If you haven't read Michael Pollan's article, Farmer in Chief, which ran in the New York Times on October 9th, I highly recommend that you do. It's long, but it's well written and chock full of fascinating ideas and statistics. Here's a short excerpt to whet your appetite:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.Pollan goes on to discuss the American diet's effect on our health system and our economy, finally outlining a plan for the president-elect to "wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine."
If I had written a letter to the candidates, this would have been it. Bravo Mr. Pollan! Your essay resounded with many of us, even if no politician actually reads it.
But wait, what was that? One of the candidates actually read Pollan's article? In it's entirety? And then promoted it during a speech? Seriously??
...and now you know why I'm in love with the man. Here's what he had to say during his interview with Time magazine:
There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.Photo credit: Treehugger.
1 comment:
Every one of the reasons to invest my Liberalism in this guy is appreciated; what has to be offset - for me to be a full-throated supporter - are those very un-Liberal moves he's made: like going along with retroactive immunity for eaves-dropping telecoms, his intention to continue the NeoCon "faith-based initiative", and his less-than-enlightened grasp of public education issues. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt: for example, regarding his stated intention to 'remain open' to increased domestic drilling, I like to think that his game plan is to so enrich our search for alternative fuels that all oil, domestic/foreign, will rapidly become so obsolete that green-lighting this Republican Scheme, in the end, just won't matter.
Having said all that, and for the record, I worked on Obama's campaign and gave $$$$ (Gave more $$$ to the campaigns of true Liberals running against incumbant D.I.N.O.'s and, later, Republicans...but still.)
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