism, of agriculture, of cities, of industry.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet. The technology is – depending on how close an approximation to meat you demand (Quorn seems almost indistinguishable from chicken or mince to me) – either here or just around the corner. The ethical switch is happening already: even today, there are half a million vegans in the land of roast beef. It’s time to abandon the excuses, the fake facts and false comforts. It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will.
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Climate change creating food shortages across the Pacific, says support agency.
Food shortages and eroding coastlines are an increasingly urgent problem across the Pacific, thanks to climate change.
Food shortages and eroding coastlines are an increasingly urgent problem across the Pacific, thanks to climate change.
Caritas has just released Turning the Tide, its 2017 report on the state of the environment in Oceania.
Problems accessing safe food and drinking water were highlighted, with the increasing frequency of natural disasters making the problem more urgent.
"Our experience in 2016/17 is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the health and integrity of these sources [of local food supplies] - especially after a disaster," the report said.
"The poor are most affected when local supplies are disrupted - they often cannot afford to buy food and water from other sources."
George Alabeni from Arihu Rural Training Centre in Solomon Islands, told Caritas the sea was now becoming so hot, it was unpleasant.
"Before you just go down to the shore and might take fish and see a lot of seashells, crabs and the beauty of the sea; everything.
"There are birds all around the beach, very white beach.
"Now seabirds' coastal homes are being destroyed, and dead fish are washing up on shore.
"We don't expect it, and it's new to us. We have never seen those things happening."
Meanwhile those living in Tuvalu and Vanuatu had been forced to permanently change their diet after Cyclone Pam.
Climate justice advocate Aso Ioapo said locals hadn't been able to replant crops damaged by the storm surges and flooding of the 2015 disaster.
"Since the cyclone they have had to use more imported food, from stores, including chicken, meat, because our food was destroyed in the cyclone.
"Imported food is very new for us in our lives.
"We miss all of our local foods, because in Tuvalu they really need the fish every day ... you have breakfast, morning, lunch and dinner with the fish."
Caritas rated the impact of coastal erosion, flooding, and rising seas as "severe".
It said coastal flooding and sea level rise was displacing increasing numbers of people, especially around Papua New Guinea.
While Caritas acknowledged climate aid money was increasing, it said the funding still fell short of what was needed.
In particular it said that New Zealand "could be playing a pivotal role", yet "seems to be lagging and even reducing its commitments to the Pacific".
The organisation made a raft of recommendations, including a call for the global community to do more to help people who will lose their homes through climate change.
This includes a call to create legal protections for people who are forced to leave their country because of climate change, and putting together a regional body to map which communities are likely to be worst affected.
It's also pushing for the Australian and New Zealand governments to prioritise investments in agriculture, fisheries, and water sources that are climate resilient, to make sure Pacific communities have access to sustainable local sources.
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We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost.
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable 'food Fordism.'
We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost
Felicity Lawrence
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable ‘food Fordism’
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK.
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK. Photograph: For Guardian investigation with ITN
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Tuesday 3 October 2017 01.00 EDT
The dirty business of chicken processing is in the spotlight, with a Guardian undercover abattoir investigation revealing dodgy practices. As supermarkets suspend sales from the factory involved and Labour promises a parliamentary inquiry, some members of the food industry are sighing at the media’s obsession with the subject of poultry hygiene. But the subject will keep coming up, however much business wishes it away, because industrial chicken is one of the defining commodities of our era. Its cheapness comes at a high price.
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Meat production has quintupled in my lifetime, in large part thanks to the ubiquitous skinless factory chicken breast, and chicken accounts for around half of the meat we eat. At any one time there are more than twice as many chickens on Earth as humans – around 19 billion of them, bred to put on weight at turbocharged rates and mature in record time as uniform units of production that fit abattoir machinery. We have invented food Fordism – meat for the masses from the conveyor belt, no longer a luxury but an everyday ingredient. But, for all its apparent democratising possibilities, it is a commodity fraught with inescapable dilemmas.
Intensive livestock production is one of the most significant drivers of climate breakdown. It contributes nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the whole global transport sector. True, feedlot cattle leave a greater environmental footprint than poultry, but if you care about mitigating global warming, plant-based proteins are far better than intensively reared birds. Most of us in developed countries eat far more protein than we actually need for health, and most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.
Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding like Marie Antoinette, but the price of cheap is too high
As the world’s population grows, the question of how we produce enough to feed everyone becomes ever more urgent. Intensively reared livestock is an inefficient way of meeting needs. Farm an acre of decent land and you can produce 20kg (45lb) of animal protein from it; give the same acre over to producing wheat and you’ll get 63kg of protein. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed directly to people, there might be just enough food to go round when population peaks. If instead we continue to spread our industrial meat habit to poorer countries, we’ll need three planets to feed the world. The ethical argument is overwhelming: we need to get back to thinking of meat as a luxury, to be enjoyed occasionally, if not entirely forsworn.
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The reason the sector is beset by repeated scandals is that it is economically unsustainable. Even leaving aside the big planetary questions, meat can only be this cheap if the price is paid elsewhere. The livestock revolution took off in the 1950s because of three factors: cheap energy, which allowed farmers to house animals indoors; cheap synthetic fertiliser, which produced surplus grain for concentrated feed; and the mass production of cheap drugs, particularly antibiotics – you can only keep large numbers of birds in close confinement if you have the means to control the disease that inevitably accompanies the practice.
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For centuries before that, farmers had been constrained in their production by how much their land could support. Chickens were fed waste and acted as scavengers of food and insects, allowed to range free so that they could eat food that would otherwise go unused, with the added advantage that they spread their manure as they went.
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The next leap forward for industrial chicken production came with the development of processing machinery in the 1960s – an engineering feat that automated the mass slaughter, plucking, eviscerating and cutting of birds in one continuous conveyor belt. Large numbers of workers are still needed to process chickens, but they are in low-skilled production-line jobs. All this slashed costs and allowed the populations of developed countries to consume meat in a completely new way.
But now the consequences are coming home to roost. Energy is no longer cheap; nor is the grain needed for concentrated feed, despite agricultural subsidies. Some of the raw materials for fertiliser are running out globally. Frontline antibiotics needed for humans are losing their efficacy in large part because of overuse in farming. Supermarkets with their oligopolies of buying power have used cheap chicken as a weapon in their price wars and kept prices low, so that processors have to work on high volumes with low margins, despite the pressure of rising costs.
The sector is highly concentrated, with just a few corporate players. Just five companies account for 90% of the birds slaughtered in Britain each week. The pressure to cut corners in factories and sweat capital-intensive machinery, leaving little time for cleaning, is intense. Food-borne illness caused by chicken is a stubborn problem. Meanwhile, if a supermarket wanted to go elsewhere to punish an errant supplier, it has little choice left.
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There’s plenty you could do to make it a more sustainable industry. You could slow the growing time and give birds more room on farms, using less engineered breeds that take 12 weeks, rather than just over a month to reach slaughter weight. That would help curb some of the cruellest aspects of the business, which see densely packed, overbred birds, prone to disease and bacterial infection, collapsing under their own weight. But that would cost more. In the factory you could slow the speed of the lines, so that cross-contamination of carcasses was less likely, and workers’ jobs less relentlessly tough and unpleasant, thus easing the pressure to break hygiene rules and making the sector more attractive to local staff. But that, too, would cost more.
We know roughly how much more, since the top end of organic production already does these things, and a posh chicken from that sort of outlet is three to four times as expensive as a conventional supermarket one. But there are hardly votes in arguing we should pay that much for our chicken. Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding Marie Antoinette-ish. But the price of cheap is too high, and we should probably be eating something else.
• Felicity Lawrence is special correspondent for the Guardian
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The electric road to zero emissions hits a gas pocket.
Union members, environmental justice advocates and green transportation activists packed a meeting room to send a loud and clear message: the city and state should make electric transportation in the city and at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports a priority.
Union members, environmental justice advocates and green transportation activists packed a meeting room Tuesday evening in Downtown Los Angeles to send a loud and clear message to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC): the city and state should make electric transportation in the city and at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports a priority.
The Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015 (Senate Bill 350) requires utilities to present programs to accelerate the widespread use of zero emission vehicles over the short term and longer range. Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Pacific Gas & Electric, utilities providing about three quarters of California’s electricity service, have all proposed paths to zero emissions, and the CPUC hearing was part of the public process to weigh the merits of those proposals.
Regulators will determine whether the proposals will benefit ratepayers with greater energy efficiency, improved air quality, lower emissions of greenhouse gases, reduced dependence on oil, and increased job creation, including jobs in disadvantaged communities.
The new proposals include programs to accelerate the adoption of light-duty EVs (electric vehicles), but also address trucks, buses, port equipment, forklifts, and the other vehicles that move people and goods in bulk in an effort to reduce diesel pollution.
Pacific Gas & Electric has proposed spending $250 million over five years to install infrastructure to electrify fleets of medium and heavy-duty vehicles. That infrastructure includes all the necessary electrical equipment from the transformer down, but not the actual charging stations. San Diego Gas & Electric proposed a $244 million outlay for its five-year program to install 90,000 charging stations at homes in the San Diego region at an estimated 71 cents monthly cost to its customers. The most ambitious proposal has come from Southern California Edison, which includes $554 million in infrastructure to electrify vehicles and equipment moving goods from the Port of Long Beach. PG&E; estimates its customers will see a 28-cent hike in their monthly bills while SoCal Edison customers will pay 53-cents more a month.
But the Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) is determined to protect its piece of the energy pie. If SoCalGas’ arguments to the CPUC are effective, none of the electric utilities’ proposals will be adopted.
Clean Energy Fuels Corp. attorney J. Nathan Jensen urged the CPUC in August to make “cautious, measured movement toward electrification in the off-road, medium-duty and heavy-duty (MD/HD) sectors of the transportation market.” The MD/HD electric vehicle market has “only limited areas of early commercial readiness,” he said in written testimony submitted to the commission.
“Ratepayers are already being asked to shoulder market development costs as the utilities experiment in the MD/HD market,” Jensen said. “Asking them not only to assist customers in funding infrastructure but to allow the utility to earn a return on that assistance is unreasonable.”
Adrian Martinez, an attorney with Earthjustice, said after the meeting that SoCalGas is mostly worried about its own bottom line.
The company “is basically arguing that the natural gas infrastructure is already installed, and therefore there will be stranded assets and harm to ratepayers if the CPUC allows electric vehicle infrastructure to be installed,” Martinez said. “But it’s SoCalGas and other gas companies that will be hurt.”
SoCalGas’ testimony is unusual in that it sets up a situation of one utility potentially going up against another, and SoCalGas going up against a sister company, San Diego Gas & Electric.
Melissa Bailey, a spokeswoman for Sempra Energy, parent company of SoCalGas and San Diego Gas & Electric, rejected the contention that it was a utility vs. utility fight. For heavy duty trucking, Sempra is touting natural gas engines fueled by biogas, made from green waste, waste water, and other organic sources.
“Natural gas and biogas engines reduce the emissions of smog forming pollutants to nearly zero,” Bailey said. “When fueled by biogas, these natural gas engines actually deliver lower greenhouse gas emissions than electric ones. That’s because biogas takes climate pollutants out of the air and uses them as clean, renewable fuel instead.”
Alexandra Nagy, Southern California Community Organizer with Food & Water Watch, said biogas promotion amounts to “greenwashing.”
“Those vehicles still have tailpipes that still emit greenhouse gasses,” Nagy said. “And gas companies still need to build out infrastructure to move the gas from farms to the consumer, which undercuts their argument about stranded assets.” Food & Water Watch supports the use of biogas onsite, she said, but not for widespread consumer distribution.
Advocates for electric vehicle infrastructure said SoCalGas is playing hardball.
Kathleen Woodfield, of the San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners Coalition, gave Capital & Main a letter she had sent to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach regarding possible SoCalGas interference at a joint Clean Air Action Plan hearing in August.
Woodfield wrote that on the evening of September 1, a woman approached her and said that she and 35 other people had been hired to give pro-natural gas testimony at a Clean Air Action Plan hearing, and that about 35 other people were each paid $60 and were given a free dinner for similar testimony. The woman said she had been hired by a PR firm called Method, Woodfield said.
Martinez said such tactics to sway regulators, if true, wouldn’t surprise him.
“They’re desperate,” Martinez said. “The natural gas industry sees electric vehicles as the future, and they don’t want to lose their market share. That’s why SoCalGas is fighting Edison on this. They’re opposed to electric across the board.”
At the downtown CPUC meeting, Jennifer Kropke, Director of Workforce and Environmental Engagement at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Los Angeles area Local 11, testified that Edison’s approach was bold, and that it was the perfect nexus of “good, green jobs paying a living wage to local workers, and cleaner air for people who live near our ports.”
Kropke also emphasized, as did many others at the meeting, that building out EV infrastructure solves a chicken or egg problem. “It is easier to transition to EVs when the charging infrastructure is in place,” Kropke said after the meeting.
The CPUC hearings on the electric utilities’ proposals will be wrapped up in the next three weeks. Decisions on whether to approve or deny a proposal are expected early next year.
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