News

Percy Schmeiser stands up to -- and takes down -- Monsanto

2011-03-18T19:38:01Z

Percy Schmeiser, a farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada, spent a decade battling GM behemoth Monsanto. In the end, after many setbacks, he came away with a win of $660, which was the cost of removing Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" canola oil seeds off Schmeiser's land.

13 years ago Monsanto claimed it found its canola growing on Schmeiser's 1,030 acre farm. Though he had never puchased the seeds and had grown canola for 50 years, and planted seed he had saved from his own crops, Monsanto didn't care. They said somehow their genetically modified (GM) product had found its way onto his fields, and Schmeiser owed them money.

$400,000 to be exact.

Although Schmeiser didn't want the GM seed and didn't spray his fields with herbicide -- which is the only reason why you would use the GM seeds in the first place -- Monsanto decided to sue when Schmeiser wouldn't pay.

According to the Center for Food Safety, as of 2005, 186 farmers had paid Monsanto a total of $15 million in response to similar Roundup Ready claims. But Schmeiser fought back.

Schmeiser lost at trial and on appeal and was ordered to pay nearly $20,000 in damages and $150,000 for Monsanto’s legal fees.

But the Canadian Supreme Court didn't see it that way. They ruled for Schmeiser. The court found that Monsanto's patent was valid, and that Schmeiser had infringed when the seeds were on his land, but it held he had gained no benefit from using the seed, and that he owed Monsanto nothing.

Schmeiser quit planting canola but, in 2005, he found more Roundup Ready canola in his fields. Monsanto had a standing offer to clean the stuff out of any fields where it was growing without the company’s permission. But they required farmers to sign a release that included an agreement never to discuss the terms under which the cleanup was done.

Schmeiser refused to be gagged by the release as a condition of getting Monsanto's GM canola off his land. When Monsanto wouldn’t change the release, he hired help to remove the invading canola and sent Monsanto the bill. Monsanto wouldn’t pay. So Schmeiser sued.

On the eve of trial, the parties agreed to settle. Monsanto paid the cleanup costs and Schmeiser signed a release—without the nondisclosure clause.

Isn't it nice when every now and then David beats Goliath?

CLICK HERE TO WATCH INTERVIEW WITH PERCY SCHMEISER

Want fries with that budget crisis?

2011-02-21T18:05:36Z

Instead of cutting jobs and services to solve California’s budget crisis, why not eliminate the state water subsidies that allow McDonalds and Colonel Sanders to market burgers and chicken for a dollar? Reducing the consumption of water by the livestock industry would benefit almost every economic facet of the California economy.

A recent analysis done by the Pacific Institute, “More with Less: Agricultural Water Conservation and Efficiency in California - A Special Focus on the Delta,” was presented at a briefing to legislators in Sacramento along with recommendations on how farmers can grow more food and use less water. What the report doesn't mention is the dramatic water saving that could be realized by limiting livestock production in California.

Our federal and state governments subsidize the meat industry's water consumption at every stage of the process. Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) consume particularly egregious quantities of water.

Cornell economists, David Fields and his associate Robin Hur, have studied the fiscal consequences of water subsidies to the meat industry:

“Reports by the General Accounting Office, the Rand Corporation, and the Water Resources Council have made it clear that irrigation water subsidies to livestock producers are economically counter productive. Every dollar that state governments dole out to livestock producers, in the form of irrigation subsidies, actually costs tax payers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs, and reduced business income.

The 17 Western states receive limited precipitation, yet their water supplies could support an economy and population twice the size of their present ones. But most of the water goes to produce livestock, either directly or indirectly. Thus, current water use practices now threaten to undermine the economies of every state in the region.”

You might think that all this water consumption would at least create jobs. But no other industry comes close to the meat industry’s paucity of jobs created per gallon of water consumed. Every job created by livestock production in California uses 30 million gallons of water a year, far more than any other industry.

Economist Douglas McDonald estimates that if water subsidies were withdrawn from California livestock producers, the income of the state’s other businesses and workers would rise over $10 billion annually (1987 figures).

Other economists have exposed the cost of water subsidies to the meat industry that are hidden in the state’s rising prices for water rights, and thus, housing. Fields and Hur calculate the overall price of subsidizing the California meat industry’s water to be $24 billion (1987 figures).

And if the health of the California economy is not enough to convince us to reduce or eliminate meat from our diet, consider that the beef industry produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane per year--the two major greenhouse gases that together account for more than 90 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions, substantially contributing to global warming.

Additionally, rainforests are being cut down to both pasture cows and grow soybeans to feed cows. Rainforests have been called the “lungs of the Earth” because they filter our air by absorbing CO2 while emitting life-supporting oxygen. Many geophysicists have concluded that changing our meat-eating habits to a vegetarian diet would do more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a fuel-efficient hybrid car. Quite simply, you can’t be a meat-eating environmentalist.

The editors of World Watch state that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future — deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.” Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”

And although reducing meat production and consumption will not by itself solve California’s budget crisis, it can solve the other California Crisis – WATER. Thanks to less than normal rainfall and a court order protecting the Delta Smelt, we not only hear the call for rationing but also the other “R” word: recycling. The world’s supply of fresh water is disappearing at a terrifying rate, and we may soon have be drinking our toilet water. My comment to my water district when the subject of rationing comes up: “I am not willing to drink my toilet water to get a hamburger for a $1.00.”

The amount of water consumed because of America’s meat habit is staggering. Over half the total amount of water consumed in the United States goes to irrigate land growing feed for livestock. Enormous additional quantities of water must also be used to wash away the animal’s excrement. It would be hard to design a less water-efficient diet than the one we have to come to think of as normal. To produce a day’s food for one meat-eater takes more than 4,000 gallons: for a lacto-ovo vegetarian, only 1,200 gallons; for a pure vegetarian, only 300 gallons.

Giving up that hamburger will not only improve the state economy and help defuse the budget crisis, it is the fastest, most effective way to make more water available for all Californians.

John Robbins, of Baskin-Robbins fame, is president of the EarthSave Foundation. Has written a book on the subject, the research for this article was adapted from his book The Food Revolution.

To Bee or Not to Be? Insects, amphibians and birds dying off

2011-01-07T01:51:39Z

Bees - upon which the entire human food chain rests - are suffering a sharp decline.

As the Guardian pointed out Monday:

The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades, according to the most comprehensive national census of the insects [a three-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences].

***

Sydney Cameron, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, led a team on a three-year study of the changing distribution, genetic diversity and pathogens in eight species of bumblebees in the US.

By comparing her results with those in museum records of bee populations, she showed that the relative abundance of four of the sampled species (Bombus occidentalis, B. pensylvanicus, B. affinis and B. terricola) had declined by up to 96% and that their geographic ranges had contracted by 23% to 87%, some within just the past two decades.

Cameron's findings reflect similar studies across the world. According to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the UK, three of the 25 British species of bumblebee are already extinct and half of the remainder have shown serious declines, often up to 70%, since around the 1970s. Last year, scientists inaugurated a £10m programme, called the Insect Pollinators Initiative, to look at the reasons behind the devastation in the insect population.

As the Guardian notes, bees are essential for human food production:

Bumblebees are important pollinators of wild plants and agricultural crops around the world including tomatoes and berries thanks to their large body size, long tongues, and high-frequency buzzing, which helps release pollen from flowers.

Bees in general pollinate some 90% of the world's commercial plants, including most fruits, vegetables and nuts. Coffee, soya beans and cotton are all dependent on pollination by bees to increase yields. It is the start of a food chain that also sustains wild birds and animals.

***

Insects such as bees, moths and hoverflies pollinate around a third of the crops grown worldwide. If all of the UK's insect pollinators were wiped out, the drop in crop production would cost the UK economy up to £440m a year, equivalent to around 13% of the UK's income from farming.

The collapse in the global bee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon pollination by bees, which means they contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

***
"Pollinator decline has become a worldwide issue, raising increasing concerns over impacts on global food production, stability of pollination services, and disruption of plant-pollinator networks," wrote Cameron. "

The Guardian notes that bees are not the only pollinators which are declining:

But the insects, along with other crucial pollinators such as moths and hoverflies, have been in serious decline around the world since the last few decades of the 20th century. It is unclear why, but scientists think it is from a combination of new diseases, changing habitats around cities, and increasing use of pesticides.

The Guardian points to some of the potential causes of bee decline:

Parasites such as the bloodsucking varroa mite and viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods.

As Fast Company pointed out last month:

A leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.

The document, which was leaked to a Colorado beekeeper, shows that the EPA has ignored warnings about the use of clothianidin, a pesticide produced by Bayer that mainly is used to pre-treat corn seeds. The pesticide scooped up $262 million in sales in 2009 by farmers, who also use the substance on canola, soy, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat, according to Grist.

The leaked document (PDF) was put out in response to Bayer's request to approve use of the pesticide on cotton and mustard. The document invalidates a prior Bayer study that justified the registration of clothianidin on the basis of its safety to honeybees:

Clothianidin's major risk concern is to nontarget insects (that is, honey bees). Clothianidin is a neonicotinoid insecticide that is both persistent and systemic. Acute toxicity studies to honey bees show that clothianidin is highly toxic on both a contact and an oral basis. Although EFED does not conduct RQ based risk assessments on non-target insects, information from standard tests and field studies, as well as incident reports involving other neonicotinoids insecticides (e.g., imidacloprid) suggest the potential for long-term toxic risk to honey bees and other beneficial insects.

The EPA is still allowing the use of Clothianidin to this day. And see this.

And as I've previously pointed out:

Bees spend most of their lives being trucked all around the country in boxes

While being trucked around, bees are fed a diet of high-fructose corn syrup (and soy protein), not real pollen (see also this).

To recap: bees are fed junk food totally different from what bees naturally eat with very little nutritional content, taken out of their normal natural environment and shoved into trucks, and then driven all over the nation.

The poor nutrition, exposure to numerous pesticides (and genetically modified foods), and stressful condition of being constantly trucked all over the country are hurting the bees. Why do beekeepers do it? Because high-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are cheap junk, and because the widespread use of pesticides coupled with trucking bees around the country is the low-cost industrial farming business model.
The bottom line is that raising and using bees to pollinate crops in a way that won't kill so many bees will be more expensive ... thus driving up food prices.

There is also evidence that genetically modified crops might be killing bees ... or at least weakening them so that they are more susceptible to disease. See this, this, this, this, this and this.

And as Agence France-Presse notes, inbreeding may be weakening the bees.

(On a side note, no one has yet asked whether silver iodide or other compounds used in weather modification affect bees. They may not, but someone should test the bees for such compounds and their metabolites so that we can rule out them out as a cause of colony collapse.)

Albert Einstein reportedly said:

If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!

That might have been a slight exaggeration, but Einstein was right: If we kill off the bees, we will be in big trouble.

There are also reports of birds and fish mysteriously dying world-wide. While these may or may not be connected with the collapse of bee populations, it is a sign that all is not right with the world.

As I wrote two years ago:

First the frogs started disappearing.

Then the bees started disappearing.

Now, its birds. According to CBC, tens of millions of birds are disappearing across North America.

According to the Seattle Times:

Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say.

Frogs and bees are so different from people that they are easier to ignore. But birds are larger, more complicated, warm-blooded animals, and thus closer to us biologically.

People will be in real trouble unless we figure out why the amphibians, bees and birds are dying.

Reprinted with permission from http://www.washingtonsblog.com/

The Leveraged Buyout of the US - Financial Coup d'Etat (VIDEO)

2011-01-06T06:07:12Z

The "Tapeworm Economy"

"We are literally changing the way countries are governed - no longer by governments but by corporations."

Former Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H.W. Bush Catherine Austin Fitts blows the whistle on how the financial terrorists have deliberately imploded the US economy and transferred gargantuan amounts of wealth offshore as a means of sacrificing the American middle class.

Fitts documents how trillions of dollars went missing from government coffers in the 90's and how she was personally targeted for exposing the fraud.

Fitts explains how every dollar of debt issued to service every war, building project, and government program since the American Revolution up to around 2 years ago - around $12 trillion - has been doubled again in just the last 18 months alone with the bank bailouts.

"We're literally witnessing the leveraged buyout of a country and that's why I call it a financial coup d'état, and that's what the bailout is for," states Fitts.

She calls it the "Tapeworm Economy"

Massive amounts of financial capital have been sucked out the United States and moved abroad, explains Fitts, ensuring that corporations have become more powerful than governments, changing the very structure of governance on the planet and ensuring we are ruled by private corporations. Pension and social security funds have also been stolen and moved offshore, leading to the end of fiscal responsibility and sovereignty as we know it.

Fitts explained how when she was in government she tried to encourage the creation of small businesses, new jobs and new skills to compete in a globalized world otherwise the American middle class was toast, only to be forced out by the feds using dirty tricks. The elite instead wanted Americans to take on more credit card, mortgage and auto debt that corporations and insurers knew they couldn't afford, while quietly moving their jobs abroad in the meantime.

This video is nearly 50 minutes in length, but eye-opening from someone who was very high up and on the inside of the planning for the current financial mess. Watch:

Meat diets pose environmental danger: report

2010-10-05T17:52:35Z

LONDON (Reuters) - People will have to cut meat from their diets if the world is to stay within safer limits of planet-warming greenhouse gases, nitrate pollution and habitat destruction, according to a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Experts agree that eating plant products can be better for the environment, because eating meat involves consuming animals which are themselves raised on plants, a less efficient process.

But there is some controversy about just how far people should shun meat for vegetables and grains to curb damage to the environment, partly because of wide disagreement about exactly what those impacts are.

The paper used coarse estimates to argue that, on current trends, livestock farming on its own - disregarding all other human activity - would push the world near danger levels for climate change and habitat destruction by mid-century.

"We suggest that reining in growth of this sector should be prioritized," said the authors from Canada's Dalhousie University, in their article titled "Forecasting potential global environmental costs of livestock production 2000-2050."

The paper described "a profound disconnect between the anticipated scale of potential environmental impacts associated with projected livestock production levels and even the most optimistic mitigation strategies."

Solutions to the problem included using best practice such as substituting manure for nitrogen fertilizers, and increasing agricultural productivity, said the paper published

But efficiency gains would not be enough. Per capita meat consumption would have to be cut.

"Across the board reductions in per capita consumption of livestock products should ... be a policy priority," it said.

Meat Wastes Water

2010-09-26T11:43:58Z

Clean water for drinking and other human needs such as irrigation is a precious and increasingly scarce resource. Indeed, the increasing scarcity of water is one more reason to promote vegetarianism.

Meat production not only pollutes water, due to the huge amount of liquid and solid waste produced by the animals whom we eat, meat production also uses more water than does the growing of plant foods.

Many readers of IVU Online News are aware that environmentalists calculate people's carbon footprints, but many of our readers may not be aware that environmentalists also calculate our water footprints: www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery

For instance, according to the Water Footprint website, it requires 70 litres of water to grow an apple and 80 litres for 2 slices of wheat bread, but 1937 litres for 1/8 kg of beef and 487 litres of water for 1/8 kg of chicken.

All the water footprint calculations presented in the product gallery (on the footprints of products such as rice and beef) on the Water Footprint website were calculated by the people who maintain the site. Details can be found in the different reports in their publications list or in the report "The Water Footprint of Nations" which covers a variety of products.

Links are also provided for each product. These links provide additional information on that specific product, all sorts of things, especially on its supply chain. Links offer complementary information thought to be of interest.

Does anyone know other water footprint resources?

Footprint Calculators Promote Steps Towards Meatlessness
Our environmental footprint is one way to measure our impact on the environment. There are now many online footprint calculators that include meat consumption as one factor in calculating our environmental impact.

Here are several (some are more fun than others):

• www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator
• www.greenprogress.com/carbon_footprint_calculator.php
• www.foodcarbon.co.uk/calculator.html
• www.conservation.org/act/live_green/Pages/ecofootprint.aspx
• www.endangeredearth.org/climateneutral/carboncalcc/carboncalcc.htm
• www.EatLowCarbon.org

Can you recommend others?

IVU Online news: http://www.ivu.org/onlinenews.php

Pollution Takes Its Toll on the Heart

2010-09-23T22:51:49Z

The fine particles of pollution that hang in the air can increase the risk for sudden cardiac arrest, according to a new study conducted by a team from Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center and The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.

Robert A. Silverman, MD, and his colleagues have been interested in the effects of ambient fine particulate matter on a number of medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease and asthma. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) keeps tabs on air pollution through dozens of strategically placed pollution sensors in cities and towns throughout the country. This data allowed the researchers to collect data on average 24-hour values of small particulates and other gaseous pollutants around New York City during the summer (when pollution is higher) and winter months. They then compared that data to the 8,216 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests that occurred between 2002 and 2006. Most people in the throes of a cardiac arrest do not survive in time for emergency medical service teams to save them.

What they were looking for was simple: Were there more cardiac arrests on high pollution days than on lower pollution days? In the American Journal of Epidemiology, Dr. Silverman and his fellow researchers reported that for a 10ug/m3 rise in small particle air pollution, there was a four-to-10 percent increase in the number of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. The current EPA standard is 35ug/m3. The effect was much greater in the summer months, said Dr. Silverman, an associate professor of emergency medicine and director of research at LIJ's Department of Emergency Medicine. The scientists also evaluated levels of ozone, nitric oxide, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide, but these showed a much weaker relationship. Analysis of the data from the death records and the 33 EPA monitors was conducted in collaboration with Kazuhiko Ito, PhD, an assistant professor at the Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine at New York University School of Medicine and investigators from the New York City Fire Department, John Freese, MD, Brad J. Kaufman, MD, David J. Prezant, MD, and James Braun.

10 ways vegetarianism can help save the planet

2010-08-04T22:35:13Z

The average British carnivore eats more than 11,000 animals in their lifetime, each requiring vast amounts of land, fuel and water to reach the plate. It's time to think of waste as well as taste

If we really want to reduce the human impact on the environment, the simplest and cheapest thing anyone can do is to eat less meat. Behind most of the joints of beef or chicken on our plates is a phenomenally wasteful, land- and energy-hungry system of farming that devastates forests, pollutes oceans, rivers, seas and air, depends on oil and coal, and is significantly responsible for climate change. The way we breed animals is now recognised by the UN, scientists, economists and politicians as giving rise to many interlinked human and ecological problems, but with 1 billion people already not having enough to eat and 3 billion more mouths to feed within 50 years, the urgency to rethink our relationship with animals is extreme.

1 Overheating the planet

We humans eat about 230m tonnes of animals a year, twice as much as we did 30 years ago. We mostly breed four species - chickens, cows, sheep and pigs - all of which need vast amounts of food and water, emit methane and other greenhouse gases and produce mountains of physical waste.

But how much stress does our meat-eating put on ecological systems? The answer is a lot but the figures are imprecise and disputed. In 2006, the UN calculated that the combined climate change emissions of animals bred for their meat were about 18% of the global total - more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.

The authors of the report, called Livestock's Long Shadow, did not just count the methane from the belching, farting cattle, but the gases released from the manures that they produce, the oil burned taking their carcasses to markets often thousands of miles away, the electricity needed to keep the meat cool, the gas used to cook it, the energy needed to plough and harvest the fields that grow the crops that the animals eat, even pumping the water that the cattle need.

The figure was revised upward in 2009 by two World Bank scientists to more than 51%, but attempts to fully account for meat-eating are condemned as simplistic. Should the studies have been based on giant US factory farms, or on more sustainable breeding in Europe? Should you include all the knock-on emissions from clearing forests? What about the fertiliser used to grow the crops to feed to the animals, or the emissions from the steel needed to build the boats that transport the cattle; or the "default" emissions - the greenhouse gases that would be released by substitute activities to grow food if we were to give up meat? And is it fair to count animals used for multiple purposes, as they mostly are in developing countries, from providing draught power to shoe leather or transport, and which only become meat once they reach the end of their economic lives?

It's an accounting nightmare but depending on how it's done, livestock's contribution to climate change can be calculated as low as 5-10% of global emissions or as high as 50%. Last year, a Food Climate Research Network report concluded that UK meat and dairy consumption was responsible for 8% of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions. But however it's counted, livestock farming ranks as one of the three greatest sources of climate changing emissions and one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation.

2 Eating up land

A human population expected to grow by 3 billion, a shift in developing countries to eating more meat, and global consumption on track to double in 40 years point to the mother of all food crises down the road. How much food we grow is not just limited by the amount of available land but meat-eaters need far more space than vegetarians. A Bangladeshi family living off rice, beans, vegetables and fruit may live on an acre of land or less, while the average American, who consumes around 270 pounds of meat a year, needs 20 times that.

Nearly 30% of the available ice-free surface area of the planet is now used by livestock, or for growing food for those animals. One billion people go hungry every day, but livestock now consumes the majority of the world's crops. A Cornell University study in 1997 found that around 13m hectares of land in the US were used to grow vegetables, rice, fruit, potatoes and beans, but 302m were used for livestock. The problem is that farm animals are inefficient converters of food to flesh. Broiler chickens are the best, needing around 3.4kg to produce 1kg of flesh, but pigs need 8.4kg for that kilo.

Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made for Us

2010-07-23T16:34:59Z

Excerpts from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, specifically, from the chapter titled A Universe Not Made For Us. The music is Jack's Theme from the Lost soundtrack.

Scroll down for thought-provoking video...

Diabetes Drug Maker Hid Test Data, Files Indicate

2010-07-17T18:53:42Z

In the fall of 1999, the drug giant SmithKline Beecham secretly began a study to find out if its diabetes medicine, Avandia, was safer for the heart than a competing pill, Actos, made by Takeda.

Avandia's success was crucial to SmithKline, whose labs were otherwise all but barren of new products. But the study's results, completed that same year, were disastrous. Not only was Avandia no better than Actos, but the study also provided clear signs that it was riskier to the heart.

But instead of publishing the results, the company spent the next 11 years trying to cover them up, according to documents recently obtained by The New York Times. The company did not post the results on its Web site or submit them to federal drug regulators, as is required in most cases by law.

"This was done for the U.S. business, way under the radar," Dr. Martin I. Freed, a SmithKline executive, wrote in an e-mail message dated March 29, 2001, about the study results that was obtained by The Times. "Per Sr. Mgmt request, these data should not see the light of day to anyone outside of GSK," the corporate successor to SmithKline.

The heart risks from Avandia first became public in May 2007, with a study from a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who used data the company was forced by a lawsuit to post on its own Web site. In the ensuing months, GlaxoSmithKline officials conceded that they had known of the drug's potential heart attack risks since at least 2005.

But the latest documents demonstrate that the company had data hinting at Avandia's extensive heart problems almost as soon as the drug was introduced in 1999, and sought intensively to keep those risks from becoming public. In one document, the company sought to quantify the lost sales that would result if Avandia's cardiovascular safety risk "intensifies." The cost: $600 million from 2002 to 2004 alone, the document stated.

UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet

2010-07-14T01:31:40Z

Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change, UN report says

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products."

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: "Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels."

The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern, former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions.

The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said.

Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products - livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides."

Both energy and agriculture need to be "decoupled" from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.

Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: "Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."

What Ever Happened to Public Transportation?

2010-07-02T21:50:49Z

In 2009, National Geographic conducted an annual study measuring and monitoring consumer progress toward environmentally sustainable consumption in seventeen countries around the world. The resulting "Consumer Greendex" found that Americans ranked as the world's least green consumers. Of all the nations surveyed, we have the lowest percentage of people who use public transit on a daily basis. And we have the highest percentage of people who never, ever, take public transit.

How did this happen? Are we Americans that antisocial? I don't think so. But our public policies have had unintended consequences.

The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 produced an enormous network of highways across the United States. The largest public works project in American history to that date, it paid for a vast suburban road infrastructure, making commutes between the suburbs and urban centers much easier and far quicker. In part, the system was justiﬁed for reasons of national defense. It provided roads big enough to carry our tanks, in case the Russians invaded.

More consequences of the takeover by oil & gas industry

2010-06-26T17:26:46Z

While the news media slept and Congress collected its payoffs, the US was handed over lock, stock and barrel to the oil and gas industry during the Bush administration.

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico (and soon to be the Atlantic Ocean) is only the most obvious consequence.

Here's another one. Unreported. Every bit as catastrophic.

==Scroll down for video==

Fighting Food Fascism: Monsanto's GM foods exist simply to own you

2010-06-10T13:58:55Z

Multi-national corporations are waging a war against humanity.

This may sound like an exaggerated claim, but it's literally true as this video shows.

But they're not using bullets, they're using seeds.

Possibly the most important video you'll see this year - and will NEVER see on mainstream TV.

Please spread the word on this one.

Video:

It's pretty clear that the US (and Canada) are ruled by Wall Street and the oil companies, but there's a third closely related member of this unholy trinity that presents an even more sinister threat...

Monsanto and its criminal allies in Washington DC and Ottawa.

They intend not only to steal our wealth, but also our ability to feed ourselves without TOTAL dependence on their "products."

Genetically modified organisms have NOTHING to do with higher yields or disease resistance. They're a trojan horse designed to turn farmers (and the rest of us) into 21st century serfs.

The hero in this video is Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser.

UN Study: "Substantial worldwide diet change away from animal products" our only hope

2010-06-02T14:54:10Z

Fossil-fuel use and feeding world cause greatest environmental impacts: UNEP panel
Energy and agriculture top Resource Panel's priority list for sustainable 21st century

How the world is fed and fueled will in large part define development in the 21st century as one that is increasingly sustainable or a dead end for billions of people.

A new and hard-hitting report concludes that dramatically reforming, re-thinking and redesigning two sectors--energy and agriculture--could generate significant environmental, social and economic returns.

Current patterns of production and consumption of both fossil fuels and food are draining freshwater supplies; triggering losses of economically-important ecosystems such as forests; intensifying disease and death rates and raising levels of pollution to unsustainable levels.

The report, prepared by the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says decoupling the environmental impacts of these two broad sectors from economic growth, can start at the level of the household.

Sustainability goals can begin through dramatic improvements in household patterns of energy and food use including heating and cooling systems, gadgets and appliances and the way people travel.

Perhaps controversially, it also calls for a significant shift in diets away from animal based proteins towards more vegetable-based foods in order to dramatically reduce pressures on the environment.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which hosts the Panel, said: "Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation--thus setting priorities would seem prudent and sensible in order to fast track a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy."

"The Panel have reviewed all the available science and conclude that two broad areas are currently having a disproportionately high impact on people and the planet's life support systems--these are energy in the form of fossil fuels and agriculture, especially the raising of livestock for meat and dairy products," he said.

"Smart market mechanisms, more intelligent fiscal policies and creative policy-making are among the options for internalizing the costs of unsustainable patterns. Some tough choices are signaled in this report, but it may prove even more challenging for everyone if the current paths continue into the coming decades,' added Mr. Steiner.

Ernst von Weizsaecker, co-chair of the Panel, said the report challenged the widely-held view that rising affluence leads automatically to environmental improvements.

"In the case of CO2, a doubling of wealth leads typically to an increase of environmental pressure by 60 to 80 per cent and in emerging economies this is sometimes even higher. In the case of food, rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and diary products--livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilizers and pesticides linked with that crop production in the first place," he added.

Ashok Khosla, co-chair of the Panel and President of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), said: "Incremental efficiency gains in for example motor cars or home heating systems have provided some improvements but, faced with the scale of the challenge, far more transformational measures need to be taken--currently we are fiddling--or fiddling around the edges--while Rome burns."

"Part of that new and decisive action also relates to the way the world is trying to combat climate change--as the report points out, for many of the developed economies 20-30 percent of a nation's pollution is not taking place on its territory, but happening abroad via imports. Given this fact, perhaps the current way of structuring agreements on emission reduction targets are becoming obsolete," he added.

The report, called Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production: Priority Products and Materials, is the latest in a series from the 27 high-level experts that constitute the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management.

Launched today with the European Commission in Brussels on the eve of UN World Environment Day (June 5), the 149-page report provides science-based priorities for world environmental efforts -- ranking products, materials and economic and lifestyle activities according to their environmental and resource impacts.

The Panel, which has drawn on numerous studies including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for action: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus, overexploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, solid cooking fuels, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational (including kitchen) exposure to particulate matter.

The Panel set out to identify those activities or resources that contribute disproportionately to environmental pressures and impacts, including (i) production and manufacturing processes; (ii) products and consumption categories; and (iii) materials. It concludes that the priorities for achieving transformational change are:-

    * Agricultural goods, particularly products from animals, which are fed more than half of all world crops. Agricultural production accounts for 70% of the global freshwater consumption and 38% of the total land use. Food production accounts for 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and 60% of the phosphorus and nitrogen pollution and 30% of toxic pollution in Europe;
    * Users of fossil fuels, especially electrical utilities and other energy-intensive industries, residential heating, and transportation. Fossil-fuel production and consumption dominate as the world's leading cause of environmental degradation. Extraction from alternative fossil fuel sources, such as tar sands, poses potentially even heavier environmental consequences."
    * Materials, especially plastics, iron, steel, and aluminium, use of which is growing, not least in the unsaturated emerging economies; and the energy requirements for which are rising because of declining grades of ore as they get used up.

The Panel notes that some efficiency gains are possible in terms of reducing the impacts of agriculture. But adds that a 50 per cent growth in population by 2050 will overwhelm or offset these gains.

Therefore says the report, "a substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products."

Environmental impacts of households, facts and figures:

The report also focuses on the link between households and greenhouse gas emissions as one area to be addressed.

In developing and emerging economies, food and housing dominate as causes of household greenhouse gas emissions.

Available national studies, mostly from OECD countries, show following split of total household energy use:

Houses: including the energy embodied in home construction and furniture, the recurring energy use for maintenance, lighting and comfort, and the growing category of electronic and electric products such as computers): 35 to 52 percent;
Mobility: including vehicle manufacture, fuel production, and operations: 15 to 30 percent;
Food: 10 to 20 percent;
Recreation: 5 to 10 percent;
Clothing: 3 to 5 percent.

Overall emissions from air travel are still small compared with other transportation modes, but could rise rapidly with growing prosperity. Since emissions from aviation reach the upper and particularly vulnerable layers of the atmosphere, their negative impacts could be disproportionately high.

One third of the average US household's carbon footprint is due to emissions caused abroad producing goods imported into the US market.

"This report drives home the message that there is no time like the present for a switch to a resource-efficient economy," said Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for the Environment. "It will be a titanic task, but one that is essential for our future prosperity and quality of life. In Europe, it will require effective dialogue with our Member States, where many of the most important decisions have to be made, especially in areas such as tax reform. And we will never succeed without the business community on board, where, despite a number of excellent examples of leadership, there are still too many who have yet to understand the urgency of the need for change."

Says Lead Author Edgar Hertwich, director of the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology: "The Report shows that there a steady increase in greenhouse emissions with wealth, both across countries and within countries. Emissions associated with mobility and the consumption of manufactured products increase fastest with increasing wealth, but even for food consumption we do not see any decoupling. Decoupling does not happen by itself, it can only be the result of strong policy action."

Says Angela Cropper, UNEP Deputy Executive Director: "On World Environment Day, we hope people everywhere become more conscious of the world behind the products we buy and the impacts they cause, often on the other side of the world. Our aim is to inform business, policy makers and consumers about environmental impacts of our every day consumption. Having better information is the starting point for efforts to reduce the impacts on biodiversity, climate and pollution in an intelligent, targeted way.

"Sustainable development starts by putting emphasis on those efforts that do the most good in reducing humanity's harm of ecosystems. In that regard, this report is of high relevance for policy-makers and businesses. And for individuals, it reinforces familiar advice: action is needed beyond recycling to installing energy efficient heating and cooling in the house, shifting to a more sustainable diet, and use public transport where available."

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Contacts:
Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson/Head of Media, on Tel: + 254 20 7623084, Mobile: + 254 733 632755 / +41 79 596 57 37, e-mail: nick.nuttall@unep.org
Moira O'Brien-Malone, UNEP Information Officer, Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (DTIE), Paris, + 33-1-4437-7612, moira.obrien-malone@unep.org
Terry Collins, Tel: +1-416-538-8712; Mobile: +1-416-878-8712, email: TerryCollins@rogers.com
Jim Sniffen, UNEP Programme Officer, New York, Tel: +1-212-963-8094 or 8210 info@nyo.unep.org

About the Resource Panel

The International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, or Resource Panel for short, was officially launched in November 2007 and is expected to provide the scientific impetus for decoupling economic growth and resource use from environmental degradation. The objectives of the Resource Panel are to:

    * Provide independent, coherent and authoritative scientific assessments of policy relevance on the sustainable use of natural resources and in particular their environmental impacts over the full life cycle; and
    * Contribute to a better understanding of how to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation.

For more information: www.unep.fr/scp/rpanel

About UNEP

Created in 1972, UNEP represents the United Nations' environmental conscience. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, its mission is to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations. UNEP's Division of Technology, Industry and Economics - based in Paris - helps governments, local authorities and decision-makers in business and industry to develop and implement policies and practices focusing on sustainable development. The Division leads UNEP's work in the areas of climate change, resource efficiency, harmful substances and hazardous waste. For more information: www.unep.org