Quiz Oct 13

Atmosphere of Hope

1.  What gathering last December does Tim Flannery say might create an atmosphere of hope?

2. Digital connectedness has brought what new opportunities?

3. What may the "third way" allow us to do in coming decades?

4. What excellent website on climate science does Flannery recommend?

5. What "silent killer" accounted for so many "excess deaths" in Melbourne?

6. What other silent killer takes more than 300,000 lives every year?

7. Why are extreme warming-induced snowfalls a problem?

8. How long might "mega droughts" last, later in this century?

9. What did NASA conclude about six big glaciers that drain into Amundsen Bay?

DQ

• Is it reasonable to place our hope in nonbinding international accords?
• Have most people now experienced enough extreme weather to know that climate change is real? xii
• Do you think the public understands the health implications of a warming world? Why hasn't climate change been framed as a public health issue?
• Do you think people who don't live near coasts tend to be dismissive of sea level rise? What would you tell such people?

	Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)
10/10/16, 1:46 PM The great @ElizKolbert gave a great speech accepting the Rose/Walters prize. It's on Youtube! youtube.com/watch?v=3Fqea5…

And consider the worst-case scenario...
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An important essay by Michael Pollan, "Big Food Strikes Back"-

Eight years ago this month, I published in these pages an open letter to the next president titled, “Farmer in Chief.” “It may surprise you to learn,” it began, “that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food.” Several of the big topics that Barack Obama and John McCain were campaigning on — including health care costs, climate change, energy independence and security threats at home and abroad — could not be successfully addressed without also addressing a broken food system.

A food system organized around subsidized monocultures of corn and soy, I explained, guzzled tremendous amounts of fossil fuel (for everything from the chemical fertilizer and pesticide those fields depended on to the fuel needed to ship food around the world) and in the process emitted tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas — as much as a third of all emissions, by some estimates. At the same time, the types of food that can be made from all that subsidized corn and soy — feedlot meat and processed foods of all kinds — bear a large measure of responsibility for the steep rise in health care costs: A substantial portion of what we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases linked to diet. Furthermore, the scale and centralization of a food system in which one factory washes 25 million servings of salad or grinds 20 million hamburger patties each week is uniquely vulnerable to food-safety threats, whether from negligence or terrorists. I went on to outline a handful of proposals aimed at reforming the food system so that it might contribute to the health of the public and the environment rather than undermine it.

A few days after the letter was published, Obama the candidate gavean interview to Joe Klein for Time magazine in which he concisely summarized my 8,000-word article:

“I was just reading an article in The New York Times by Michael Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they’re contributing to Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity.”

Was it possible that the food movement — the loose-knit coalition of environmental, public-health, animal-welfare and social-justice advocates seeking reform of the food system — might soon have a friend in the White House?

This, after all, was not the only sign that Barack Obama recognized the need to reform industrial agriculture and stand up to Big Food. In his long-shot quest to win the Iowa caucuses, he courted the state’s small farmers, many of whom feel victimized by the oligopolies that dictate the prices and terms by which they’re forced to sell their crops and livestock. He also courted rural Iowans whose communities are increasingly befouled by the hog and chicken CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) replacing the state’s family farms. Though CAFOs pollute the air and water like factories, they are regulated like farms, which is to say very lightly, when at all. Obama promised to change all that, vowing on the campaign trail to bring CAFOs under the authority of the federal Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and Superfund program “just as any other polluter.” He also promised to give communities “meaningful local choice about the placement, expansion and regulations of CAFOs.” To big pork and chicken producers, which had largely succeeded in gutting both local and federal authority over CAFOs, these were fighting words. And agricultural reformers cheered.

As Big Food partnered with Michelle Obama in her war on obesity, it engaged in a campaign against any new law or regulation that threatened its freedom to make and market junk food.

They also cheered when, at a 2007 agricultural meeting in Iowa, Obama declared that Americans had a right to know where in the world their food came from and whether it had been genetically modified. In ways small and large, Obama left the distinct impression during the campaign that he grasped the food movement’s critique of the food system and shared its aspirations for reforming it.

But aspirations are cheap — and naïveté can be expensive. A few days after the candidate’s interview with Time, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a.k.a. the Senior Senator from Corn, blasted Obama for his heretical views on American agriculture, suggesting he was blaming farmers for obesity and pollution. A campaign spokesman quickly walked back Obama’s remarks, explaining that the candidate was merely “paraphrasing an article he’d read.” Big Food had spoken, and the candidate — an urban politician from Chicago — got the first of what would turn out to be many unpleasant tutorials on the industry’s sway in Washington.

In order to follow the eight-year drama starring Big Food and both Obamas — for soon after the inauguration, the first lady would step in to play a leading role — it’s important to know what Big Food is. Simply put, it is the $1.5 trillion industry that grows, rears, slaughters, processes, imports, packages and retails most of the food Americans eat. Actually, there are at least four distinct levels to this towering food pyramid. At its base stands Big Ag, which consists primarily of the corn-and-soybean-industrial complex in the Farm Belt, as well as the growers of the other so-called commodity crops and the small handful of companies that supply these farmers with seeds and chemicals. Big Ag in turn supplies the feed grain for Big Meat — all the animals funneled into the tiny number of companies that ultimately process most of the meat we eat — and the raw ingredients for the packaged-food sector, which transforms those commodity crops into the building blocks of processed food: the corn into high-fructose corn syrup and all the other chemical novelties on the processed-food ingredient label, and the soy into the oil in which much of fast food is fried. At the top of the Big Food pyramid sit the supermarket retailers and fast-food franchises... (continues)
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The Health Impacts Of Climate Change Are Huge And Very Real 

Think of climate change, you probably think of melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, crazy weather and environmental havoc. While the health of Planet Earth is usually the biggest factor, it's not often that the health of the human race enters significantly into the discussion.

A roundtable forum of public health leaders in Canberra hopes to change that, and to place health at the forefront of Australia's action on climate change.

The Climate and Health Alliance (CAHA), along with a number of healthcare and nursing groups, hosted the meeting of around 40 professionals in Parliament House. Assistant Health Minister Ken Wyatt, Shadow Health Minister, Catherine King, and Greens leader Richard Di Natale attended, hearing about how climate change is a "public health emergency", according to CAHA executive director Fiona Armstrong... (continues)