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There’s trouble brewing for your coffee habit

by Bettye39Wqhk Posted on May 23, 2014

There’s trouble brewing for your coffee habit

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Coffee lovers beware: Those miracle beans just got all the more precious. Coffee rust, a fungal disease, and Brazil’s epic drought are driving up the cost of that vital morning fix.

As NPR reports, wholesale coffee prices have jumped by more than 60 percent since January, from $1.25 per pound to $1.85. And traders suspect that the worst is still to come. Some predict that during the main harvest next month, prices could shoot up to $3 a pound. The long-term forecast looks even grimmer: Global warming is only making it easier for the fungus to spread, and some studies even suggest that our favorite blends will be wiped out by 2080.

Will you need a savings plan just to cover your morning cuppa joe? Well, it’s really the farmers and distributors who bear the brunt of the rust. On the consumer end, the serious snobs will feel the sting most: Even if plants survive, the fungus can hurt the coffee’s flavor, so specialty shops will need go the extra distance, and pay the extra penny, to get the best beans.

Some shops are already raising their rates. Joe, a specialty coffee chain with 10 shops in New York City and Philadelphia, recently raised it’s prices by 25 cents a drink because of the higher cost of beans.

So at what price does the coffee habit no longer become worth it? Ugh … get me another cup and I’ll stew on it.

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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Eastern Ukrainians Dislike EU and US, But They Dislike Russia Even More

by DoraOZLPgq Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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I don’t have a lot to add to this, but I thought this recent poll result from Pew was sort of fascinating. It’s part of a survey of Ukrainian attitudes toward governance, and the main takeaway is that Ukrainians from both east and west are strongly in favor of remaining united. Even in the east, only 18 percent favor allowing regions to secede.

That’s a surprisingly high number, but the question on the right was even more interesting. It turns out that eastern Ukrainians don’t really think very highly of any of the foreign actors currently meddling in Ukrainian politics. Unsurprisingly, 46 percent don’t like the EU and 52 percent don’t like the US, but an even higher number, 58 percent, don’t like Russia either. Even among Russian speakers, a small plurality dislike Russia.

If these poll results are accurate, there’s little appetite for secession in eastern Ukraine, and little appetite for Russian intervention. That should be food for thought for Vladimir Putin.

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6 Charts That Show How We Became China’s Grocery Store and Wine Cellar

by RoderickHaswell Posted on May 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jaeah Lee

We hear a lot about the perils of consuming food from China—and very little about the food we send to China. Yet we export five times more chow to China than we import from it (see chart above).

No doubt, China has undergone a full-on food-production miracle over the past generation, but there’s zero chance that its farms will emerge as a global exporting powerhouse, as its vaunted electronics factories have done. As this 2013 UN report notes, China’s total farm output has tripled since 1978. But it has to feed nearly a fifth of the globe’s people on just 8 percent of its arable land. Meanwhile, nearly 20 percent of China’s farmland has been polluted by runoff from industrial waste and/or excessive agrichemicals, its government recently acknowledged. On top of that, the country’s water resources are extremely limited.

Nevertheless, China is a major supplier of some high-profile items in our grocery stores and restaurants. Which ones?

Alex Park

Overall, though, China is a relatively minor source of food for the US—we import much more from both Mexico and Canada. The much bigger story is rocketing exports. China overtook Mexico as the country that sucks in the most US food in 2012. We export more than $25 billion worth of food per to China, as the chart at the top shows—an amount nearly equal to total food expenditures in the state of Ohio.

Jaeah Lee, Julia Lurie, Katie Rose Quandt

The main driver: China’s rapid switch to a US-style meat-rich diet. China taps US farms to feed its fast-growing meat habit in two ways. First, it directly imports it. Pork exports to China have surged over over the past decade. China is also a large importer of beef on the global market (mainly from Australia), but it has banned US product since 2003, over a mad-cow disease scare. With its beef demand soaring, though, it recently signaled it might lift the beef as early as July. As for chicken, China imports a huge amount from the US; and it has also invited US agribusiness giants Tyson and Cargill to plunk down chicken farms on domestic soil. These factory-scale facilities need a steady supply of feed to keep humming—and that’s where we get to the second way China looks to the US for its meat supply: by importing lots and lots of livestock feed, namely, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa (fed as hay to cows). Chinese consumers are also demonstrating a surging appetite for another protein-rich US product: nuts, almost all of which are grown in California. And, perhaps to help wash down all of that meat, there’s a growing thirst another California-centric luxury product, wine.

Jaeah Lee and Alex Park

These final charts, drawn from recent USDA projections, suggest that China’s love affair with meat will continue. Meanwhile, its appetite for nuts shows no sign of abating. For the US, these trends no doubt mean a windfall for the agribusiness companies that dominate meat, grain, and nut production. They also mean yet more pressure on our two most important food-growing regions: California’s Central Valley and the Midwest’s corn belt. As I’ve pointed out before, the Central Valley, source not only of nuts but also of alfalfa, is already rapidly drawing down fossil water resources to irrigate its drought-parched farms; and the corn belt is quietly undergoing a potentially devastating loss of topsoil, under the strain of maximum production and chaotic weather.

Jaeah Lee

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6 Charts That Show How We Became China’s Grocery Store and Wine Cellar

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Don’t Take the April Jobs Numbers Too Seriously

by AdanPrimrose Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the previous post, I mentioned that although the unemployment rate was down in April, this wasn’t so much because lots of people had suddenly found work. It’s mostly because a lot of people dropped out of the labor force and were no longer counted in the statistics. Think of it this way: If 93 people out of a labor force of 100 have jobs, the unemployment rate is 7 percent. But if one of those unemployed people gives up and exits the labor force entirely, then the labor force shrinks to 99 people. Now, 93 out of 99 people have jobs. That’s an unemployment rate of 6 percent even though the exact same number of people have jobs.

The labor force participation rate measures how many people in the total population are part of the labor force (i.e., working or looking for work). That number went way down in April. This produced a smaller labor force, which is the main reason the unemployment rate declined so dramatically. But there are two things to keep in mind: (a) the participation rate has been shrinking steadily for a long time, and (b) it’s a pretty volatile number from month to month. The chart below shows both things. The participation rate has been steadily shrinking since 2000, and it’s been shrinking even faster ever since the end of the Great Recession. And the big drop in April? As you can see from the tail end of the chart, the participation rate hasn’t actually changed since October. It’s just been bouncing up and down.

Bottom line: Don’t take the April numbers too seriously. The long-term trends are important, but there’s so much noise in the month-to-month numbers that you can’t draw too many conclusions from them.

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Don’t Take the April Jobs Numbers Too Seriously

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No, the IPCC climate report doesn’t call for a fracking boom

by Abraham Lowe Posted on April 16, 2014

No, the IPCC climate report doesn’t call for a fracking boom

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You might have heard that the latest installment of the big new U.N. climate report endorses fracking, urging a “dash for gas” as a bridge fuel to put us on a path to a more renewable energy future. These interpretations of the report are exaggerated, lack context, and are just plain wrong. They appear to have been based on interviews and on a censored summary of the report, which was published two days before the full document became available.

The energy chapter from the full report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “near‐term GHG emissions from energy supply can be reduced” by replacing coal-fired power plants with “highly efficient” natural gas–burning alternatives — a move that “may play a role as a transition fuel in combination with variable renewable sources.” But that’s only true, the report says, if fugitive emissions of climate-changing methane from drilling and distribution of the gas are “low” — which is far from the case today. Scientists reported Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that methane measurements taken near fracking sites in Pennsylvania suggest such operations leak 100 to 1,000 times more methane than the U.S. EPA has estimated. The IPCC’s energy chapter also notes that fracking for gas has “created concerns about potential risks to local water quality and public health.”

To protect the climate and save ourselves, the new IPCC report says we must quit fossil fuels. That doesn’t mean switching from coal to natural gas. It means switching from coal and gas to solar and wind, plugging electric vehicles into those renewable sources, and then metaphorically blowing up the fossil-fueled power plants that pock the planet.

Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at “low levels” requires a “fundamental transformation of the energy supply system,” the IPCC says. Overall, its latest report concludes that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70 percent by midcentury, and stop producing any such pollution by the turn of the century, if we’re to keeping warming to within 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.7 F. And nothing is more important in meeting those goals than revolutionizing the way we produce electricity. Humanity’s thirst for electricity is the biggest single cause of climate change, with the energy sector fueling a little more than a third of global warming.

Wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable forms of energy account for a little more than half of all new generating capacity being built around the world, the report says. But that is not enough. The report notes that renewable energy still requires government support, such as renewable portfolio standards and prices and caps on carbon emissions.

But, as desperately as we need to be curbing fossil-fuel burning, we just keep increasing it instead. Greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector rose 3.1 percent every year from 2001 to 2010. In the 1990s, they rose just 1.7 percent annually. “The main contributors to this trend were a higher energy demand associated with rapid economic growth and an increase of the share of coal in the global fuel mix,” the report states.

Of course, slaking our thirst for electricity with renewables wouldn’t just be good for the climate. The energy chapter highlights “co-benefits” from the use of renewable energy, “such as a reduction of air pollution, local employment opportunities, few severe accidents compared to some other forms of energy supply, as well as improved energy access and security.”

A revolution doesn’t sound so scary when you put it that way.


Source
Chapter 7: Energy Systems, IPCC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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More than 20 Million Families Would Benefit From an Increase in the Minimum Wage

by Margherit Posted on February 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The CBO released a study today on the effect of raising the minimum wage to $10.10. The chart below shows their main finding: millions of families outside the upper middle class would see a net increase in income (partly from higher wages and partly from higher economic growth) while families in the top 20 percent would see a decline (primarily from having to pay slightly higher prices for goods and services):

The cost of this higher income is fewer jobs: CBO estimates that employment would fall by about 0.3 percent, or 500,000 workers. That strikes me as being on the high side of consensus estimates, but it’s probably in the right ballpark.

As economic policies go, that’s not bad. In the real world, there’s no such thing as a policy that has benefits with zero costs. There are always compromises. In this case, in return for the small job losses, 16 million workers would get a direct wage increase; another 8 million would get an indirect wage increase; and nearly a million workers would be lifted out of poverty. That’s about as good as it gets.

All that said, this is a report that I suspect CBO shouldn’t have bothered doing. Their value-add lies in assessing the effects of legislation that no one else is studying. But the minimum wage has been studied to death. CBO really has nothing to add here except its own judgment about how to average out the dozens of estimates in published academic papers. In other words, they aren’t adding anything important to the conversation at all. This report is going to get a lot of attention, but it really doesn’t teach us anything new.

UPDATE: This post originally said that 80 percent of all families would benefit from a minimum wage increase. But the CBO figures don’t actually say that. Families throughout the bottom 80 percent of the income spectrum would benefit, and each individual income bucket that CBO studied would see a net increase in income, but that doesn’t mean every single family would benefit. I’ve corrected the text to reflect this.

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More than 20 Million Families Would Benefit From an Increase in the Minimum Wage

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How the Artists of "The Square" Fueled Egypt’s Revolution

by y32nmet Posted on January 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, which won an audience award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and is on the shortlist for an Oscar this year, delivers a fierce and frenetic portrait of life on the Cairo streets during two years of Egypt’s ongoing political unrest. Based on more than 1,600 hours of footage, the film tags along with several revolutionaries—among them Ahmed, a fiery grassroots activist, Magdy, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Khalid, a foreign-born actor—as they struggle against a suffocating regime and attempt to breathe new life into Egypt’s governance.

The Square made headlines when it became Netflix’s first major film acquisition—it will stream exclusively through the service starting January 17—and also because its only scheduled public screening in Egypt was canceled at the last minute. The country’s censorship board still hasn’t give Noujaim, whose past work includes Control Room and Rafea: Solar Mama, permission to screen the film in public.

The doc’s narrative arc initially hinged on the deposition of Hosni Mubarak and subsequent election of Mohamed Morsi as president. But history is often messier than we would wish to tell it. In January 2013, as Noujaim scrambled to meet her Sundance deadlines, she learned that her main characters “were back in the streets again saying, ‘Morsi is using the tools of democracy to create another dictatorship.'” The story wasn’t over.

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How the Artists of "The Square" Fueled Egypt’s Revolution

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The Simple Heart Cure – Chauncey W. Crandall

by Myrna Posted on November 5, 2013

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The Simple Heart Cure

The 90-Day Program to Stop and Reverse Heart Disease

Chauncey W. Crandall

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: October 8, 2013

Publisher: Humanix Publishing LLC

Seller: Ingram DV LLC


Heart disease kills more people than any other medical condition. And no one is more aware of this than top cardiologist Dr. Chauncey Crandall, who has performed over 40,000 heart procedures during his career. In his new book The Simple Heart Cure you’ll find this top doc’s groundbreaking approach to preventing and reversing heart disease — an approach honed by his study of foreign cultures free of heart disease and decades of experience helping patients achieve a healthier heart at any age. Dr. Crandall is living proof of his program’s success. At the age of 48, and with no major risk factors, he found himself in the ER with a “widow-maker” blockage of his main coronary artery. After emergency heart surgery, he recovered from heart disease using the same course of treatment he recommends to his thousands of patients — and details for your benefit in The Simple Heart Cure. His unique perspective as both doctor and patient helps him empathize with the difficulties in making a transition from years of bad habits to a heart-healthy way of life. Plus, Dr. Crandall believes in using every weapon in his medical arsenal to help his patients recover — conventional medicine, emerging treatments, lifestyle changes, even alternative therapies. So whether you just want to prevent heart problems, or you’ve already had a heart attack, you’ll find the help you need in The Simple Heart Cure capped by tasty heart-healthy menus, and a 90-day week-by-week plan to help you start taking action immediately.

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The Simple Heart Cure – Chauncey W. Crandall

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Rich Food Poor Food – Jayson Calton

by Myrna Posted on June 22, 2013

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Rich Food Poor Food

The Ultimate Grocery Purchasing System (GPS)

Jayson Calton

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: February 26, 2013

Publisher: Primal Nutrition, Inc.

Seller: Midpoint Trade Books


Do you get confused while pouring over labels at the grocery store trying to determine the healthiest options? What makes one box of cereal better for you than another, and how are we suppose to decipher the extensive lists of mysterious ingredients on every package, and then determine whether they are safe or toxic to a your family's health? With nearly 40,000 items populating the average supermarket today, the Rich Food Poor Food – Grocery Purchasing System (GPS), is a unique guide that steers the consumer through the grocery store aisles, directing them to health enhancing Rich Food options while avoiding health detracting Poor Food ones Rich Food, Poor Food is unique in the grocery store guide arena in that rather than rating a particular food using calories, sodium, or fat as the main criteria, it identifies the products that contain wholesome, micronutrient-rich ingredients that health-conscious shoppers are looking for, like wild caught fish, grass-fed beef, raw/organic cheese, organic meats, pastured eggs and dairy, organic produce and sprouted grains, nuts and seeds, while avoiding over 150 common unwanted Poor Food ingredients such as sugar, high fructose corn syrup, refined flour, GMOs, MSG, artificial colors, flavors and sweeteners, pesticides, nitrites/ nitrates, gluten, and chemical preservatives like BHA and BHT. So while other food swapping grocery guides may give the green light to eating Kellogg's Froot Loops with Sprinkles, Oscar Mayer Turkey Bologna and Hostess Twinkies based on their lower calories, sodium, and/or fat levels, you won't find these heavily processed, food-like products identified as Rich Food choices in Rich Food, Poor Food. That doesn't mean this guide to micronutrient-sufficient living leads readers to a boring culinary lifestyle. Quite the contrary! The Caltons offer Rich Food choices in every aisle of the store including desserts, snacks, sauces, hot dogs, and other fun foods! This indispensable grocery store guide raises the bar on food quality as it takes readers on an aisle-by-aisle tour, teaching them how to identify potentially problematic ingredients, while sharing tips on how to lock in a food's nutritional value during preservation and preparation, save money, and make homemade versions of favorite grocery store staples. Regardless of age, dietary preference or current health, Rich Food, Poor Food turns the grocery store and farmers market into a micronutrient pharmacy–filling the shopping cart with a natural prescription for better health and longevity.

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Rich Food Poor Food – Jayson Calton

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Say bye-bye to cheap food

by Carson Silverman Posted on June 12, 2013

Say bye-bye to cheap food

By John Upton

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They won’t be $1 for long.

The days of agricultural plenty are over and it’s going to keep getting harder for everybody to afford enough food to eat.

That’s the somber conclusion of a new international report, which warns that low food prices “seem now a feature of a bygone era.” Blame climate change, degraded land, growing populations, and increasing energy costs.

“[W]ith energy prices high and rising and production growth declining across the board, strong demand for food, feed, fibre and industrial uses of agricultural products is leading to structurally higher prices and with significant upside price risks,” states the 10-year agricultural outlook [PDF] published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

From Think Progress:

The report notes that “increasing environmental pressures” — which include climate change-fueled storms, drought and flooding — will be one of the main factors slowing the growth of food production around the world. In China in particular — a country the report focused on, with a fifth of the world’s population and steadily rising income levels — water shortages will be one of the key problems facing food production as rainfall becomes more variable. And there will be other risks for China as well. As the report notes: “Food availability will be impacted by changes in temperature, water availability, extreme weather events, soil condition, and pest and disease patterns.”

But China’s not the only country that faces threats to food production from climate change. Last year, a report from Oxfam warned that extreme weather events would cause food prices around to world to soar in the coming decades. The report projected worldwide corn prices to spike by 500 percent by 2030, and that another U.S. drought in 2030 could raise America’s corn prices 140 percent on top of that.

And from Bloomberg:

Even as population growth slows in the next decade, the world will still have an additional 742 million people to feed by 2022, according to the report. …

Global yield growth for crops, particularly grains, has been slowing for at least two decades, partly due to reduced investment in crop research, according to the report. That trend is expected to continue in the next decade.

“Measures to reduce food loss and waste will be important in meeting rising demand and for increasing productivity,” the organizations wrote.

It’s almost enough to make you lose your appetite.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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