Crop Failure Phase, Crop Failure Phase Compl...

I am routinely finding farm news as fascinatingly horrifying as a car crash. It's bad news but I can't look away. It's December 1st in Iowa and the corn harvest is only 87% complete.

The reasoning for the delay:

"Periodic rains, some shortage of grain drying capacity on farms and at grain elevators, and spot shortages of propane for drying, have prevented us from closing the books on the 2009 harvest," he adds. "But for many farmers at least the end is now in sight. Hopefully, those who spent part of Thanksgiving in a combine will not have to spend Christmas worrying about crops still in the field."

It's been a very mild and sporadic fall winter, atleast in Wisco where I live. An abnormally cold summer followed by a 3 week drought in September and a wet, mild October, November has kept corn growth down and has post-poned harvesting. Farmers should consider themselves lucky that they haven't even seen the first snow of the year yet. Snowfall in the Madison-area has been above normal the past two years. I would expend this trend to get worse as climate change continues. Then we're all really f-ed.

Famine, Pestillence, Etc

Bloomberg.com (not some hippy site) states that grain production in China will decline by 37% by 2050.

The crops affected would include wheat, corn and rice, Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, said in an article published on the agency’s Web site yesterday. Research shows that for every degree warmer the atmosphere becomes the key growing period for rice to develop properly will be shortened by an average of 7-8 days and by 17 days for the winter wheat crop, Zheng said. “Yield and quality will drop accordingly,” he said.

How is this bad? Let me count the ways. Starvation: with the 2nd largest population continually unable to feed itself there will be lots of famine related deaths. Or this could lead to the 2nd horseman, War: where an angry, nuclear China has nothing better to do than attack other nations which is a standard human reaction to desperation. And don't forget Economically. Yes, the biz folks who fear caps on carbon emissions because it'll cut into profit and growth will find less pockets available to buy their products (or make their products in China/Walmart's case) and then the agribusiness would be hurting too. Bloomberg interviewed people in a town hall and this was the average reaction.

So there's something in climate change for everyone. What's your part?

Support the EPA'ers?

Soldiers die. It's part of the job description. When they get called to duty there is a good chance they will be put in a situation that will lead to their death. Same with firemen, police, etc. Yet, the people who die don't really have any say on what they go to die for. Could be to retaliate against a homeland assault or to advance a wealthy elites access to resources. But they die nonetheless and we feel bad. Their sacrifice makes us ashamed of staying safe behind our 50" TVs. So we give them carte blanche as far as our tax dollars and support is concerned for better or worse.

Yglesias asks what if we had that same view for our other govt organizations?

And if you think about a comparable situation with the civilian bureaucracy, you’ll see that things are very difficult. It’s not a serious problem if a Republican president pursues a course that senior career officials at the Environment Protection Agency believe are destroying the planet. Nobody says we need to “support the Civil Rights Division litigators” or “give the social services workers the resources they need to finish the job” of fighting child poverty.

Instead of "Support our Troops" yellow ribbon bumper magnets how about a recycle sign magnet with "Help the Folks Who Help Us Drink Clean Water: EPA". It doesn't roll of the tongue as well but gives us something to think about.

Where the Wild Things Are

Kindergarten in the woods. Wish that was around when I was young. If the fact that most social change isn't brought about by one side winning but by the opposition dying then these kids who are growing up among the wilderness will be the "winners" of the climate battle. One can only hope.

When It Rains, It Contaminates

NYT has a pollution series or "Has science been good or bad for the world" or "No matter what we do we still lose". Today was on our lackluster sewage system.

Quick breakdown:

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways.

Upgrade fail. But we punish those failures right?

But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.

Punishment fail. This points out two things: 1) we can't fix the problems we have, 2) we can't enforce the laws we have that were made to enforce the fixes, and/or 3) we don't have the balls to admit how we live is wrong. It's all three.

Prescription: We need to get over ourselves and move toward a more reasonable existence.

The Joke's On Us

Example of how we kill the planet: Man drives 1680 miles round trip to take a 3 hour improv class. Let me count the ways. A person with no vocation can drop $150 a week on gas to go to a improv class. I'll say it another way. A person who contributes nothing still has enough money to conjure up enough hydrocarbon slaves to transport him at least 2/3 the distance it took Lewis and Clark to travel in 1 year in about 15 hours so he can take an improv class. WTF.

He'd probably have a better shot spending the $150 on lottery tickets and in the mean time taking a class in Dallas (you're telling me they don't laugh in Texas?) and then when his ship comes in move to Chicago and take the class full time. Or hell, if you figure 4 x $150 is $600 I'm sure he could find a studio apartment in or around Chicago and take some public transportation to the class. Whatevs.

But the moral of the story is that someone who produces no directly measurable physical good (not necessarily meaning economically; he could volunteer in a hospice or soup kitchen) has enough resources to trade for the power to travel quite rapidly (compared to previous human history) to learn a career that has a lottery winner's chance of actually making a wage. Yep, that is a barometer of our times.

That is the answer to the "should Chicago lease it's water" question. Doing this is terrible for any lessor (?). Didn't work in Bolivia. Didn't work in Atlanta. Water is a right. You cannot live without it and should not have to do anything to earn it. Period.

Here are some quick hits of how bad water leasing is:

Mayors from Homer Glen to Urbana are threatening municipal takeovers of their local water systems, moved by complaints about skyrocketing rates and lackluster
service from corporate operators. Fort Wayne, Ind., already wrested away part of its water system and is seeking to buy back the rest after accusing a private operator of putting shareholder interests before those of customers.

And the Grand Marshall of U.S. Water Lease failures, Atlanta:

"Water is critical to a city's future management and growth," said Rob Hunter, Atlanta's commissioner of watershed management. "It's not something you want to turn over to somebody else."

That from their current mayor who is a bit wiser than the previous mayor who signed the leasing contract and is currently in jail.