This Global Change Research report released this week is a compendium of the expected fallout from climate change in the U.S.

It’s not something you’ll want to curl up with in place of your bedtime novel; it won’t make you hazy, happy and sleepy (picture yourself bolt upright, watching crime news to calm down).  Still, for those of us deliberately trying to keep our heads above the sand (or our real estate above the tide) it’s a must read.

I recommend skipping a lot of the governmentish intros and conclusions. Cut to the heartland synopses; these assessments of each region are a great reality check. This section of the report is stout and specific and will wrest away any fuzzy notion you have that climate change will just make things a tad warmer and we’ll all wear fewer sweaters.

For instance, the report projects that under the worst case scenario,  average temperatures in Carbondale, Ill., at the end of the 21st Century could parallel those of Houston today; blueberry cultivation, maple syrup harvests and dairy farming could go bye-bye, or nearly so, in the Northeast and on the Great Plains, the great and beneficent Ogallala Aquifer could, ummm, how to say it nicely…dry up.

I’ve synopsized some of the synopses below to give you more details from four sample regions.

NORTHEAST:
Flooding coastlines could cause the most havoc as sea levels rise, threatening real estate worth trillions up and down the coasts. Manhattan’s 100-year flood zone, for instance, could expect a flood of that magnitude every ten years by the end of this century, instead of once in a century. Warmer temperatures also will create air quality issues and increasing demand for air conditioning. The length of winter could be cut in half across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Temperate crops like apples and blueberries will no longer be adapted to the region, under worst case scenario projections. Forests will be pushed northward. Heat will stress dairy cows, damaging milk production. Cod and lobster fisheries will be diminished.

MIDWEST:
Changing average temps could make climate in Michigan more like that of Arkansas or evenNorth Texas. Downstate Illinois could end up feeling more like Houston. Increasingly frequent severe heat waves, though, would be lethal, with blasts like the one that killed tens of thousands in Europe in 2003 occurring about every other year by the end of the century (under the “higher emissions scenario”). The Great Lakes would warm and lose water to evaporation, with lake levels falling by one to two feet, choking out fisheries, reducing hydropower and degrading water quality. Longer growing seasons will potentially increase row crop yields – but heat waves, floods and increased insect pests will make growing food more challenging.

SOUTHWEST:
Hotter temperatures are reducing snowpack and river flow, and a northward shift in storm tracks are zapping precipitation.The resulting water scarcity would (and already does) threaten croplands in California and municipal water supplies in populationcenters like Phoenix and Las Vegas. As the situation worsens, it could lead to “conflict” over competing needs. During more frequent droughts, for instance, water set aside for agriculture would have to be diverted to urban areas. Desert and forest fires would become more frequent, and invasive species could gain a stronger foothold, jeopardizing native biodiversity.

GREAT PLAINS:
Higher temperatures here could soar to more than 10 degrees higher by the end of the century under the “higher emissions” scenario, or 6 to 7 degrees under the “lower emissions” scenario. (Throughout the report, projected changes are described this way, based on how well greenhouse gas emissions are controlled.) Coupled with more frequent heat waves, drought and heavy rainfall, the region would experience changes in water availability and agricultural and ranching activities. Withdrawals from the Ogallala Aquifer system could overrun input, leading to problems irrigating crops. Rising temperatures would help more insect pests survive winter, and weeds also would flourish. Playa lakes that preserve prairie wildlife would dry up, and agricultural wastes will continue to clog them, further depleting the aquifers.

So that’s the bad news, and there’s plenty more of it in the sections on Alaska, the Coasts, the Islands, the Northwest and the Southeast.

The report contains a few nuggets of good news. The Great Plains are primed for wind power. Chicago is pioneering heat mitigation in urban areas with green roofs and vegetation areas. King County (Seattle) is repairing its levee system to prepare for sea rise. Some flood walls were redesigned after Katrina.

But these seem like flotsam on vast floodwaters. Much more will be needed, and soon.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

The movie FOOD, INC. opened this past weekend in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It’s not the first film to tackle the problems of our industrial food complex. Indies like Chris Taylor’s Food Fight (2008) and King Corn (2007) a handful of few bigger releases, like Fast Food Nation (2006) have been chipping away at this story for a few years now.

But FOOD INC. arrives at a time when the American public seems primed for the message in ways it wasn’t before: We better recognize today that our mass-produced food is threatening our vitality and tearing up the arable land we need; that food that’s been processed beyond recognition has also been stripped of nutrients; that packaging can’t substitute for flavor and that local food often tastes better it has a lower environmental cost (OK, not everyone gets that last point, yet).

This Magnolia Pictures release, headed right for major theaters across the country starting this weekend, could tip us into rebellion. It’s got great early reviews, and it aspires to start a movement. Perhaps this film that promises to show us the “underbelly” of industrial agriculture – and took six years to create – will be so eye-opening we’ll start on a healthier path (soon as we’re done eating some cheap meat for the 4th of July!).

Producer/director Robert Kenner and co-producer Eric Schlosser have the right idea. It is time the American consumer gets a look behind the scenes. Early indications are that some of the material will make your next visit to the grocery a scary one. And getting queasy might be a necessary first step (you know, like with AA, acknowledging the problem). We’ll just have to see if Americans swallow it.

Meantime, FOOD INC. offers these “Ten Simple Things You Can Do” to get started.

1. Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages.
You can lose 25 lbs in a year by replacing one 20 oz soda a day with a no calorie beverage (preferably water).
2. Eat at home instead of eating out.
Children consume almost twice (1.8 times) as many calories when eating food prepared outside the home.
3. Support the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards. Half of the leading chain restaurants provide no nutritional information to their customers.
4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks.
Over the last two decades, rates of obesity have tripled in children and adolescents aged 6 to 19 years.
5. Meatless Mondays-Go without meat one day a week. An estimated 70% of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to farm animals.
6. Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides. According to the EPA, over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the U.S.
7. Protect family farms; visit your local farmer’s market. Farmer’s markets allow farmers to keep 80 to 90 cents of each dollar spent by the consumer.
8. Make a point to know where your food comes from-READ LABELS.
The average meal travels 1500 miles from the farm to your dinner plate.
9. Tell Congress that food safety is important to you. Each year, contaminated food causes millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths in the U.S.
10. Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections. Poverty among farm workers is more than twice that of all wage and salary employees.

I would add that you could also:

11. Grow some of your own food, and teach your kids how to do the same. It’s frugal and it TASTES BETTER.
12. Clue in to fiber. It keeps you de-toxified.
13. And about those Meatless Mondays. Consider adding a few more meatless days, but do it like real vegetarians, adding protein-rich beans, lentils, tofu, nuts, brown rice and whole grains instead of just subtracting the meat.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Agriculture, so often cited as a factor in global decline – for claiming natural grasslands that store carbon, soil erosion and pesticide runoff – could become a big part of the solution to global warming, according to a hopeful report by Worldwatch Institute released today.

Innovations in food production and land use that are ready to be put to work could reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to roughly 25 percent of global fossil fuel emissions and be managed to reduce carbon already in the atmosphere as well, according to WWI and Ecoagriculture Partners.

Carbon capture technology remains unproven and will take a decade at least to put into operation. By contrast, agricultural and land use management practices that are ready today could be employed to sequester carbon through photosynthesis by growing and sustaining more plants.

To understand how and why the agricultural approach to climate change must be a part of the solution, the public first needs to recognize that the world must “go negative” with carbon emissions – producing fewer than it churns out to reach the necessary reductions by 2050, said Sara Scherr, co-author with Sajal Sthapit of the report, Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use.

Policymakers must go beyond improving energy efficiency and scaling up renewables and add ways to pull down emissions from forestry and agriculture operations.

More than 30 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases are linked to agriculture and land use, notes the report, which rivals the combined emissions of the transportation and industry sectors.

The report outlines five ways to reduce and sequester carbon using farming strategies:

• Enriching soil carbon. Soil, the third largest carbon pool on Earth’s surface, can be managed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by minimizing tillage, cutting use of nitrogen fertilizers, and preventing erosion. Soils can store a vast amount of additional carbon by building up organic matter and by burying carbon in the form of biochar (biomass burned in a low-oxygen environment).

• Farming with perennials. Two-thirds of all arable land is used to grow annual grains, but there is large potential to substitute these with perennial trees, shrubs, palms, and grasses that produce food, livestock feed, and fuel. These perennials maintain and develop their roots and branches over many years, storing carbon in the vegetation and soil.

• Climate-friendly livestock production. Livestock accounts for nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use. Innovations such as rotational grazing, manure management, methane capture for biogas production, and improved feeds and feed additives can reduce livestock-related emissions.

• Protecting natural habitat. Deforestation, land clearing, and forest and grassland fires are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Incentives are needed to encourage farmers, ranchers, and foresters to maintain natural forest and grassland habitats through product certification, payments for climate services, securing tenure rights, and community fire control.

• Restoring degraded watersheds and range lands. Restoring vegetation on vast areas of degraded land can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while making land productive again, protecting critical watersheds, and alleviating rural poverty.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Recent research on potatoes showed that low levels of herbicides, which did not result in obvious damage to the plants above ground, negatively affected their underground growth, reducing yields.

Oregon researchers with the Environmental Protection Agency tested the herbicides to assess a plant’s resilience to exposures that would be assumed to be safe; levels that weren’t concentrated enough to wilt the plant’s foliage or cause any obvious signs of damage.

Seven different herbicides were tested and applied at certain times in the plant’s development – and found to affect the size and number of the potato tubers produced, according to a news release about the study by the American Society of Agronomy.

Potatoes were chosen for the project because scientists suspected that their plant structure  would provide an easy way to check on the effects of herbicide exposure a during a plant’s  reproductive cycle.

Oust, an herbicide authorized for use in ditches and road right-of-ways, was found to have a significant effect on the potato plants, causing deformed tubers and reduced yield, said lead researcher Dr. Thomas Pfleeger, a plant physiologist with the EPA.

That finding had implications for real world practices because the low levels of Oust applied simulated what can happen when a pesticide drifts into agriculture areas. If the drift occurs at a sensitive time in the plants development, the fruit of the plant can be affected, Pfleeger said.

Previous work with low levels of pesticides on cherry trees, simulating accidental or “drift” exposures, also found damage to the trees ability to reproduce and bear fruit the following season, he explained.

The takeaway message?

“People who are applying pesticides have to be very careful. They can go long distances and cause problems. And you can’t always see the damage,” he said.

The experiments also have relevance for EPA labeling practices. Currently, pesticides are tested on pre-emergent and seedling plants, to gauge their effects. Pfleeger says the Oregon experiments suggest that testing during a plant’s reproductive cycle should also be part of the chemical registration process.

Asked if the tests also raise questions about pesticide use in general, and other potential “unseen” effects, he responded that the threat to the produce-buying public would be nominal: “It’s pretty hard to get away from pesticides. They’re pretty much everywhere.”

The research by the U.S. EPA’s Western Ecology Division has been printed in the latest issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, a peer reviewed publication put out by the American Society of Agronomy.

The article notes that American agriculture’s dependence on herbicides – a multi-billion dollar industry that annually dumps about 500 million pounds of herbicides on the land at last count – is worth evaluating because  of “potential risk are non-targeted crops, rare and endangered plant species, native plant communities, and organisms that are dependent on natural plant communities for food and shelter.”

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

When legislators cross party lines and governors publicly plead for water reform, you know the country’s water crunch has reached a new degree of direness.

And yet, some conservationists ask, who’s really listening?

In late July an Opinion column appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers. In it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and senior U.S. Senator, Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, attempted to jolt water-hoggers into acknowledging that their state is in a full-blown water crisis.

The unlikely duo delivered frightening news: California’s largest reservoir, the Shasta Reservoir, is operating at only 48 percent capacity this year, and the state’s second largest water storage reservoir, Lake Oroville, has less water to spare than it has in three decades. California’s multi-year drought has allowed wildfires to gobble up more than a million acres this year. And job-loss has become a major factor, they say, noting that in two of the past three years, the Pacific salmon fisheries (which impact tens of thousands of jobs) have shut down because there just isn’t enough salmon for fishing.

In light of those facts, you have to scratch your head over why Americans, who consume two to three times the amount of Europeans daily, still squander water, the most essential thing to life itself.

Jason Morrison, a water expert from the non-profit Pacific Institute in Oakland, CA, says it’s simple: Because water is cheap, and economics still trumps ecology as a motivation for conserving it. The only problem is, water’s not just an “environmental” issue; it’s the glue to entire nations’ economies, their food supplies, their industry, their people’s day-to-day life. It’s a survival issue.

And though California (and Nevada and Arizona) might be the most obvious victim now, many scientists believe other states in the U.S. will face the same situation very soon if aggressive action isn’t taken.

Morrison and others at the Pacific Institute believe that any real change will be driven by utility policies – “like pricing and metering. There are some parts of the world, even some parts of the United States,” he says, “where sites aren’t even requiring meter readings for their water users. Sacramento was one, until recently.”

Understanding the situation in their own backyard, Schwarzenegger and Feinstein have worked together for almost two years to come up with a nonpartisan water policy that would address individuals, water-service providers, industry and agriculture, and set an example for the rest of the country.

Their Opinion piece should’ve scared the pants off all Americans – since California’s economy is among the ten largest in the world. In their nonpartisan plea, the two concluded that if the state doesn’t put an “emergency compromise” water package on the state’s ballot this November, the results – a drought worse than anything California has experienced – loom as early as next year.

And that, they stated, would be “catastrophic for our water supply, our environment and our economy. Already, farmers are taking agricultural lands out of production, and building permits could be put on hold, causing the loss of thousands of jobs. …”

That last issue, loss of jobs, is part of a bigger motivator for water conservation: Money. It all comes down to money.

“Water is a relatively low cost item,” explains Morrison, director of the Pacific Institute’s Economic Globalization and Environment Program. “It’s hard to get businesses or water users to pay attention to conserving a resource that’s been so devalued – or to cherish it.”

Speaking to GreenRightNow by phone from Oakland, the advocate – who helped represent the conservationists’ side in the recent CEO Water Mandate – discussed what’s really going on with water in the United States, and why, despite evidence to the contrary, many Americans just haven’t gotten it.

WATER: THE PRICE ISN’T RIGHT

“Right now, they have no incentive to use water more wisely – because it’s so cheap. But what’s changing is, locally, municipalities are looking at full-cost pricing to reflect how much it takes their water service providers to actually deliver it, having that reflected in the price of water.”

Only then will consumers start to conserve, he says, underscoring the adage that people don’t change their destructive behavior until it hits them in their wallets.

Traditionally, the cost of water hasn’t conveyed the fact that its supply and demand are at odds. When the supply of something is limited or shrinking, its rising cost alerts consumers to eminent shortages. Just look at the current crude oil market (which is based largely on perceived shortages). Until recently, though, local governments and even global corporations haven’t put water in the same economic context as other natural resources.

A prevailing factor is agriculture.

“One of the biggest water users in the world is agriculture. When you look at what or who consumes the most water, it’s 70 percent agriculture. Even in countries where the water systems are more developed, there are huge places where agriculture can get more efficient,” Morrison says.

“Also, the Ag lobby in this country, and in others, is a very powerful force in shaping water policies, including pricing,” he says. “When it comes to implementing policy changes that would drive (conservation), they’re blocking much of the legislation.”

The reason? All across the American West, big agriculture has what’s called senior water rights, allowing large-scale farmers to ignore water shortages and conservation requirements, and also giving them first dibs on water.

“In the Western United States,” Morrison explains, “the water rights are dictated by the doctrine of ‘prior appropriation’ . They’re first in line for water – they have first rights, so that it’s there when the region comes into drought periods and (others) have rationing.”

This pro-ag policy forces individuals, and even water utilities, to make do when supplies are already being heavily rationed. But pro-environment groups like the non-profit Water Heritage Trust say that’s an outdated practice, not just for human consumption but for the survival of wildlife and the waterways that support them.

The organization, part of the non-profit Resources Renewal Institute founded in 1985 by former California Resources Secretary Huey Johnson, asserts that the restoration of “free-flowing water” is essential to resolving extreme scarcity throughout the West. Their focus is on wildlife, but what’s good for wildlife, in this case, could be good for humans.

“As California and the west were settled… (w)ater rights were established on a seniority system of ‘first in time, first in right,’” the WHT explains on its site. “No one thought to allocate to fish, birds and other wildlife the water they needed to survive. Probably no one could conceive or even imagine that they would ever be gone.”

But, the organization notes, “At last things may be changing. For the first time in 150 years of managed water allocation in California, a legal precedent has been established to preserve the water rights of wildlife. … Additions to the California Water Code, specifically Section 1707, establish the right to reserve water for the ‘purposes of preserving or enhancing wetlands habitat, fish and wildlife resources or recreation in, or on, the water.’”

Experts in all walks of water conservation agree that the legislation and litigation out West can provide a blueprint for the rest of the U.S.

People like Morrison (and his boss, Pacific Institute co-founder and president Peter Gleick, a powerful force in shaping international water policy) believe that only when the debate over who has water rights shifts toward the individual – or even wildlife – will consumers get a true sense of water’s “value.” They say that once big fish like the “ag lobby,” which wants to keep water cheap, are forced to play fair, pricing will underscore the true scarcity of water. That’s already occurring in Europe and other developed nations where stricter policies make it more expensive.

AMERICANS CLUE IN

Some find it curious, though, that Americans, who like everyone else rely on water for their very existence, may not appreciate water’s preciousness until our market – i.e., the cost of it as a commodity – makes us realize just how precious.

Still, Morrison has reason to be optimistic.

“It is happening already – through these changes in water policy. I do think water is one of those resources that is hard for people to see as a global issue, because it’s such a local resource. It’s hard for people who live in Michigan or Sweden, which are surrounded by water, to understand water scarcity.”

It’s just a matter of trickle-down, though. When water scarcity in California makes purchasing a head of broccoli in Michigan as expensive as, say, buying a new CD or T-shirt, then perhaps consumers will notice.

Reducing the issue to its essence, Morrison puts water conservation on human terms, reminding us that it’s part of the larger “green” approach – and that invariably, even the most stubborn resisters will be forced to comply.

“Water is just another one of those areas of the green movement. And we’re coming out of this slumber, so to speak, as a society. We haven’t been really fully aware of how we misuse and over-use these resources that are so precious.”

Clearly, that’s changing. The fact that Republicans and Democrats are crossing the aisle to address water, our most valuable resource, speaks volumes.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media