© 2011 Joshua Stark
President Obama has pulled back from his earlier proposal to put stricter limits on ground-level ozone, a major pollutant and cause of asthma attacks and deaths, reports the Associated Press.
By this act, the President has conceded to opponents the very idea that pollution regulations are job killers, and opened the door to a flood of rollbacks, and the subsequent pollution increases that will come with them.
Hard choices have to be made, and the President has ducked a big one right here. Sadly, he has done it by buying into the notion that pollution control is a net loss to our economy, thus legitimizing the idea, even though, under our current circumstances, it almost never has merit.
In our dirtiest places, Americans live like 3rd World countries. California's Central Valley has thousands of Americans who can't even drink their own tap water, and one-fifth of their children have asthma (for a thorough look at the impacts of asthma and ozone on the Valley, click here).
The regulation that the President has backed off would have direct impacts on asthma rates in places like the Central Valley, improving the quality of life for millions of Americans, particularly the poor. But, what would be the economic impact?
Well, in 1997 the EPA estimated that asthma cost the U.S. between $9 and $11 billion (today, that would be $12.5 to %15 billion). And these rates don't calculate lost productivity due to parents' worries over a hospitalized child, stress from losing a child, young people's inability to perform work throughout their life due to their impaired physiques and oxygen loss during growth.
Additionally, these calculations don't take into account the value of individual dollars - a gaping intellectual hole when calculating economic impacts. Simply put, one dollar is worth more in a poor person's hands than it is in a rich person's hands, especially now. A poor person, when getting a dollar, will spend that dollar, because it is more valuable turned into food than it is sitting in a bank. A rich person may spend that dollar, or they may save it, because its value as a saved dollar may be bigger than its value as one more hamburger.
Right now, our economic problem is in large part due to our low total demand for goods and services because we can't afford them, because there isn't enough circulating money. Money isn't circulating because we have too many people out of work, unable to afford things.
We are in the beginning stages of a vicious cycle, economically-speaking, and this cycle has nothing to do with our pollution. But, regulating our pollution can go a long way toward ending this cycle and getting us out of our current slump. Robust pollution regulation can lead to direct job growth in the testing and regulating industries (often public-private partnerships), and it will lead to increased productivity among those who would see improved health. The additional demand from this growth of more valuable dollars would lead to increased supply to meet that demand, pushing up employment.
Make no mistake, companies who fight these regulations want to pollute. If they didn't want to pollute, they would not care about the regulation. They do not care about total demand, they do not care about social health improvements. The individuals who work in these companies might care, but officially and professionally, they don't make their decisions based on what is good for the nation; they cannot, because the pressures of their fiduciary duties and their pressures to see quarterly profits are too great.
Economic reasons aren't the only reasons for robust pollution controls, and they shouldn't even be the first reasons. But, there are real economic benefits to robust pollution control, and the President, by ignoring these, has lost sight of the good of the nation and has given over to ideas that will further stunt our growth, economically and otherwise.
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Friday, September 2, 2011
Friday, September 17, 2010
Fear mongering and non sequitors from a couple of pro-Big Ag liberals
© 2010 Joshua Stark
A Grist blogger slams Ezra Klein at the Washington Post over a snippet in support of industrial agriculture. Klein "argues", in two paragraphs, that we'll have to keep agriculture industrial, and he quotes a man saying the same thing... well, in fact, half of "his" piece is the quotation. The good news? If that's the best he can get in support of big ag., then we don't have much to worry about in the arena of reason.
The quotation claims that farming benefits from economies of scale, like steel manufacture, so we should keep it industrial, and even make it super-industrial. Klein tries to add to this excruciating generalization by noting that no other enterprise that has gone industrial has ever gone back, and he does so in a remarkably juvenile fashion, I might add. We can comfortably ignore Klein's little "addition" because there is no argument in there. It's so silly, in fact, it's actually quite shocking.
However, the gentleman being quoted, Mr. Raynor from the Observer, attempts some semblance of a conversation on a serious topic that involves the lives of billions of people.
Mr. Raynor believes that the U.K. is on the verge of food shortages of such a level as to cause riots. His description of the British food supply goes a long way toward proving how silly that sounds, but he sticks to it - it is the gist of his opening line, after all.
In light of the cheap, perfect-looking foods Brits have come to expect, Mr. Raynor argues, the only way they will avoid Mozambique-like riots over food is to build a big mega-dairy...?
From there, he gets even more lost.
First, Mr. Raynor makes an across-the-board claim about agriculture, taking an extraordinarily diverse concept and treating it as if it is one product in one market. His belief that "agriculture" always and everywhere benefits from economies of scale illustrates his ignorance of both agriculture and economics.
Mr. Raynor fails to realize, for example, that economies of scale in agriculture most often come from lax environmental regulation, extraordinarily cheap labor, poor animal treatment, and/or subsidies. Mr. Raynor spends much time considering the British apple market, probably because they are an iconic English crop, but he gives no example of how big ag. can save British apple production. Would he be willing to allow DDT, labor at a pound or so per day, and tax breaks in order to save apples? I think he would argue that these measures wouldn't save British farming, and he would be 100% right.
And if Mr. Raynor is worried about the status quo, he must surely realize that the status quo includes big ag. for most of his food supply right now, anyway. Those imported apples he hates? They get there only through a few, gigantic corporations. Instead of vilifying the apples, he should be praising their availability to the skies.
Since he couldn't provide an industrial ag. solution for the problem he outlined, he picked up another one: dairy. I don't know the specifics of the dairy industry in England, and from Mr. Raynor's quick description, neither does he. I've spent some time debunking the "farmers don't get profits from sick animals" claim, so I won't do that here, but the fact that he uses this as his argument in favor of a mega-dairy says a lot about how much he really knows about food production facilities.
His last point, the inference that organic and sustainable farming practices can only be enjoyed by the wealthy, actually undermines his first point, that Brits have put themselves in a pickle by demanding produce at half of what they've previously paid (and will even burn buildings and kill people if they have to go back).
Mr. Raynor's bias of omission is also startlingly revealing: No mention of the impact of oligopoly on food markets, which often exacerbate scarcity and jeopardize food security to maximize profits - the very crises he hopes to avert by concentrating food production in the hands of a few people and places. He needs to consider the past 25 years of price gouging and collusion that major corporate agriculture enterprises have committed, and study the recent foodborne disease outbreaks originating from huge, centralized production facilities, before he goes waving the Big Ag Flag in public.
To me, though, his biggest offense is that he compares Mozambique with England to give a frightening picture of a possible English future. This is just wrong, and maybe immoral. Mozambique's GDP per capita in 2008 was roughly $440. Ten years ago, it was below $200, which means that Mozambique has been slowly improving, and that people remember times worse than when they averaged four hundred bucks per person. This, alone, should explain the reaction of Mozambicans in light of a 30% hike in bread prices, and it should make startlingly clear just why it is so wrong to compare Mozambique to England. What do Londoners pay for bread, two pounds? If it rose 100%, there would be no riots. If it rose 500%, there would be sternly-written letters to MP's, replete with apologies for doing so, but there would be no riots.
Mr. Raynor points out that Brits are paying half of what they paid for food 20 years ago, from about 20% to about 10% of their incomes. If prices rose 100% for all foods, not just bread, they'd just be back where they were twenty years ago.
Mr. Raynor makes no serious claims for supporting big ag.; he obviously is not familiar with scientific studies that point to organic and sustainable smaller ag. producing higher yields and more sustainable business models without the need for exploitation of the resource or of humans; he ignores the market impacts of oligopoly that come with big ag.; he completely misses the problems associated with food security when production is centralized; and he tries to scare people in England into thinking that they may start killing each other over the price of bread.
I don't buy it.
A Grist blogger slams Ezra Klein at the Washington Post over a snippet in support of industrial agriculture. Klein "argues", in two paragraphs, that we'll have to keep agriculture industrial, and he quotes a man saying the same thing... well, in fact, half of "his" piece is the quotation. The good news? If that's the best he can get in support of big ag., then we don't have much to worry about in the arena of reason.
The quotation claims that farming benefits from economies of scale, like steel manufacture, so we should keep it industrial, and even make it super-industrial. Klein tries to add to this excruciating generalization by noting that no other enterprise that has gone industrial has ever gone back, and he does so in a remarkably juvenile fashion, I might add. We can comfortably ignore Klein's little "addition" because there is no argument in there. It's so silly, in fact, it's actually quite shocking.
However, the gentleman being quoted, Mr. Raynor from the Observer, attempts some semblance of a conversation on a serious topic that involves the lives of billions of people.
Mr. Raynor believes that the U.K. is on the verge of food shortages of such a level as to cause riots. His description of the British food supply goes a long way toward proving how silly that sounds, but he sticks to it - it is the gist of his opening line, after all.
In light of the cheap, perfect-looking foods Brits have come to expect, Mr. Raynor argues, the only way they will avoid Mozambique-like riots over food is to build a big mega-dairy...?
From there, he gets even more lost.
First, Mr. Raynor makes an across-the-board claim about agriculture, taking an extraordinarily diverse concept and treating it as if it is one product in one market. His belief that "agriculture" always and everywhere benefits from economies of scale illustrates his ignorance of both agriculture and economics.
Mr. Raynor fails to realize, for example, that economies of scale in agriculture most often come from lax environmental regulation, extraordinarily cheap labor, poor animal treatment, and/or subsidies. Mr. Raynor spends much time considering the British apple market, probably because they are an iconic English crop, but he gives no example of how big ag. can save British apple production. Would he be willing to allow DDT, labor at a pound or so per day, and tax breaks in order to save apples? I think he would argue that these measures wouldn't save British farming, and he would be 100% right.
And if Mr. Raynor is worried about the status quo, he must surely realize that the status quo includes big ag. for most of his food supply right now, anyway. Those imported apples he hates? They get there only through a few, gigantic corporations. Instead of vilifying the apples, he should be praising their availability to the skies.
Since he couldn't provide an industrial ag. solution for the problem he outlined, he picked up another one: dairy. I don't know the specifics of the dairy industry in England, and from Mr. Raynor's quick description, neither does he. I've spent some time debunking the "farmers don't get profits from sick animals" claim, so I won't do that here, but the fact that he uses this as his argument in favor of a mega-dairy says a lot about how much he really knows about food production facilities.
His last point, the inference that organic and sustainable farming practices can only be enjoyed by the wealthy, actually undermines his first point, that Brits have put themselves in a pickle by demanding produce at half of what they've previously paid (and will even burn buildings and kill people if they have to go back).
Mr. Raynor's bias of omission is also startlingly revealing: No mention of the impact of oligopoly on food markets, which often exacerbate scarcity and jeopardize food security to maximize profits - the very crises he hopes to avert by concentrating food production in the hands of a few people and places. He needs to consider the past 25 years of price gouging and collusion that major corporate agriculture enterprises have committed, and study the recent foodborne disease outbreaks originating from huge, centralized production facilities, before he goes waving the Big Ag Flag in public.
To me, though, his biggest offense is that he compares Mozambique with England to give a frightening picture of a possible English future. This is just wrong, and maybe immoral. Mozambique's GDP per capita in 2008 was roughly $440. Ten years ago, it was below $200, which means that Mozambique has been slowly improving, and that people remember times worse than when they averaged four hundred bucks per person. This, alone, should explain the reaction of Mozambicans in light of a 30% hike in bread prices, and it should make startlingly clear just why it is so wrong to compare Mozambique to England. What do Londoners pay for bread, two pounds? If it rose 100%, there would be no riots. If it rose 500%, there would be sternly-written letters to MP's, replete with apologies for doing so, but there would be no riots.
Mr. Raynor points out that Brits are paying half of what they paid for food 20 years ago, from about 20% to about 10% of their incomes. If prices rose 100% for all foods, not just bread, they'd just be back where they were twenty years ago.
Mr. Raynor makes no serious claims for supporting big ag.; he obviously is not familiar with scientific studies that point to organic and sustainable smaller ag. producing higher yields and more sustainable business models without the need for exploitation of the resource or of humans; he ignores the market impacts of oligopoly that come with big ag.; he completely misses the problems associated with food security when production is centralized; and he tries to scare people in England into thinking that they may start killing each other over the price of bread.
I don't buy it.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Husbandry and Hope
Today, I'm officially joining some form of blogging unity. The good folks at Heifer International are holding a, "Unite for Hunger and Hope" blogging rally of sorts, and as a fan of their work, I thought I'd offer this morning's post for anybody reading.
If you don't know them, Heifer International paraphrases the old fishing and eating line, and gives folks goats, sheep, cattle, fowl, and quite possibly other domestic animals, as a means to help end poverty and hunger. The idea is that by providing animals that produce milk, eggs, etc., as well as training, they offer sustainable means to providing nutrition.
I created this blog to talk about the connections between folks and nature, and so I often find myself blogging about the effects of acquiring food, or the means. For me (and I'm sure most of you reading this), this is easy enough: we go to the store. But for one third of our world's folks, that just isn't possible. The World Health Organization estimates that over two billion people are starving today. Right now.
Please consider that.
Then, please consider heading over to one of these organizations (or Heifer International) to see if there is anything you can do:
Sportsmen Against Hunger (through SCI)
Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest)
UN World Food Program (to which a great, James Beard-nominated blogger donates an auction prize to each year)
Now, I do not personally endorse or work for any of these organizations, but they have decent track records, and seem to be really trying.
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