Vote No

Here are the details that unfortunately don't fit on a "Vote Yes" bumper sticker or yard sign. This amendment will fund four commendable causes: "Water Quality" (the clean water fund), "Wildlife Habitat" (an outdoor heritage fund), "Our Great Outdoors" (a parks and trails fund), and "Our Way of Life" (an arts and cultural heritage fund). These sound like good priorities, but consider the cost: this would increase the sales tax by three-eighths of one percent (0.00375 or 3/8%) for twenty-five years. This is a new tax, and it represents a substantial increase in funding for these areas by generating an estimated $312 million a year. For perspective, consider that the existing Environmental and Natural Resources Trust Fund has financed a total of $229 million in projects since 1990, including $21 million in 2008. That's a big difference.
To repeat, forty percent of the profits of the Minnesota State Lottery have flowed into this existing trust fund for almost twenty years, with a smaller percentage (now a total of $229 million) becoming available for spending as the fund builds. The new 3/8% tax will generate $312 million every single year ($11 billion over its twenty-five year life). It's not only going to fund clean water projects, but also theater and museum projects.

Perspective is Key

I read Fast Food Nation in high school and should reread it to give you my opinion now. However, my opinion of The Omnivore's Dilemma is that is an acceptable overview of today's food industry for an audience disconnected from agriculture, but that it does not necessarily cover the whole picture. For instance, I recommend The Man Who Fed The World by Leon Hesser as an accompanying book to give perspective and appreciation for the "industrial agriculture" methods that are so vilified by Pollen. Agronomists had good intentions: much of the world was starving, and the Green Revolution saved India from that fate. (Of course, that is not a free pass for the methods used at that time when we have more environmentally-friendly practices now like precision application of those herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.)

My food reading list

My food reading list
*The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry
*Silent Spring Rachel Carson
*A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold
*A Thousand Acres Jane Smiley
*Animal Vegetable Miracle Barbara Kingsolver
*In Defense of Food Michael Pollen
*The End of Food Paul Roberts

Other possibilities:
Food Politics Marion Nestle
Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto Peter Pringle
Lords of the Harvest Dan Charles

Water and Fuel

The forests, energy, water, chemicals, and biodiversity chapters of my copy of The Skeptical Environmentalist have been thoroughly highlighted in pink and marked in pencil. I read them all yesterday and today, and they are up for discussion next Wednesday in my graduate class at the University of Minnesota, Globalization and the World Food Economy.

I felt like the biodiversity and chemical chapters were a waste of my time. The conclusion of the biodiversity chapter was that some scientists have grossly overestimated the number of species going extinct without providing any evidence to back up their assumptions. We are probably not losing 40,000 species a day, even if we count as-yet-unidentified rainforest species of worms and insects. The maximum reasonable estimate is a loss of 0.7% of all species over the next 50 years, or a little more than 4,000 a day assuming 30 million species (though only 1.6 million species have been actually identified). The author had a point that we should base the estimates and assumptions on scientific evidence, but offered no policy ideas for actually preserving biodiversity while continuing to produce enough food to feed the world.

I was similarly disappointed with the chapter on chemicals. The author presented evidence by the well-respected Dr. Ames from the University of California that about the same proportion of natural chemicals as synthetic chemicals are found to be cancer-causing using high-dosage lab rat tests. If we really trusted these tests, we would conclude that apples and celery are actually more carcinogenic than DDT. The author agreed that the high-dosage lab rat test is a discredited method, but then seemed to conclude that synthetic chemicals are OK. I continue to be personally cautious about low doses of chemicals, synthetic or natural, in humans, over long periods of time. I saw what low doses of aflatoxin (a natural chemical--in other words, produced by a fungi) in our corn did to our dairy herd in the 90s.

I was much more satisfied with the conclusions reached in the water and energy chapters. I am now pretty sure that, though fossil fuel and water resources are limited, the biggest problems we face are developing new renewable energy technologies and water pricing mechanisms. There will come a day when we stop relying on oil, and it won't be because we run out of oil, but because we've developed more affordable, cleaner technologies. I'm also not worried that nations will go to war over water. It would be cheaper for a nation to build a desalination facility to produce useable water from the ocean than to invade and occupy an upstream nation.

Some policy implications I tentatively gleaned from today's readings:

1. Tax fossil fuels. The price we pay for oil, coal, and natural gas (avg. of 6.2 cents per kWh when the book was published) does not cover negative social costs of pollution, etc. (an additional 1.2 cents per kWh). Funding renewable energy research is still a good idea, because research will lower the cost of solar energy (50 cents per kWh when the book was published, but 30 cents now according to a brief Google search) and wind energy (currently between 6 and 10 cents per kWh). We also need research (I know this is being done at Iowa State) on biomass production, where it will not compete with food production, on poor soil, on land susceptible to erosion, and on land that needs to be replenished in fertility.
2. Price water--by the liter or gallon, not by a yearly flat rate. Agriculture (irrigation) is the number one use of water, ahead of other industries and household uses, and agriculture uses water very indiscriminately. Why not? The true social cost of using the water is not being paid. If so, we could encourage efficient use of water through drip irrigation and acceptance of the fact that some places where there is not much water should import their food instead of exploiting their water supplies to grow food locally. I hadn't considered this before, but cheap water is pretty much a hidden subsidy. In the U.S., agriculture gets to use $3.5 billion water for free. In poorer, developing countries, it is even worse, with a total unpaid water use of $22 billion by cities and $20-25 billion by agriculture. Worldwide , we need to stop using groundwater, because we're using it faster than our aquifers can replenish, and instead use dams, which would have the capacity to provide what we currently use and more. The result of these water management reforms: more food, less hunger, better health, environmental development, and wealth (wealth equals luxury uses of water like green lawns and dishwashers by the world's affluent).