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Mother Jones
This story included erroneous information. Waterford, NY, fire chief Donald Baldwin was not the commenter in question. We regret the error and are investigating.
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Tag Archives: Pines
The Looming Olive Oil Apocalypse
Mother Jones
The world’s most celebrated olive oil comes from sun-drenched groves of Italy. But Italy is also a hotbed of olive oil subterfuge, counterfeit, and adulteration—and has been since Roman times, as Tom Muellar showed in an eye-opening 2007 New Yorker piece (which grew into a book called Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.) Next year, getting real olive oil from Italy is going to be even harder than usual. Here’s the LA Times’ Russ Parsons:
As a result of what the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is calling “The Black Year of Italian Olive Oil,” the olive harvest through much of Italy has been devastated—down 35% from last year.
The reason is a kind of perfect storm (so to speak) of rotten weather through the nation:
When the trees were turning flowers to fruit in the spring, freezing weather suddenly turned scorching, causing the trees to drop olives. Summer was hot and humid, leading to all sorts of problems. Then in mid-September, there was a major hail storm, knocking much of the fruit that remained onto the ground.
Other major olive oil-producing nations suffered similar calamities; Parsons reports that in Spain and Mediterranean neighbors, production is also “forecast to be far below last year’s.” And California, that big chunk of Mediterranean-like climate on our west coast, where excellent olive oil is produced? Parsons says the epochal drought is pinching production, and he quotes Muellar to the effect that “frankly, I hear about a lot of games being played there too, with labels and quality alike.” Sigh.
I find all of this distressing. I came of age as a cook in an era of olive oil hegemony. I treat it like the oil that powers my car, as something to be relied on casually, as if it appeared by magic from nowhere. (Nearly all my Tom’s Kitchen columns feature it.)
Once a staple of Mediterranean polyculture—farms and households would feature olive trees in mixed groves along with a multitude of other crops—olive oil production has long since industrialized. Here is The Ecologist from 2008:
Industrial olive farms grow their olive trees, planted at high densities, in massive irrigated orchards on lowland plains. The olives are harvested by machines that clamp around the tree’s trunk and shake it until the olives fall to the ground. Oil is then extracted by industrial-scale centrifuge, often at high temperatures. In contrast, small, traditional farms are often ancient, their trees typically planted on upland terraces. The farmers manage their groves with few or no agrochemicals, less water and less machinery. Olives are picked off the ground by hand and the oil extracted by grinding the olives in a millstone and press. Demand for cheap, mass-produced oil is making it a struggle for the smaller, traditional farms to be economically viable, however.
….
Intensive olive farming is a major cause of one of the biggest environmental problems affecting the EU: widespread soil erosion and desertification in Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal. In 2001, the European Commission ordered an independent study into the environmental impact of olive farming across the EU. The report concluded: ‘Soil erosion is probably the most serious environmental problem associated with olive farming.
I fear that next year’s olive oil crunch is a harbinger of things to come. I am officially in search of alternative cooking fats. One I’ve come to appreciate: lard from pasture-raised hogs. Lard’s rotten nutritional reputation is the result of outdated and discredited science. And it makes food taste really good, too.
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Thanksgiving Films, Ranked
Mother Jones
Ho ho ho and merry Thanksgiving! Here is a ranking of twenty Thanksgiving films. What is a “Thanksgiving film”? For the purposes of this post it is a film that is both a) on Wikipedia’s list, and b) one I, Ben Dreyfuss, immediately recall seeing and have an opinion about.
1. Hannah and Her Sisters
2. Rocky
3. Scent of a Woman
4. Rocky II
5. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
6. Home for the Holidays
7. Avalon
8. The Ice Storm
9. The Morning After
10. For Your Consideration
11. Grumpy Old Men
12. Addams Family Values
13. Funny People
14. Spider-Man
15. The Object of My affection
16. The Other Sister
17. Bean
18. Son in Law
18. Tower Heist
19. Unknown
20. Jack and Jill
Disclosure: I haven’t actually seen Jack and Jill but I’m pretty confident it’s the worst. Also, The Last Waltz was not included in this ranking because though it is on the Wikipedia list of Thanksgiving films, it shouldn’t be. Still pretty good though!
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Under Pressure From Obama, France Delays Warship Sale to Russia
Mother Jones
I confess that I’m surprised to read this:
France has put on hold a controversial deal to supply Russia with two high-tech amphibious assault ships following international concern over Moscow’s military involvement in Ukraine
….After months of wait-and-see messages from the French, Hollande’s declaration Tuesday was at least clear: It would not be appropriate to deliver the control-and-command vessels given the current conflict between Moscow-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine, he said.
….In June, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, had insisted that the contract had been signed and sealed and had to be honored. On Tuesday, following months of pressure from the United States, Fabius appeared to have changed his mind.
Huh. I guess the weakling Obama really is working quietly behind the scenes on stuff like this, and really does still have some clout on the international stage. Who knew?
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Under Pressure From Obama, France Delays Warship Sale to Russia
A Nuclear Deal With Iran Probably Won’t Happen
Mother Jones
Over at Foreign Affairs, Aaron David Miller and Jason Brodsky run through four reasons that we failed to reach a nuclear deal with Iran by this weekend’s deadline. This is the key one:
An internal IAEA document that was prepared in 2009 detailed an April 1984 high-level meeting at the presidential palace in Tehran in which Khamenei — then president of Iran — championed a decision by then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to launch a nuclear weapons program. According to the account, Khamenei said that “this was the only way to secure the very essence of the Islamic Revolution from the schemes of its enemies, especially the United States and Israel.”
….The fact is that Iran knows what it wants: to preserve as much of its nuclear weapons capacity as possible and free itself from as much of the sanctions regime as it can. The mullahs see Iran’s status as a nuclear weapons state as a hedge against regime change and as consistent with its regional status as a great power. That is what it still wants. And that’s why it isn’t prepared — yet — to settle just for what it needs to do a deal. Ditto for America. And it’s hard to believe that another six months is going to somehow fix that problem.
This is why I’m skeptical that a deal can be reached. Iran wants to have nuclear weapons capability. The United States wants Iran to verifiably abandon its nuclear ambitions. Everything else is just fluff, and it’s hard to see a middle ground here.
This doesn’t mean an agreement is impossible. Maybe there really is some halfway point that both sides can live with. It sure isn’t easy to see it, though. The disagreement here is just too fundamental and too definitive. One side wants to be able to build a bomb, and the other side wants exactly the opposite. How do you split that baby?
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More Patents Does Not Equal More Innovation
Mother Jones
Via James Pethokoukis, here’s a chart from a new CBO report on federal policies and innovation. Needless to say, you can’t read too much into it. It shows the growth since 1963 of total factor productivity (roughly speaking, the share of productivity growth due to technology improvements), and there are lots of possible reasons that TFP hasn’t changed much over the past five decades. At a minimum, though, the fact that patent activity has skyrocketed since 1983 with no associated growth in TFP suggests, as the CBO report says dryly, “that the large increase in patenting activity since 1983 may have made little contribution to innovation.”
The CBO report identifies several possible innovation-killing aspects of the US patent system, among them a “proliferation of low-quality patents”; increased patent litigation; and the growth of patent trolls who impose a substantial burden on startup firms. The report also challenges the value of software patents:
The contribution of patents to innovation in software or business methods is often questioned because the costs of developing such new products and processes may be modest. One possible change to patent law that could reduce the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit patent protections for inventions that were relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, patents on software and business methods could expire sooner than is the case today (which, with renewals, is after 20 years), reducing the incentive to obtain those patents. Another change that could address patent quality, the processing burden on the USPTO, and the cost and frequency of litigation would be to limit the ability to obtain a patent on certain inventions.
Personally, I’d be in favor of limiting software and business method patents to a term of zero years. But if that’s not feasible, even a reduction to, say, five years or so, would be helpful. In the software industry, that’s an eternity.
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Tagged cbo, daily-onslaught, photos, Pines, Processing, regulatory affairs, street, tech, tfp, uspto, venta
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Are Term Limits a Good Idea?
Mother Jones
Jim Newton, a longtime local politics reporter in Los Angeles, wrote his final column for the LA Times today. In it, he offered up “a handful of changes that might make a big difference,” and the one that resonates with me is his suggestion that both LA and California do away with term limits:
Elected officials who were popular with their constituents once held their seats for decades, building up experience and knowledge; now, with term limits in place, they’re barely seated before they start searching for the next office. That’s brought new faces but at great cost. Power has shifted from those we elect to those we don’t, to the permanent bureaucracy and to lobbyists. Problems get kicked down the road in favor of attention-grabbing short-term initiatives that may have long-term consequences.
Case in point: Why do so many public employees enjoy budget-breaking pensions? Because term-limited officials realize it is easier to promise a future benefit than to give raises now. The reckoning comes later; by then they’re gone.
Term limits locally were the work of Richard Riordan, who bankrolled the initiative and later became mayor. I asked him recently about them, and he startled me with his response: It was, he said, “the worst mistake of my life.”
Term limits always sound good. The problem with the idea is that being a council member or a legislator is like any other job: you get better with experience. If your legislature is populated solely by people with, at most, a term or two of experience, it’s inevitable that (a) they’ll have an almost pathologically short-term focus, and (b) more and more power will flow to lobbyists and bureaucrats who stay around forever and understand the levers of power better.
For what it’s worth, I’d recommend a middle ground. I understand the problem people have with politicians who win office and essentially occupy sinecures for the rest of their lives. It’s often a recipe for becoming insulated and out of touch with the real-world needs of constituents. But short term limits don’t solve the problem of unaccountable power, they simply shift the power to other places. The answer, I think, is moderate term limits. Something between, say, ten and twenty years. That’s long enough to build up genuine expertise and a genuine power base, while still preventing an office from becoming a lifetime of guaranteed employment.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (25th Anniversary Edition) – Stephen R. Covey
READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS
Genre: Self-Improvement
Price: $9.99
Publish Date: November 11, 2014
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Seller: Vook INC
When it was first published in 1989, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was an almost instant bestseller—and quickly became a permanent part of the cultural lexicon. With over 25 million copies sold worldwide in over 40 languages since its first publication, this book continues to help millions of readers become more effective in both their personal and professional lives. This is one of the rare books that has influenced presidents, CEOs, educators, and individuals all over the world not only to improve their businesses and careers but to live with integrity, service, dignity, and success in all areas of life. It has had an undeniable impact for the past 25 years—and will no doubt continue to be influential for many more. ENDORSEMENTS "Every so often a book comes along that not only alters the lives of readers but leaves an imprint on the culture itself. The 7 Habits is one of those books." —Daniel Pink, author of Drive and To Sell Is Human "The 7 Habits encompass timeless principles that can help guide any company toward success." —Tony Hsieh, New York Times bestselling author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc. "There are very few business books that are essential reading for anyone who wants to make a difference. This is one of the great ones." —Seth Godin, author of The Icarus Deception "No person lasts forever, but books and ideas can endure. Stephen R. Covey's life is done, but his work is not. It continues, right here in this book as alive today as when first written." —Jim Collins "Twenty-five years after it first appeared, the wisdom of The 7 Habits is more relevant than ever. On an individual level people are burning out, and on a collective level we are burning up the planet. So Dr. Covey's emphasis on self-renewal, and his understanding that leadership and creativity require us to tap into our own physical, mental, and spiritual resources, are exactly what we need now." —Arianna Huffington Dr. Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012) was a world-renowned authority on leadership and family relations. He held a Bachelor of Science from the University of Utah, an MBA from Harvard, and a PhD from Brigham Young University. Dr. Covey served as Vice Chairman of FranklinCovey Co., and was an in-demand speaker, teacher, and organizational consultant. Throughout his career, Dr. Covey brought new insight and understanding to millions of readers and students.
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The US Will See 50 Percent More Lightning Strikes, Thanks to Global Warming
Mother Jones
By now we’re familiar with some of the scarier potential impacts of climate change: Floods, fires, stronger hurricanes, violent conflicts. Well, here’s a new one to add to your nightmares. Lightning strikes in the continental United States will increase roughly 12 percent for every degree Celsius of global warming, a study published today in Science finds. If warming continues unchecked, that could translate into a 50 percent increase in lightning by the end of the century—three strikes then for every two strikes now. (On average, there are currently about 25 million strikes per year.)
Does this mean an increase your odds of getting struck by lightning? Technically yes, I guess, but I wouldn’t worry about that. Instead, the increase matters because lightning strikes are the principle cause of wildfires, which are already predicted to become more severe due to global warming. In one 24-hour period in August, lightning in Northern California started 34 wildfires. The study doesn’t make any specific predictions about wildfire activity, but knowing about future lightning conditions is an important part of that equation.
Lightning is notoriously hard to account for in climate models, because the models can only represent large-scale atmospheric forces like wind speed, moisture, and temperature; they can’t show relatively small electric pulses, said Anthony Del Genio, an atmospheric scientist for NASA who was not involved with the study. So to get a sense of how lighting patterns will change in future climates, scientists have to rely on “proxies”—third-party forces they can model that have a known relationship to lightning. Early lightning studies in the 1990s, for example, made inferences based on how the heights of clouds—thought to be one contributor to lightning patterns—are expected to change with global warming, Del Genio said.
But lightning is a complex phenomenon that still isn’t fully understood by atmospheric scientists, so proxies have mostly proven to be imperfect for one reason or another. As a result, the Science study explains, previous estimates for how lightning will change with global warming range from an increase of 5 percent to and increase of more than 100 percent for each degree of temperature rise. Not very informative.
This study presents a new proxy for lightning—a proxy that author David Romps of the University of California-Berkeley thinks is much stronger than any of the previous ones. It’s actually a combination of two proxies: precipitation and “CAPE,” a standard measure of the kinetic energy clouds hold as they rise in the atmosphere. Lightning is the product of electrical charges caused by ice particles of different densities colliding in clouds, so Romps chose factors that would be necessary for lightning to occur: Enough precipitation to form ice, and enough upward energy to keep the ice suspended.
Taken together, those proxies accurately predicted 77 percent of actual lightning strikes observed in the US in 2011 by a national web of electromagnetic sensors. That result, Romps said, is a sign that these proxies are “doing a remarkably good job” of representing lightning patterns.
The video below shows the data Romps used to compare his hypothesis to observed lightning strikes, here represented as red dots. The original was over five minutes long—with one second for every day of the year—so we sped it up a bit.
The next step was to use data from 11 existing climate models to find out how precipitation and CAPE are predicted to change with global warming. Although Romps said the correlation between warming and CAPE is still being studied, all 11 models predicted it would increase by the end of the century. In other words, global warming will probably produce clouds that have stronger upward momentum. Combine that with predicted precipitation and, according to Romps, you get a sense of how much more lightning we can expect to see.
In this study, Romps’ dataset paints its predictions with a broad brush; the data isn’t detailed enough to know how lightning will change in specific parts of the country, or how the frequency will change in different seasons. But Del Genio says that the study advances our understanding of which weather forces contribute most to lightning. What’s more, he says, Romps’ work give us a strong indication of what lies ahead.
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The US Will See 50 Percent More Lightning Strikes, Thanks to Global Warming
“Wild-Caught,” Eh? 30 Percent of Shrimp Labels Are False
Mother Jones
Shrimp is America’s favorite seafood—we eat more of it than any other kind, by a wide margin. And the tasty crustacean still (more or less) thrives near our ample shores—from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf to the Carolinas. That’s why it’s deeply weird that 90 percent of the shrimp we eat comes from often-fetid farms in Southeast Asia, which tend to snuff out productive mangrove ecosystems and have a sketchy labor record. But it gets worse. Even when we do try to choose wild-caught US shrimp, we’re often fooled. That’s the message of a new report by the ocean-conservation group Oceana.
The researchers sampled 143 shrimp products from 111 grocery stores and restaurants in Portland, Ore., New York City, Washington D.C., and along the Gulf of Mexico, and subjected them to DNA testing. Result: 30 percent of them were misrepresented on labels.
They found the most deception in New York City, where 43 percent of the samples from supermarkets and restaurants proved to be misleadingly labeled. Of those, more than half were “farmed whiteleg shrimp disguised as wild-caught shrimp.” Oof. D.C. shrimp eaters have also have cause for doubt about what’s being served them: Supermarkets there showed better than in ones in New York, but nearly half of shrimp samples from D.C. restaurants turned up mislabeled.
Even in the Gulf, still the site of a robust shrimp fishery despite the occasional cataclysmic oil spill and vast annual dead zones from agricultural runoff, the researchers found that “over one-third of the products labeled as ‘Gulf’ shrimp were farmed.” On the other hand, “nearly two-thirds of the samples simply labeled as ‘shrimp’ were actually wild-caught Gulf shrimp,” the report states, “possibly a missed marketing opportunity for promoting domestically caught seafood.”
Only Portlandia emerged virtually unscathed from Oceana’s scrutiny: Just one sample in 20 turned out to be mislabeled—a dish presented as “wild Pacific shrimp” turned out to be farmed.
Beyond rank mislabeling, the report also reveals that consumers indulge their shrimp habit from within a generalized information void. “The majority of restaurant menus surveyed did not provide the diner with any information on the type of shrimp, whether it was farmed/wild or its origin,” Oceana found. As for supermarkets, “30 percent of the shrimp products surveyed in grocery stores lacked information on country-of-origin, 29 percent lacked farmed/wild information and one in five did not provide either.
This overriding lack of transparency does more than lull us into accepting an inferior product. As Paul Greenberg argues in his brilliant 2014 book American Catch, it also makes our coastal areas—home to 40 percent of the US population—vulnerable to climate change.
That’s because treating treasures like the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery as an afterthought allows us to disregard the ecosystems that make them possible: the region’s wetlands, which are vanishing at the rate of one football field-sized chunk per hour, largely under pressure from the oil industry. These coastal landscapes don’t just provide nurseries for shrimp and other seafood; they also provide critical buffers against the increasingly violent storms and rising sea levels promised (and already being triggered) by a changing climate. Greenberg argues that a revival of interest in US-caught shrimp could rally support for wetland restoration, “conjoining of the interests of seafood and the interests of humans.”
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