Recognition of how difficult it is to get a movement like this going. Creative Commons had taken off, and I decided to do this, I had forgotten how hard the first steps are.

We’ve been successful at getting funding. We’re still hiring th enetroots activist person.

I want to hear ideas and criticism from you. Blogger council: advisers willing to give feedback.

The state of Vermont is going about reducing it’s solid waste output in completely the wrong way. Why crack down on Vermont Compost and Intervale Compost, two entities working hard to do the right thing and reduce the amount of trash we bury in landfills? Enforcement is not the way here, the state needs to work with responsible people trying to do the right thing. After all, where else is this waste to go but the landfill?

Yes, ok so there’s some site issues. I’m not disagreeing, but come on, suggest/help find an alternative. Food waste to compost is such a noble and worthy cause. Making a resource out of a waste, that’s what we need more of, not less. What’s the alternative? Burying it in the ground and letting future generations deal with the issue? Not that I think it’s much better than landfilling, but at least New Hampshire has kept up with technology. With modern pollution controls, they incinerate all their waste and generate electricity from it.

No landfills, plus. Electrical generation, plus. Unfortunately there is still hazardous ash left over, minus. Also some pollution that eludes the controls set in place, minus. I see it as breaking even, versus lanfilling which is just a minus. Is this what Vermont should move toward???? What options do we really have left if the state won’t let anybody do anything with waste other than landfill it?

In this case we’re not really talking about dangerous pollutants or hazardous household chemicals, its just food waste. The only problems that you can run into both relate to the site. The first is leachate of the nutrients from the compost into the groundwater. The second is animals, whether it be flies, rats, raccoons etc. Solve these two issues and you’ve got a successful waste reduction operation. Even Martha Stewart in the latest issue of her magazine uses Vermont Compost for her garden.

So please State of Vermont, work with these good people, don’t arbitrarily regulate them. Let VT compost go back and get whatever permits they need, don’t close them down. If there turns out to be issues still, then work with them to solve them. Same with the Intervale, so there’s site issues that can’t be overcome. Work with them, help them find a new site that will work, it’s in everyone’s best interest. Move forward, not backward, after all they’re just good people trying to do the right thing for everyone!.  

There’s a new food and politics blog: lavidalocavore.org blog.

Questions asked by: Orange Clouds 115 and Natasha.

Homework for all participants [and all you readers out there]: There are some myths about food in media, your job is to reframe the message when you see a food myth.

——————-

Mark Winne – author of “Closing the Food Gap”

Jane Goodall’s comment on the book: “It’s heartening to find a book that blends passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor.”

Q: With rising food prices, fed program food dollars not going as far any more. What needs to be done, and how can we move that discussion forward?

A: Lower income people paying much more for food. Food cost is already 20% of income for lower income familes vs much less for rest of us.

They’re already lining up at food banks and food stamp offices in record numbers. They’ll take an additional hit from these rising costs. We HAVE to act immediately in terms of responding to human need.

We haven’t always informed our compassion with analysis and long term thinking.

[there’s more]

We have to start asking why we still have food banks in richest country in the world? We have 50k places where people can get emergency food. Why do we spend 60 billion/yr in food assistance programs (food stamps, wic, etc.) and yet hunger and food insecurity is the same as when we first started measuring hunger in 1996? It’s not much different than 10, 12, 20 yrs ago. Our programs don’t do more than manage poverty. It’s not enough just to make donations, or advocate for food stamps. It’s important to get to the root causes. Ask state, local, fed govt to take poverty seriously and end the real cause of hunger in this country.

Q: Aren’t there enough inexpensive healthy foods? No one forces poor people eat junk.

A: In the 8th ward of DC, if you’re looking for a cheeseburger, fried chicken or a sandwich, you’ll do pretty well. You won’t find fresh veggies, you won’t find affordable healthy food. The same percentage of people are poor as are obese. I call it the Urban Food Desert. 800 counties in the country are food deserts – more than 20 miles to a food store. This is the result of the abandonment of our communities by the American grocery industry. They walk away from the poorest parts of the city. Public transit also failed. It didn’t connect people to the supermarkets in the ‘burbs. People are forced to shop at small mom & pop stores, bodegas, etc., where the food choices are limited. You have to be really committed to eat well: go long distance, make really good decisions about how to use food dollars to buy the best food possible. If you’re coming out of our public schools, you won’t be prepared to buy and prepare good foods. Families that haven’t learned to prepare food well will not be able to pass that info down to their children. We’re not providing that info in our public programs. All the programs that provide nutrition info to low income families are underfunded.

Q: You’ve done excellent work on local level food policy, what can we do in our communities?

A: A lot of the action is in DC. The Farm Bill, Child Nutrition bill, etc. Better options at state and local level: All kinds of opportunities to have your voice heard, talk about how food is produced in your community. Work on how to make sure poor people in car dependent communities can get good food. Develop food policy councils – groups of local stake holders with the intent of coordinating their work in the local food system and influence policy at state and local level.

One example relating to apple cider production:

A farmer ended up with e-coli in cider, people got sick, the state over-reacted and imposed regulations that would shut down all small producers in state. A food council intervened, brought dept of agriculture together with educators to work with producers. They hired a person to be in charge of helping the small farmers to produce healthfully, saving the farms while still protecting public health.

——————-

Judith

Small and sustainable farmer

Q: It is said that we won’t be able to feed the world if everyone farms organically.

A: Rumors that organic farming will starve the world are bad science funded by industrial agriculture.

In human terms: say someone is eating nothing but terrible junk food. You say: we’ll make you healthy. Here, eat just apples. That doesn’t work. That’s similar to the studies at the land grant universities. They took chemically saturated land, stopped using the chemicals, then a grew cover crop or used only one kind of organic fertilizer, and looked at the results and declared it doesn’t work.

But that’s not organics. Organic agriculture is a systematic approach. Examine the soil, examine the microbes, use livestock to fertilize, grow cover crops, rotate crops, etc. If you do this you get a very different result.

Q: Study by USDA on organic ??? (nut) orchards

A: 5 yrs into the program, finding more nuts, bigger nuts, and MUCH higher anti-oxidants. They’re now cutting funding for the program. Calling it organic seems to be the issue.

Q: How do we support small farms?

A: Besides going out and financially supporting them by buying from them directly and shopping farmer’s markets, we need to deal with policy. HUGE Industrial ag (Tyson, Cargill) are creating the policy, and creating huge problems in our farm policy (social justice, animal welfare, pollution). These in turn create food safety and health problems. Then they deflect the problem: mountains of manure, we’ll regulate them to “protect wetlands.” Then they subject ALL farms to these regs – even the tiny ones that are designed to prevent these problems to begin with.  This process drives small farms out of business.

We need consumers to tell policy makers to control big ag excesses, but realize that’s a broken system to begin with, make the policy that doesn’t ream small farms.

——————-

Michelle Simon

author: “Appetite for Profit”

Q: Average people: isn’t it a parent’s responsibility to make sure their child eats well? Why should the govt be involved in what people eat?

A: There’s a national debate about why people aren’t eating the right way. Why are there increasing health problem with not just adults, but with children. It has recently been recommended that we start giving cholesterol lowering drugs to children.

How did this happen? How can we fix it?

Major food cos are convincing American public policy makers not to do anything about advertising. “There’s nothing to look at here.”

The message is: “Parent’s you need to do a better job” But that’s nothing more than a deflection of criticism. PR is the name of the game.

Food industry must hook consumers while they’re young. Industry undermines parental authority with their advertising and promotions. As increasing tech has given advertisers more means to target kids, kids are being given new ways to go behind their parents’ backs.

So we have to HELP parents do their jobs. We don’t say “Parents that’s up to you” about child pornography, about cars speeding on residential roads, and so on, so why would we do that about nutrition?

Q: Why isn’t “good corp citizenship” causing companies to self-regulate?

A: If you look at latest snack food offerings, you’ll see “trans-fat free!” or “0 trans-fats!” because it helps their bottom line without changing anything about the healthfulness of the food.

Corporations are bound by law to make money for their shareholders [and maximize those earnings]. We can’t leave it to voluntary methods because there’s no moral element in corp decision making – the only goal is money.

Some results: SpongeBob is now on baby carrots, spinach, etc. It’s not the answer. Need to get food marketing out of the way entirely. Let them eat when they’re hungry, and give them real foods. Voluntary self-regulation won’t solve the problem. Cannot and will not work.

If they start doing the voluntary self-regulation, they do it until they stop doing it.  That’s the way voluntary self-regulation works and has always worked.

Q: Why isn’t it enough for us to act as individual consumers?

A: It’s too small a portion of the population, and they’re stopping with themselves “I’m shopping at a farmer’s market, game over.” It’s not enough that the affluent can get good healthy food. Everyone has an obligation to ensure that everyone else has the SAME access to good, healthy food.

——————-

Margaret Cohn

Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture

Q: ’08 farm bill – how can we make sure it’s implemented.

A: We got some important gains – program to promote farmer’s markets. Got $1 mil/yr prev yrs. NOW $3/$5/$10/$10 over the next 4 yrs. Major increases in organic research and extension. To retain those gains: USDA is the implementer. The bill is the framework, USDA determines how it looks when implemented.

Conservation security program is an example – nationwide program USDA tried to prevent. So USDA schedules sign-ups at height of farming season, so farmers won’t have the time to sign-up.

A new administration will help.  There are mechanisms for getting information about national policy advocacy. Action alerts. [join the mailing list]

Q: Ways to influence bills

A: The distinction betw auth (farm bill every 5 yrs) and appropriations (annual). Appropriations power lies at ag subcommittee of appropriations committee. So we focus our campaign on the members of that subcommittee. A lot of what happens is done without constituent ever seeing the priorities letter coming out of subcommittee via letter to ag chair.

Once we have our program, we have to ask the subcommittee what they will give us, they give us the smallest, easiest to implement piece.  If we want something more, we need Nebraskans getting back to Nebraska’s legislator, etc.  I want to hear back about how to do this more effectively.

Has anyone here written on state or local blogs? That’s where the politicians look.

[laptop  died at this point]

First of all, thanks to everyone who helped me get here. It’s been a really great event. I’m utterly exhausted, but totally energized! I liveblogged this in the AM, but didn’t have time to cross post ’til now. Enjoy!…

(note: all is paraphrased. Please pardon typos, I can’t type that fast! It’s really, really long, much more after the fold.)

———————–

Adam Siegel

My name is A Siegel, and I’m a carboholic…

[intros Jerome]

———————–

Jerome a Paris:

[Several charts of oil prices over the last few years] Mentioned that it was up to $130 3 weeks ago. It’s down to 130 again, so the problem is over, bubble is popped! [laughter]

The price of oil has moved from non-noticeable to noticeable, and is now heading to painful. As you can see prices have gone up, but in actual terms, it’s not EXPENSIVE yet. If you’re just grumbling about it, it’s not high enough yet to cause demand destruction.

Markets do not know where the price is going. [more charts] They were saying for a long time, that no matter what, the price is going to be at $20. … and now the assumption is that the price is going to be wherever it is right now. So they’re staying close to the pack and not going anywhere.

We should have known for a long time that there is a problem brewing. Since 1984, every single year, we’ve been burning more oil than we’ve been finding. The graph shows we are not going in the right direction with consumption.

Why are prices so high now? Production has been catching up with production capacity. We no longer have spare capacity. As you know anything that reduces production has to go with hand in hand demand destruction, and when China and others increase consumption, we must decrease ours more to keep overall consumption even. Otherwise the price rises.

Oil producing regions are peaking and declining really fast. You have countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran in an economic boom, buying cars, burning more and more oil, the volume available for export has been declining for several years, even more than the production capacity.

Reducing consumption means demand destruction.

It’s not just oil, coal is not going to be the solution. The energy value of coal peaked in 1998. Gas is not going to be a solution either. We are going to move away from oil whether we want to or not. We still have a choice of solutions right now, if we start solving it now. Famine is the market solution if we let prices make the choice. It’s our choice now, it won’t be later.

———————–

Mark Sumner:

Photos of Thomas Jefferson, Donald Rumsfeld, Thomas Gold.

These people are believers.

Jefferson:

Expected to find the mastodon in Louisiana. People then did not believe it possible for an animal to become extinct.

Rumsfeld:

Will find weapons of mass destruction. Why? It made no sense, in light of inspection reports that said they aren’t there, and our own intelligence that said they weren’t there.

Thomas Gold:

[pulsars astronomer]

Claims oil coal, natural gas not really fossil fuels, but bubble up from the middle of the earth due to some mysterious process. Claims it can be found in places we would not look. On the face it’s a little ludicrous, but after research, really ludicrous.

BUT we’re behaving like there’s endless oil. US oil production is falling no matter the incentives, the price, and so on. Anyone pretending that any drilling anywhere in the US will fix our problems doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Anyone that thinks we can find, hiding mysteriously, some oil source that will reverse this trend is looking for mastodons. 98 countries produce petroleum, 68 are past peak, 60 are in permanent decline.

Clean air act: the industry’s estimated cost of the clean air act was off by 3 orders of magnitude (too high). It really cost far, far less.  Electric bills went down despite claims that they would increase by 50%.

You cannot trust the industry when they tell you what these programs will cost to implement. They will be off by orders of magnitude. They will not factor in gains from all the new infrastructure we’ll build.

Important point: what Gore talked about yesterday doesn’t do anything about oil.

Transportation doesn’t run on electricity, it runs on oil. We need to entangle the systems. If we electrify transportation THEN electrical generation can solve the problem.

—————-

Adam Siegel:

Principles:

– Improve capacity for broader change

– 50 state impact, tangible, near term

– Public private, federal state local partnerships

– Not a comprehensive solution, but part of the solution

– Establish freshman class leadership.

Concepts:

– Energy smart communities

– Energysmart rail (reduce 10% in a decade)

– Energy smart mail

– Green the schools

energy smart education (make a profit while improving performance)

– Plugin hybrid electric school buses. (one of these sitting outside today)

Plugin Hybrid buses

– 6 – 10 mpg

reduce diesel pollution

reduce health risk

Emergency services – mobile backup power generatior

– Cost to buy is higher, but lower cost to own.

$60 million/yr, 5 yr, changes equation.

There are a lot of solver BBs that will help slay the dragon.

Make the right choice the preferred and easy choice.

Join the effort

– ideas?

– comments?

– Suggestions?

– Resources?

skills

time

enthusiasm

Hope to work with a bunch of freshmen to develop a freshman package for energy.

Engage with us.

UPDATE [The other half of the presentation]:

———————–

Debbie Cook:

Crossroads between bliss and dead end. I think there’s definitely some middle ground.

In Ireland, James Schlesinger said: “Conceptually the battle is over, the peakists have won. … Americans have to be hit over the head with a 2 x 4.”

We can drill another 1.5 million wells in TX. We can blow off every top of every mountain in the country. We can starve two billion people who can’t afford food [photo of corn ethanol]. We can dig and drill more. We can consume all the water and natural gas to unconventional oil, just so we can hang on to our “quality of life.” [collage of photos of stuff that adds no real value to our lives.]

The expected reserves from new discovery (big jack) are insufficient.

We’re pumping 8 times as much oil now than we were when I was born, but are we eight times happier? Are we happier than my grandmother? They had roads, coffee houses, transportation (rail), police on bicycles, santa clause, baseball, and lovers. Our grandparents missed out on so much stuff! [photo of family with more plastic junk in their yard than you can imagine.]

We’re still in search of the Emerald city. But it was there all along. We go to Europe to see all these quaint villages, but we can’t seem to build it in America. We’re going to need more community gardens. The French have small farms interspersed with small villages. You don’t have to do everything large.

[missed most of this: Ithaca is going to have a “podcar city” meeting for transit planning. Very interesting.]

Communities are always in transition. What will we be in 50 years?

– Energy smart america campaign

– Develop a process for creating policy

– Conservation in a hurry

– Remove barriers to renewables

– localize food , services, jobs

– Eliminate biofuels subsidies

– Zero energy buildings

– Electrify transport

———————–

Mark Begich, Anchorage mayor:

In Alaska, I have seen forests in my community where we never worried about spruce bark beetles, and now they’re drying out due to the beetles and there are fires like I’ve never seen.

In one storm, 75 feet of a village’s land disappeared. 75 feet DEEP (back from the shore). Now roads are like driving on a roller coaster in the interior because the permafrost is melting.

Rarely will you see me talk about emissions. Most people are concerned about what it’s going to cost. We try to present in terms of economic benefit down the road. We have implemented a $1/ton extra refuse site charge. We hired a renewable resource coordinator with the money.

Now we’re working on 20 – 30 projects with university interns. We put the resources in to make these programs successful. If you short ’em out in terms of dollars, you won’t succeed. What people want to see are practical real events. We changed all the Christmas lights to LED lights in Anchorage. When preparing to set it all up, the electrical guys said “We won’t have enough power to run all those lights.” They didn’t understand how much less power they use. Once we tapped ’em in, we saved 80% on our electrical and had more lights. So people saw this and went to the store and wanted some of those lights for themselves. They went to the store, but there was only one little shelf with some lights. This year, people went to the store and there were all sorts of LED lights.

Small business people didn’t know what to do with their waste. Their business focus doesn’t allow them the time to figure out how to deal with it. An intern in this program decided to change the cardboard receptacles to have a flatter opening, which causes people to flatten their boxes, and now business are saving tons of money because the cardboard is being put in there but trash isn’t and thus it isn’t being contaminated. As a result, the cardboard can all be recycled, saving tons of waste (and the associated disposal fees) from the landfill.

In Sitka, there are few roads, with a 35 mph max. I rode in a Zen there, but the owner had to modify it to drive 25 mph, because the old laws don’t understand the new technology [contextual comment by Liane: since it’s an electric car, it’s classified like those other electric vehicles we see more commonly: golf carts, and thus regulations require the max speed be reduced]. [typical speed limit on the island is 35 mph, min is 25, in rare places max is 45.]

In Anchorage, we’re now retrofitting all the city lights. We have 18 hours of night in winter. Lighting costs us millions and millions of dollars. There are 16,000 lights. When we replace them, we will save $1.6 million a year, cost only $5 million to install.

There’s a TON of low hanging fruit in government buildings.

Create $200 billion bond bank, our policy is retrofit every single government building in the country (small communities and large), do it with the savings on energy. Take the difference to seed new ideas and fund R & D. Can do it without ONE new tax dollar. Big ideas create new ideas.

———————–

Adam Siegel:

Doing the public buildings will help people learn about it. If you put a green roof on a school, parents and inspectors will learn about it.

———————–

Congressman Jeff Merkley

We’re talking about energy smart schools, energy smart rail, and energy smart mail. We need an Energy Smart Congress and Energy Smart Senate!

Do you remember in the movie “The Graduate” the famous line about the future? “The future is…” [audience reply “plastics!”].

The future today is Energy.

We see so many changes in our environment due to one degree temperature change, if we don’t act now as congress, by the time a small child is my age, the temp will go up 5 – 9 degrees. Let’s take on those issues together.

We redrafted a bill that valued property rights AND land use. I’d like to say we had the best energy smart legislation and legislature. We need to do the same with a new energy smart US congress and senate. If you see a plug-in school bus, you realize you can plug in everything. We need completely plug-in car system in America. We need a strategy to take on the efficiency of our existing and new buildings.

Conservation is often the way to take on the alternative energy investment and alternative fuels. If we’re out front, then what’s good for the planet will be good for the economy. Some ideas will be dead ends. Some will work out very well.

We need to think in terms of a distributed grid. We need to make every house a contributor. We need that leadership with the next president and the next senate. A cap & trade without loopholes can create a transition. What we did for sulfur dioxide, we need to do with global arming gases. We in this room can be a huge factor in making it happen. What you do on blogs is telling people what the mainstream media doesn’t get to. Energy’s at the heart of our national security, foreign policy, economic policy.

UPDATE:

After typing all this, I got to prove that when appropriately sleep deprived, I can give our President a run for his money in a race for “blithering idiot.” Enjoy my 1 minute, 57 seconds of rambling captured for posterity: