Post by Sunday at midnight
[2 articles]
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Shopping Trends in Korea Go Green for the first time, as a strong trend, this year
3. Marketing news from the Korea Times indicates that this was a main theme. Other themes was how perpetual media fear about flu drove people to consume certain things--perhaps the worst being the untested vaccines of course.
-------------------------------
12-03-2009 18:46
'G.I.R.L.' Sums Up 2009 Shopping Trends
By Jane Han
Staff Reporter
For local shoppers, it turns out this year was largely about green living, flu prevention, revisiting the past and bargain hunting.
Shinsegae E-Mart, the nation's top discount retail chain, analyzed 2,874 different types of products sold from January through November to 210 million visitors.
And if their findings are any indication of shopping trends, most of the money went to goods that can be summed up in one buzzword: the acronym "G.I.R.L."
"G" stands for green consumer, "I" for the effects of influenza A (H1N1), "R" for rebirth and "L" for low price, the retail expert said Thursday.
Products related to green living saw a steep sales jump this year, indicating that eco-friendly consumption is anything but a fleeting trend.
More than 850,000 reusable shopping bags were sold this year alone, up from just 1,800 last year, according to company data.
Sales of mugs and non-plastic food containers soared 62 percent and 15 percent, respectively, while sales of paper cups and plates saw almost a 35-percent drop from the previous year.
The outbreak of the H1N1 flu, which took a turn for the worse in late summer, drummed up sales of all kinds of flu prevention products in the second half of this year.
E-mart said masks, hand sanitizers and thermometers flew off the shelves early, but sales of health-related products, such as red ginseng and vitamins, soon started catching up.
Sales of red ginseng and vitamins climbed 25 percent and 59 percent, respectively.
"The flu has been a real boon to retailers this year," said Chang Joong-ho, an E-mart marketing expert, who added that the flu scare brought positive ripple effects across other health-related goods.
Another category that enjoyed solid growth this year is traditional goods, namely "makgeolli," (Korean traditional rice wine) and red thermal underwear.
E-mart statistics show that sales of makgeolli jumped nearly 200 percent from one year ago, labeling the product as one of this year's hit items. Red thermal underwear sold 30 percent better than last year.
The final shopping trend reflects the toughened economic reality this year.
"Consumers didn't stop shopping altogether, but they did go after the cheapest," said Chang, who highlighted "low price" as the top shopping keyword of the year.
According to data, sales generated by E-mart's own label goods accounted for almost 24 percent of the retailer's overall revenue this year, showing that many consumers turned to the discounter for its dirt-cheap in-house brands.
jhan@koreatimes.co.kr
---
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/12/123_56635.html
[2]
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Politicized Consumption in Korea: several cases of price rigging across state and private institutions
3. Fascinating on the commentary at the conclusion--that this rigging of the price of liquified natural gas has been coordinated for six years between 'competitors' in Korea without anyone in the Korea government seeming to notice? I find that hard to believe no one noticed. Why? Given other cases of consumptive flows, without multi-institutional agreement around the flow, certain captive consumer flows and price hikes like this one would have been challenged long ago--when it started in 2003. The article is a list of other 'market items' in Korea that have been found out as having rigged, coordinated prices among competitors as well.
---------------------
12-03-2009 17:50
War on Price Rigging
LPG Suppliers Fined for Hampering Fair Competition
The nation's antitrust regulator is waging a war on rampant price rigging by
consumer product manufacturers,
fuel suppliers and
construction firms.
But the country still has a long way to go before firmly establishing competition rules and better protecting consumer rights. Needless to say, price fixing and other unfair business practices undermine the very foundation of [the legitimating ideology of] capitalism and the [ideology that there is a] market economy. [Is there? I argue for the institutionally desired stable clientelism of politicized raw material regimes as the basis of the political economy instead of open markets...]
More worrisome is that a large number of local corporations have little sense of compunction about playing a dirty game only to maximize their profits at the sacrifice of their competitors or consumers. Critics point out that unfair practices are so widespread that almost all companies are directly or indirectly engaged in price cartels, bid riggings and other forms of anti-competition activity.
On Thursday, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) decided to impose a combined fine of 668.9 billion won ($580 million) on six major liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) suppliers for fixing prices for their products. Those subject to the penalty are E1 Corp., SK Gas, SK Energy, GS Caltex, Hyundai Oilbank and S-Oil Corp., most of which are affiliated with the nation's family-controlled conglomerates, or chaebol.
In July, the FTC slapped a 260-billion-won fine on Qualcomm of the U.S. for abusing its dominant position in the Korean market for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phone chips. On Nov. 3, the commission ordered four beverage suppliers ― Lotte Chilsung, Coca-Cola Korea, Haitai and Dongah Otsuka ― to pay a combined total of 940 million won for blocking discount stores from lowering the retail prices of their products below fixed levels. On Nov. 18, it also imposed a 226.3 billion won fine on 11 manufacturers of soju, the nation's popular liquor, including Jinro, Doosan, Daesun and Kumbokju.
Announcing the latest punitive action, the FTC said the LPG suppliers have been fixing their product prices for six years from 2003. It also accused them of increasing the prices in unfair ways, thereby leading to a hike in heating and transportation costs for consumers. In other words, the suppliers have pocketed undue and illegitimate profits [there's that concept of passive 'legitimation' maintaining the clientelistic economy] by selling LPG at much higher prices than what they ought to have been.
We believe the FTC has taken the right action against the companies, although it is belated. The FTC said it has found out that the suppliers raised LPG prices almost simultaneously and by the same margins in many cases. Some industry sources estimated that the firms have pocketed roughly several trillion won through the price collusion over the last six years. If so, it seems that the fine is only a slap on the wrist, considering the astronomical amount of ill-gotten gains. [If combined fine was only 668.9 billion won ($580 million), and profits were trillions of won (billions of dollars), then it pays to be criminal, and the incentive is to do it once more.]
Now, we have to ask a question: How could the LGP suppliers have rigged prices for such a long period? What has the regulator done to discover and crack down on such an unfair and illegal practice? We have no choice but to jump to the conclusion that the FTC has been negligent in ensuring fair competition [in being an institution along the raw material substrate path maintaining this politicized material regime]. We urge the regulator to reflect on its past inaction and negligence. And it should put action before words to become a true guardian of the rules of competition.
---
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2009/12/137_56625.html
Friday, December 4, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Week 13: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
Post by Sunday at midnight
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Denying the "Human Genetic-Cultural-Regional Food" History of the World is why people are getting sicker on the same globalized food. As the markets are destroyed for regional cuisines, there are global health problems of demoting these while changing to a common industrialized diet of fewer food regional choices. It is more than just a loss of regional options: it is a genetic issue of our bodies themselves, our "Regionalized Metabolism. Let's call it "Nabhan's Revenge"--though he calls it "evolutionary gastronomy".
The story below is a good example of leaving out this "evolutionary gastronomy. In "The Ten Fattest Countries in the World" it leaves something out. It leaves out "Nabhan's Revenge", how if you eat outside of your traditional regional cuisine you are at greater risk of health problems because there are human genetic mechanisms that have built up over time into 'demographics of regional genetics' in how we process our food (food metabolism genes) to handle a certain climate, its food chemicals and cultural choices as all intertwined.
So destroy the cultural ways of a region, and you destroy the interlinked specific regional food ways. In the process you sever your own genetic adaptability to keeping fit while eating a particular regional cuisine--a regional cuisine that might make others sick that keeps you healthy.
The journalist below is silent on the genetic mechanism why some people are getting fat on different foods. Her implied theory is based on assumptions that human genetics are all the same when it comes to our metabolism, so her indirect blame is simply "voluntary access" or a host of social policies and novel cultural habits. Like anything in the social world, there are many causal elements at play. However what she talks about is a more complicated issue that only political forces destroying regional cuisines or novel habits of youth.
It's nothing to do with only greater voluntary access to certain foods alone: it's because our diet over time became regionalized historically and 'culturalized', and our genetics followed suit as a dependent variable of the regional foodways instead of an independent causal variable.
Given "evolutionary gastronomy", our bodies are evolutionarily accustomed to certain foods over centuries and the cultural ways that were maintaining such foods.
In Nabhan's book, there are some amazing descriptions of how cultures and regional climates are the independent variable 'selecting for suitable dependent variables of genetics' to fit social adaptations, over time. (Typically people assume or talk about genetics as a determinist cause of things: Nabhan turns it around and provides examples of how genetics is a dependent variable, dependent upon cultural choices and regional food practices.) This interaction both cultural, food chemical, climatic, and human-genetic based generates a tightly locked interpenetration of a particular bioregional area--that we deny at our peril.
Remember the Mexican farmer in the film "The World According to Monsanto" and his long-term love of a particular region and its food.
Watch the optional films about European regionalism in foodways as well, many of them that fail to fit currently accepted "state cultural (sic), i.e., nationalist" borders either.
[In the packet:] Nabhan, Gary Paul. 2004. Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity. Washington, D.C.: Island Press / Shearwater Books.from ethnobotanist Nabhan, [on “evolutionary gastronomy”: the long-term biological/genetic and culinary chemical interaction as co-evolutionary: people, diet, and place, and genetics adapting to particular places and cuisines supported by particular areas over millennia]
OPTIONAL: videos on European Regional Cuisines
a. Savouring Europe - the Eastern Steppes – Hungary; November 2004 A huge grazing land alive with wild horses and cattle rounded up by cowboys; trout from the rivers and piles of red and orange paprika fill the kitchens of the inns and steaming goulash and thick sour cream are served in generous heaps.
25:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM57DsyuLNg
b. Savouring Europe: Dorset – UK; November 2004 January-March: Winter is ending, the land comes alive with new season potatoes and is ploughed for early spring crops. The grassland's cycle begins; cheese and beer making and organic farming respond to the weather on the rolling hills which descend to the Atlantic where tiny boats ply for shellfish.
25:21
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcK-5ABdbsc
c. Savouring Europe - Sodermansland – Sweden; November 2004 Summer and boar and deer are provided to be smoked and cooked as treats; lake fish and eels are provided for the new Swedish chefs to demonstrate their take on traditions and people speak of their passing culture in the reflection of deep blue lakes.
25:28
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zeWK4XWyUA
d. [many more if you search for them there]
---------------------------
Behold: the world's 10 fattest countries
Share on FacebookStumbleUponAdd to RedditPrint VersionEmail Article
By Laurie Cunningham — Special to GlobalPost
Published: November 25, 2009 14:27 ET
Updated: November 26, 2009 09:31 ET
CHICAGO — If you tend to pack on a few pounds over the holidays, blame it on globalization [it's more complicated than that]. As the world [of food choices has 'de-regionalized'] has grown smaller, we’ve all grown larger — alarmingly so. In countries around the world, waistlines are expanding so rapidly that health experts recently coined a term for the epidemic: globesity.
The common fat-o-meter among nations is body mass index (BMI), a calculation based on a person’s height and weight.
The World Health Organization defines “overweight” as an individual with a BMI of 25 or more and “obese” as someone with a BMI of 30 or higher. (To see how you weigh in, use this calculator by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.)
Today, one in three of the world’s adults is overweight and one in 10 is obese. By 2015, WHO estimates the number of chubby adults will balloon to 2.3 billion — equal to the combined populations of China, Europe and the U.S.
The rise in obesity coincides with increased modernization and a worldwide explosion in the availability of highly processed foods [and the non-availability of others, and the interaction with our 'regional genetic predispositions']. In the past 50 years, more of us have started driving to work instead of walking, opening a box of mac ‘n cheese instead of cooking, pushing computer keys instead of plows and taking the elevator rather than the stairs. [Er, it's more complicated than that.]
“The combination of these factors is driving obesity all over the world,” said James Hospedales, coordinator for prevention and control of chronic diseases at the Pan American Health Organization. “What’s really alarming is that it’s not just the middle aged, it’s children and adolescents. That’s new.”
In honor of Thanksgiving, a U.S. holiday dedicated to eating until we can’t breathe, we decided to take a look at the Top 10 Fattest Countries in the world, based on national health surveys WHO compiled between 2000 and 2008.
Yes, it's a big world after all:
1) American Samoa, 93.5 percent (of population that's overweight) [highly genetic specific area, with its traditional cuisines and markets decimated]
Traditionally, Pacific Islanders ate native foods high in complex carbohydrates and low in fat, such as bananas, yams, taro root, coconut and fish. Since World War II, an explosion of obesity on the islands has corresponded with a rise in migration to the U.S., New Zealand, France and Australia [while their same genetic metabolisms were awash with entire different food chemicals and ratios in their diets]. That began to change dietary habits as family members abroad introduced those back home to Western eating and sent money home, giving locals the means to buy more food. Today, this six-island nation in the South Pacific Ocean tops the scales as one of the fattest in the world.
2) Kiribati, 81.5 percent [another isolated genetic population, swamped by other non-regionalized foods]
Between 1964 and 2001, food imports to the least developed Pacific nations, such as Kiribati, which comprises 33 islands clustered around the equator, increased six-fold, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a United Nations agency established to fight world hunger. Those imports led to a huge influx in fatty food and processed meat, such as Spam and mutton flaps (fatty sheep scraps), often sold at lower prices than native food. [i.e., demoting the markets for what genetically had made them healthier in the past.]
3) U.S., 66.7 percent [U.S. a nation of immigrants and Native American populations all scrambled in their historic regional "evolutionary gastronomy" more than any other place in the world?]
In the early 1960s, 24 percent of Americans were overweight. Today, two-thirds of Americans are too fat, and the numbers on the scale keep going up. Health experts attribute the rise to an over-production of oil, fat and sugar — the result of government farm subsidies started in the 1970s that made it much cheaper to manufacture products like high fructose corn syrup, a common ingredient in processed foods. “On top of that, investment policies changed in the early 1980s to require corporations to report growth to Wall Street every 90 days,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of the book “Food Politics.” “This made food companies seek new ways to market to the public. Obesity was collateral damage.” [The ignore the transfat issues that the body is unable to use: as well as how the 'corn-i-fication' of sugar products in the U.S. has contributed to this because of the different chemicals in corn syrup are pretty bad for the human system as a sugar.]
4) Germany, 66.5 percent
When Germany found out that it was the fattest nation in Europe, health experts blamed the usual suspects: beer, fatty foods and lack of physical activity. Like the rest of the world, Germans are suffering from an easy availability of junk food and more sedentary jobs and lifestyles. As part of the government’s campaign to reduce obesity levels by 2020, it has launched programs to serve more fruits and vegetables in public schools.
5) Egypt, 66 percent
In the 1960s, Egypt produced enough food to feed its people a steady diet of red meat, poultry, lentils, maize and dairy products. But by the 1980s, the population had outgrown food production, leading to an increase in food imports that created poorer eating habits. Obesity among Egyptian women is particularly high, often attributed to cultural taboos on women exercising or playing sports.
6) Bosnia-Herzegovina, 62.9 percent
Once considered a problem only in high-income countries, obesity is dramatically on the rise in low- and middle-income countries [once very culturally/culinarily isolated] like Bosnia-Herzegovina, where smoking, drinking and eating unhealthy foods spiked during the war that ravaged the country from 1992 to 1995. Those living just above the poverty line in developing countries are gaining weight the fastest, partly because of the tendency to fill up on cheap processed foods high in calories and low on nutritional value.
7) New Zealand, 62.7 percent
In a study at the University of Otago, researchers found that how much time New Zealand children spend watching television is a better predictor of obesity than what they eat or how much they exercise. The study found that 41 percent of the children who were overweight by age 26 were those who had watched the most TV. Television is not the only reason New Zealanders are gaining weight, but it’s one modern development often cited for growing childhood obesity.
8) Israel, 61.9 percent
In the past 30 years, the number of obese Israelis has tripled, evidence the country is truly part of the Western world. Like in most developed countries, flab is most prevalent among Israelis with less education, with Jewish women with college degrees having the lowest levels of obesity and Arab women with basic education having the highest.
9) Croatia, 61.4 percent
Croatia, where cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, is also a victim of the globalization of the food market, which tends to suppress traditional diets as cheaper processed foods from the U.S. and Europe flood store shelves. Unlike other Europeans, Croatian men have higher rates of obesity than Croatian women, and tend to get even fatter as they age. It’s no wonder that a Croatian charity announced in June that it had created the world’s largest pair of jeans — the size of six tennis courts — stitched together from 8,023 donated pairs of jeans.
10) United Kingdom, 61 percent
Last month, The Observer begrudgingly reported that the heaviest man in the world was not in the U.S., but a 48-year-old Brit living in low-incoming housing in Ipswich “eating takeaways and playing computer games.” His weight: 980 pounds. British bellies are expanding for the same reasons as everywhere else. A recent survey, however, ranked Brits among the bottom third of European nations in physical exercise, leading Health Secretary Andy Burnham to comment, "We're really in danger of being known as the best in the world for watching sport, but one of the worst for getting out there and doing it for ourselves."
---
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/commerce/091125/obesity-epidemic-fattest-countries
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Denying the "Human Genetic-Cultural-Regional Food" History of the World is why people are getting sicker on the same globalized food. As the markets are destroyed for regional cuisines, there are global health problems of demoting these while changing to a common industrialized diet of fewer food regional choices. It is more than just a loss of regional options: it is a genetic issue of our bodies themselves, our "Regionalized Metabolism. Let's call it "Nabhan's Revenge"--though he calls it "evolutionary gastronomy".
The story below is a good example of leaving out this "evolutionary gastronomy. In "The Ten Fattest Countries in the World" it leaves something out. It leaves out "Nabhan's Revenge", how if you eat outside of your traditional regional cuisine you are at greater risk of health problems because there are human genetic mechanisms that have built up over time into 'demographics of regional genetics' in how we process our food (food metabolism genes) to handle a certain climate, its food chemicals and cultural choices as all intertwined.
So destroy the cultural ways of a region, and you destroy the interlinked specific regional food ways. In the process you sever your own genetic adaptability to keeping fit while eating a particular regional cuisine--a regional cuisine that might make others sick that keeps you healthy.
The journalist below is silent on the genetic mechanism why some people are getting fat on different foods. Her implied theory is based on assumptions that human genetics are all the same when it comes to our metabolism, so her indirect blame is simply "voluntary access" or a host of social policies and novel cultural habits. Like anything in the social world, there are many causal elements at play. However what she talks about is a more complicated issue that only political forces destroying regional cuisines or novel habits of youth.
It's nothing to do with only greater voluntary access to certain foods alone: it's because our diet over time became regionalized historically and 'culturalized', and our genetics followed suit as a dependent variable of the regional foodways instead of an independent causal variable.
Given "evolutionary gastronomy", our bodies are evolutionarily accustomed to certain foods over centuries and the cultural ways that were maintaining such foods.
In Nabhan's book, there are some amazing descriptions of how cultures and regional climates are the independent variable 'selecting for suitable dependent variables of genetics' to fit social adaptations, over time. (Typically people assume or talk about genetics as a determinist cause of things: Nabhan turns it around and provides examples of how genetics is a dependent variable, dependent upon cultural choices and regional food practices.) This interaction both cultural, food chemical, climatic, and human-genetic based generates a tightly locked interpenetration of a particular bioregional area--that we deny at our peril.
Remember the Mexican farmer in the film "The World According to Monsanto" and his long-term love of a particular region and its food.
Watch the optional films about European regionalism in foodways as well, many of them that fail to fit currently accepted "state cultural (sic), i.e., nationalist" borders either.
[In the packet:] Nabhan, Gary Paul. 2004. Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity. Washington, D.C.: Island Press / Shearwater Books.from ethnobotanist Nabhan, [on “evolutionary gastronomy”: the long-term biological/genetic and culinary chemical interaction as co-evolutionary: people, diet, and place, and genetics adapting to particular places and cuisines supported by particular areas over millennia]
OPTIONAL: videos on European Regional Cuisines
a. Savouring Europe - the Eastern Steppes – Hungary; November 2004 A huge grazing land alive with wild horses and cattle rounded up by cowboys; trout from the rivers and piles of red and orange paprika fill the kitchens of the inns and steaming goulash and thick sour cream are served in generous heaps.
25:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM57DsyuLNg
b. Savouring Europe: Dorset – UK; November 2004 January-March: Winter is ending, the land comes alive with new season potatoes and is ploughed for early spring crops. The grassland's cycle begins; cheese and beer making and organic farming respond to the weather on the rolling hills which descend to the Atlantic where tiny boats ply for shellfish.
25:21
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcK-5ABdbsc
c. Savouring Europe - Sodermansland – Sweden; November 2004 Summer and boar and deer are provided to be smoked and cooked as treats; lake fish and eels are provided for the new Swedish chefs to demonstrate their take on traditions and people speak of their passing culture in the reflection of deep blue lakes.
25:28
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zeWK4XWyUA
d. [many more if you search for them there]
---------------------------
Behold: the world's 10 fattest countries
Share on FacebookStumbleUponAdd to RedditPrint VersionEmail Article
By Laurie Cunningham — Special to GlobalPost
Published: November 25, 2009 14:27 ET
Updated: November 26, 2009 09:31 ET
CHICAGO — If you tend to pack on a few pounds over the holidays, blame it on globalization [it's more complicated than that]. As the world [of food choices has 'de-regionalized'] has grown smaller, we’ve all grown larger — alarmingly so. In countries around the world, waistlines are expanding so rapidly that health experts recently coined a term for the epidemic: globesity.
The common fat-o-meter among nations is body mass index (BMI), a calculation based on a person’s height and weight.
The World Health Organization defines “overweight” as an individual with a BMI of 25 or more and “obese” as someone with a BMI of 30 or higher. (To see how you weigh in, use this calculator by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute.)
Today, one in three of the world’s adults is overweight and one in 10 is obese. By 2015, WHO estimates the number of chubby adults will balloon to 2.3 billion — equal to the combined populations of China, Europe and the U.S.
The rise in obesity coincides with increased modernization and a worldwide explosion in the availability of highly processed foods [and the non-availability of others, and the interaction with our 'regional genetic predispositions']. In the past 50 years, more of us have started driving to work instead of walking, opening a box of mac ‘n cheese instead of cooking, pushing computer keys instead of plows and taking the elevator rather than the stairs. [Er, it's more complicated than that.]
“The combination of these factors is driving obesity all over the world,” said James Hospedales, coordinator for prevention and control of chronic diseases at the Pan American Health Organization. “What’s really alarming is that it’s not just the middle aged, it’s children and adolescents. That’s new.”
In honor of Thanksgiving, a U.S. holiday dedicated to eating until we can’t breathe, we decided to take a look at the Top 10 Fattest Countries in the world, based on national health surveys WHO compiled between 2000 and 2008.
Yes, it's a big world after all:
1) American Samoa, 93.5 percent (of population that's overweight) [highly genetic specific area, with its traditional cuisines and markets decimated]
Traditionally, Pacific Islanders ate native foods high in complex carbohydrates and low in fat, such as bananas, yams, taro root, coconut and fish. Since World War II, an explosion of obesity on the islands has corresponded with a rise in migration to the U.S., New Zealand, France and Australia [while their same genetic metabolisms were awash with entire different food chemicals and ratios in their diets]. That began to change dietary habits as family members abroad introduced those back home to Western eating and sent money home, giving locals the means to buy more food. Today, this six-island nation in the South Pacific Ocean tops the scales as one of the fattest in the world.
2) Kiribati, 81.5 percent [another isolated genetic population, swamped by other non-regionalized foods]
Between 1964 and 2001, food imports to the least developed Pacific nations, such as Kiribati, which comprises 33 islands clustered around the equator, increased six-fold, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a United Nations agency established to fight world hunger. Those imports led to a huge influx in fatty food and processed meat, such as Spam and mutton flaps (fatty sheep scraps), often sold at lower prices than native food. [i.e., demoting the markets for what genetically had made them healthier in the past.]
3) U.S., 66.7 percent [U.S. a nation of immigrants and Native American populations all scrambled in their historic regional "evolutionary gastronomy" more than any other place in the world?]
In the early 1960s, 24 percent of Americans were overweight. Today, two-thirds of Americans are too fat, and the numbers on the scale keep going up. Health experts attribute the rise to an over-production of oil, fat and sugar — the result of government farm subsidies started in the 1970s that made it much cheaper to manufacture products like high fructose corn syrup, a common ingredient in processed foods. “On top of that, investment policies changed in the early 1980s to require corporations to report growth to Wall Street every 90 days,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and author of the book “Food Politics.” “This made food companies seek new ways to market to the public. Obesity was collateral damage.” [The ignore the transfat issues that the body is unable to use: as well as how the 'corn-i-fication' of sugar products in the U.S. has contributed to this because of the different chemicals in corn syrup are pretty bad for the human system as a sugar.]
4) Germany, 66.5 percent
When Germany found out that it was the fattest nation in Europe, health experts blamed the usual suspects: beer, fatty foods and lack of physical activity. Like the rest of the world, Germans are suffering from an easy availability of junk food and more sedentary jobs and lifestyles. As part of the government’s campaign to reduce obesity levels by 2020, it has launched programs to serve more fruits and vegetables in public schools.
5) Egypt, 66 percent
In the 1960s, Egypt produced enough food to feed its people a steady diet of red meat, poultry, lentils, maize and dairy products. But by the 1980s, the population had outgrown food production, leading to an increase in food imports that created poorer eating habits. Obesity among Egyptian women is particularly high, often attributed to cultural taboos on women exercising or playing sports.
6) Bosnia-Herzegovina, 62.9 percent
Once considered a problem only in high-income countries, obesity is dramatically on the rise in low- and middle-income countries [once very culturally/culinarily isolated] like Bosnia-Herzegovina, where smoking, drinking and eating unhealthy foods spiked during the war that ravaged the country from 1992 to 1995. Those living just above the poverty line in developing countries are gaining weight the fastest, partly because of the tendency to fill up on cheap processed foods high in calories and low on nutritional value.
7) New Zealand, 62.7 percent
In a study at the University of Otago, researchers found that how much time New Zealand children spend watching television is a better predictor of obesity than what they eat or how much they exercise. The study found that 41 percent of the children who were overweight by age 26 were those who had watched the most TV. Television is not the only reason New Zealanders are gaining weight, but it’s one modern development often cited for growing childhood obesity.
8) Israel, 61.9 percent
In the past 30 years, the number of obese Israelis has tripled, evidence the country is truly part of the Western world. Like in most developed countries, flab is most prevalent among Israelis with less education, with Jewish women with college degrees having the lowest levels of obesity and Arab women with basic education having the highest.
9) Croatia, 61.4 percent
Croatia, where cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, is also a victim of the globalization of the food market, which tends to suppress traditional diets as cheaper processed foods from the U.S. and Europe flood store shelves. Unlike other Europeans, Croatian men have higher rates of obesity than Croatian women, and tend to get even fatter as they age. It’s no wonder that a Croatian charity announced in June that it had created the world’s largest pair of jeans — the size of six tennis courts — stitched together from 8,023 donated pairs of jeans.
10) United Kingdom, 61 percent
Last month, The Observer begrudgingly reported that the heaviest man in the world was not in the U.S., but a 48-year-old Brit living in low-incoming housing in Ipswich “eating takeaways and playing computer games.” His weight: 980 pounds. British bellies are expanding for the same reasons as everywhere else. A recent survey, however, ranked Brits among the bottom third of European nations in physical exercise, leading Health Secretary Andy Burnham to comment, "We're really in danger of being known as the best in the world for watching sport, but one of the worst for getting out there and doing it for ourselves."
---
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/commerce/091125/obesity-epidemic-fattest-countries
Monday, November 16, 2009
Week 12: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
Post by Sunday at midnight
1. Mark Whitaker
2. The Infrastructure of Asbestos in Korea still there in surprising consumptive uses. A person who regularly puts salt on his fast food, puts talc powder on his body, chews gum, and rides a cheap train may intersect with asbestos unwillingly and unknowingly four different ways every day. If you are someone who lives near Hongseong and Boryeong, you have another infrastructure that's hard to avoid: a 'closed' asbestos mine that is perhaps associated with why half the people there have lung diseases though aren't miners. That's quite a basis for changing someone's institutionalized habit--if they listen to the information that is.
3. Interesting on the large scale of its 'inherited' use or its ongoing tainted use in many consumer products and experiences in Korea. So a person who regularly puts salt on his fast food, puts talc powder on his body, chews gum, and rides a cheap train may intersect with asbestos unwillingly and unknowingly four different ways every day. that's quite a basis for changing someone's institutionalized habit--if they listen to the information that is.
A huge lawsuit is possible I guess if the government refuses to alter this infrastructure and clean it up. I put brackets [] throughout the article where I see an example of forms of institutional habit, personal habit, legalization, and legitimation/delegitimation that keeps the regime of asbestos politically intact or politically challenged.
--------------
11-16-2009 17:52 여성 남성
Traces of Asbestos Detected in Trains
Members of the Korean Railway Workers’ Union read a statement calling on KORAIL to take steps to deal with traces of asbestos found in insulation materials in train cars during a news conference at Seoul Station, Monday.
/ Korea Times Photo
by Kim Ju-young
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
Traces of asbestos, a grade-one carcinogen, were detected in heating systems installed in Mugunghwa and Saemaeul railway trains, the Korean Railway Workers' Union and the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement claimed [in a delegitimating way] Monday.
Since the ventilation is poor, the potential impact on the human body could be critical, the groups said, questioning KORAIL's [legitimating, self-assessing] claims that the amount was not big enough to be considered a heath hazard.
According to the workers' union, out of 28 heating and interior material samples collected from 21 carriages, 43 percent were found with traces of asbestos of varying densities but, in some cases, dangerously high.
They attributed it to the [political legalization] failure to refurbish materials installed when there were no regulations.
"The cars we surveyed were made between 1986 and 1998 [under previous institutional rules of construction no longer valid] but those found with traces of asbestos date from 1986 and 1987 in terms of the manufacturing period," said Lee Tae-young, the union spokesman.
Saemaeul and Mugunghwa are cheaper alternatives to the KTX bullet train launched in 2004. "It has been a long time since asbestos has been a hot issue nationwide, but the company doesn't seem to care about the less profitable units," he added. [delegitimating discourse to encouraging upset consumers and rightly so; this makes political allies of the general public around rejecting the material, as well aims to create legalization changes as in the government to regulate these train cars for asbestos.]
Currently, there are 1,006 Mugunghwa and 1,130 Saemaeul train cars in operation nationwide carrying an average of 200,000 passengers a day.
The group asked the [legalizing] government to conduct a health checkup on the health of passengers and railway workers. [delegitimating discourse:] "KORAIL needs to replace its fleets," Choi Ye-yong, an official of the environmental civic group, said.
[delegitimating alliance of agreement:] The World Health Organization has long designated asbestos as a life-threatening substance that is known to cause respiratory diseases such as asbestosis and lung cancer, but it was only recently that Korea started to take it seriously [with legislation against it as a materials choice.].
In April, the [other institutional ally, the] Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) confirmed that it had detected asbestos in 11 brands of baby talcum powders. The revelation expanded to capsule wrappings of several drugs, chewing gum, cosmetic goods and many other products. The authorities banned the sales of the respective products [to legitimate themselves once more and via legislation] and called for a halt of the use of talcum powder in others. [Amazing how deep and widespread are the environmental implications of things, when you consider all different choices of using them in different consumptive categories as part of their general flow.]
In June, [another institutional ally in demoting the residual asbestos material regime] the Ministry of Environment confirmed that nearly one in two residents living in Hongseong and Boryeong near a closed mine in South Chungcheong Province contracted various lung diseases, apparently caused by asbestos inhalation.
Last week, an environmental civic group claimed that traces of asbestos were detected at four salt farms nationwide, apparently due to the slated roof of the salt warehouse. [delegitimating it among general public, making a widespread uproar of concern, since salt is virtually unsubstitutable in its category of mineral foods. Poisoin a country's salt, and you have a rather wide base for social movement opposition to the asbestos material as a choice.]
bjs@koreatimes.co.kr
---
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/11/117_55576.html
Recent books:
From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Bowker’s riveting, anecdotal look at the damage done by mining and manufacturing companies who denied the harmful effects of asbestos might have been titled "Evil Incorporated." Focusing largely on a vermiculite mine in bucolic Libby, Montana, Bowker shows a business that put its bottom line over its employees’ health. Interviews with victims of asbestos poisoning and their survivors are interspersed with EPA reports, company memos and other sources, as Bowker charts asbestos’s history, from its identification [i.e., social infrastructural legitimation] as a "miracle mineral" to the first signs that it might be dangerous, to the government’s ineffectual [legalization, pro-asbestos regime] policies and various companies’ decisions not to inform its workers of the health risks it posed. [legitimation via silence and omission, same with fluoride we will watch on Thursday] As one asbestos plant exec is alleged to have said, it was "the company’s policy to let workers continue on the job until they quit work because of asbestosis or died of other asbestos-related disease." Worker after worker describes how he was never told that the dust he encountered daily was poisonous: "The asbestos was whitish-gray and my hair was pure white after work. We never wore any protective gear, except the little paper masks they gave us," said one worker who now has asbestosis. The personal stories make for a sad and gripping read, as Bowker, in classic muckraking style, gives voice to many who suffer from long-term exposure to asbestos and argues for a ban on asbestos products in the U.S.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
STILL LEGAL, STILL LETHAL
Most Americans mistakenly believe asbestos was banned long ago. In fact, it is still legal and can still kill you. Its microscopic fibers cause painful and incurable diseases.
Despite being outlawed in nearly every other industrialized country, asbestos remains a legal component of more than three thousand common products in the United States. These include toasters, washers/dryers, ovens, building supplies, and automobile brakes. Our confusion about asbestos is no accident.
Fatal Deception is a chilling exposé of the asbestos industry's successful seventy-year campaign to hide the deadly effects of its products from the American people. The stakes are high -- tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Michael Bowker rips the cover off the decades of deceit [around a particular material regime--are other material regimes that we think 'so legitimate' really so upon examination?], including the treachery in Libby, Montana, site of the most deadly environmental disaster in U.S. history. He also unveils a startling and ongoing cover-up at Ground Zero -- where thousands of New Yorkers may still be suffering from exposure to dangerous levels of asbestos fibers. [Do you know who said the air in New York City was 'completely safe'? Someone whose husband was heavily invested in new York real estate insurance companies. No joke. new York was covered in asbestos on 9-11-01 from the pulverized massive buildings and the burning craters for months afterward.]
Compelling, enraging, and very timely, Fatal Deception is not just a fascinating story, it is a plea to [delegitimate the government, and thus cause the government to legitimate itself to have] the government and to the American people to help sponsor research [state-science position] into asbestos-related diseases -- and a call to arms to ban asbestos now.
Review
given all that has been written and said about asbestos over the past 30 years is there anything else worth knowing? Do we really need another book on asbestos? After reading Defending the Indefensible the emphatic answer I reached was yes. This book is a tour-de-force of informed and concerned scholarship. Labour History [a] compelling book. The Lancet, Volume 373, Issue 9660
Product Description
In the early twentieth century, asbestos had a reputation as a lifesaver. In 1960, however, it became known that even relatively brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma, a virulent and lethal cancer.
Yet the bulk of the world's asbestos was mined after 1960. Asbestos usage in many countries continued unabated. [it's a silent 'inconspicuous consumption' regime, eh? How many people knew that asbestos was still legal in most countries and widely used?]
[The definition of a politicized raw material regime in the position of choice of materials, keeping out other things by politics instead of by economic or material requirements to be there:]
This is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century. It explains how mining and manufacture could continue despite overwhelming medical evidence as to the risks. The argument advanced in this book is that asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defense strategy for the mineral--a strategy that still operates in some parts of the world. This defence involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance, and medicine.
The book also discusses the problems of asbestos in the environment, compensating victims, and the continued use of asbestos in the developing world. Its global focus shows how asbestos can be seen as a model for many occupational diseases [and a model for a repressive raw material regime of politics]--indeed for a whole range of hazards produced by industrial societies. The book is based on a wealth of documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from the authors' visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.
"Asbestos: The Other White Meat"
The map above displays asbestos deaths from mesothelioma or asbestosis as reported to the federal government via death certificate records from 1979 through 2001. It likely represents less than 20 percent of total asbestos mortality during that time.
http://reports.ewg.org/reports/asbestos/maps/government_data.php
1. Mark Whitaker
2. The Infrastructure of Asbestos in Korea still there in surprising consumptive uses. A person who regularly puts salt on his fast food, puts talc powder on his body, chews gum, and rides a cheap train may intersect with asbestos unwillingly and unknowingly four different ways every day. If you are someone who lives near Hongseong and Boryeong, you have another infrastructure that's hard to avoid: a 'closed' asbestos mine that is perhaps associated with why half the people there have lung diseases though aren't miners. That's quite a basis for changing someone's institutionalized habit--if they listen to the information that is.
3. Interesting on the large scale of its 'inherited' use or its ongoing tainted use in many consumer products and experiences in Korea. So a person who regularly puts salt on his fast food, puts talc powder on his body, chews gum, and rides a cheap train may intersect with asbestos unwillingly and unknowingly four different ways every day. that's quite a basis for changing someone's institutionalized habit--if they listen to the information that is.
A huge lawsuit is possible I guess if the government refuses to alter this infrastructure and clean it up. I put brackets [] throughout the article where I see an example of forms of institutional habit, personal habit, legalization, and legitimation/delegitimation that keeps the regime of asbestos politically intact or politically challenged.
--------------
11-16-2009 17:52 여성 남성
Traces of Asbestos Detected in Trains
Members of the Korean Railway Workers’ Union read a statement calling on KORAIL to take steps to deal with traces of asbestos found in insulation materials in train cars during a news conference at Seoul Station, Monday.
/ Korea Times Photo
by Kim Ju-young
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
Traces of asbestos, a grade-one carcinogen, were detected in heating systems installed in Mugunghwa and Saemaeul railway trains, the Korean Railway Workers' Union and the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement claimed [in a delegitimating way] Monday.
Since the ventilation is poor, the potential impact on the human body could be critical, the groups said, questioning KORAIL's [legitimating, self-assessing] claims that the amount was not big enough to be considered a heath hazard.
According to the workers' union, out of 28 heating and interior material samples collected from 21 carriages, 43 percent were found with traces of asbestos of varying densities but, in some cases, dangerously high.
They attributed it to the [political legalization] failure to refurbish materials installed when there were no regulations.
"The cars we surveyed were made between 1986 and 1998 [under previous institutional rules of construction no longer valid] but those found with traces of asbestos date from 1986 and 1987 in terms of the manufacturing period," said Lee Tae-young, the union spokesman.
Saemaeul and Mugunghwa are cheaper alternatives to the KTX bullet train launched in 2004. "It has been a long time since asbestos has been a hot issue nationwide, but the company doesn't seem to care about the less profitable units," he added. [delegitimating discourse to encouraging upset consumers and rightly so; this makes political allies of the general public around rejecting the material, as well aims to create legalization changes as in the government to regulate these train cars for asbestos.]
Currently, there are 1,006 Mugunghwa and 1,130 Saemaeul train cars in operation nationwide carrying an average of 200,000 passengers a day.
The group asked the [legalizing] government to conduct a health checkup on the health of passengers and railway workers. [delegitimating discourse:] "KORAIL needs to replace its fleets," Choi Ye-yong, an official of the environmental civic group, said.
[delegitimating alliance of agreement:] The World Health Organization has long designated asbestos as a life-threatening substance that is known to cause respiratory diseases such as asbestosis and lung cancer, but it was only recently that Korea started to take it seriously [with legislation against it as a materials choice.].
In April, the [other institutional ally, the] Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) confirmed that it had detected asbestos in 11 brands of baby talcum powders. The revelation expanded to capsule wrappings of several drugs, chewing gum, cosmetic goods and many other products. The authorities banned the sales of the respective products [to legitimate themselves once more and via legislation] and called for a halt of the use of talcum powder in others. [Amazing how deep and widespread are the environmental implications of things, when you consider all different choices of using them in different consumptive categories as part of their general flow.]
In June, [another institutional ally in demoting the residual asbestos material regime] the Ministry of Environment confirmed that nearly one in two residents living in Hongseong and Boryeong near a closed mine in South Chungcheong Province contracted various lung diseases, apparently caused by asbestos inhalation.
Last week, an environmental civic group claimed that traces of asbestos were detected at four salt farms nationwide, apparently due to the slated roof of the salt warehouse. [delegitimating it among general public, making a widespread uproar of concern, since salt is virtually unsubstitutable in its category of mineral foods. Poisoin a country's salt, and you have a rather wide base for social movement opposition to the asbestos material as a choice.]
bjs@koreatimes.co.kr
---
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/11/117_55576.html
Recent books:
Fatal Deception: The Terrifying True Story of How Asbestos is Killing America by Michael Bowker (Paperback - Sep 2, 2003)
From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Bowker’s riveting, anecdotal look at the damage done by mining and manufacturing companies who denied the harmful effects of asbestos might have been titled "Evil Incorporated." Focusing largely on a vermiculite mine in bucolic Libby, Montana, Bowker shows a business that put its bottom line over its employees’ health. Interviews with victims of asbestos poisoning and their survivors are interspersed with EPA reports, company memos and other sources, as Bowker charts asbestos’s history, from its identification [i.e., social infrastructural legitimation] as a "miracle mineral" to the first signs that it might be dangerous, to the government’s ineffectual [legalization, pro-asbestos regime] policies and various companies’ decisions not to inform its workers of the health risks it posed. [legitimation via silence and omission, same with fluoride we will watch on Thursday] As one asbestos plant exec is alleged to have said, it was "the company’s policy to let workers continue on the job until they quit work because of asbestosis or died of other asbestos-related disease." Worker after worker describes how he was never told that the dust he encountered daily was poisonous: "The asbestos was whitish-gray and my hair was pure white after work. We never wore any protective gear, except the little paper masks they gave us," said one worker who now has asbestosis. The personal stories make for a sad and gripping read, as Bowker, in classic muckraking style, gives voice to many who suffer from long-term exposure to asbestos and argues for a ban on asbestos products in the U.S.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
STILL LEGAL, STILL LETHAL
Most Americans mistakenly believe asbestos was banned long ago. In fact, it is still legal and can still kill you. Its microscopic fibers cause painful and incurable diseases.
Despite being outlawed in nearly every other industrialized country, asbestos remains a legal component of more than three thousand common products in the United States. These include toasters, washers/dryers, ovens, building supplies, and automobile brakes. Our confusion about asbestos is no accident.
Fatal Deception is a chilling exposé of the asbestos industry's successful seventy-year campaign to hide the deadly effects of its products from the American people. The stakes are high -- tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Michael Bowker rips the cover off the decades of deceit [around a particular material regime--are other material regimes that we think 'so legitimate' really so upon examination?], including the treachery in Libby, Montana, site of the most deadly environmental disaster in U.S. history. He also unveils a startling and ongoing cover-up at Ground Zero -- where thousands of New Yorkers may still be suffering from exposure to dangerous levels of asbestos fibers. [Do you know who said the air in New York City was 'completely safe'? Someone whose husband was heavily invested in new York real estate insurance companies. No joke. new York was covered in asbestos on 9-11-01 from the pulverized massive buildings and the burning craters for months afterward.]
Compelling, enraging, and very timely, Fatal Deception is not just a fascinating story, it is a plea to [delegitimate the government, and thus cause the government to legitimate itself to have] the government and to the American people to help sponsor research [state-science position] into asbestos-related diseases -- and a call to arms to ban asbestos now.
Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival (Hardcover, 2008)
Review
given all that has been written and said about asbestos over the past 30 years is there anything else worth knowing? Do we really need another book on asbestos? After reading Defending the Indefensible the emphatic answer I reached was yes. This book is a tour-de-force of informed and concerned scholarship. Labour History [a] compelling book. The Lancet, Volume 373, Issue 9660
Product Description
In the early twentieth century, asbestos had a reputation as a lifesaver. In 1960, however, it became known that even relatively brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma, a virulent and lethal cancer.
Yet the bulk of the world's asbestos was mined after 1960. Asbestos usage in many countries continued unabated. [it's a silent 'inconspicuous consumption' regime, eh? How many people knew that asbestos was still legal in most countries and widely used?]
[The definition of a politicized raw material regime in the position of choice of materials, keeping out other things by politics instead of by economic or material requirements to be there:]
This is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century. It explains how mining and manufacture could continue despite overwhelming medical evidence as to the risks. The argument advanced in this book is that asbestos has proved so enduring because the industry was able to mount a successful defense strategy for the mineral--a strategy that still operates in some parts of the world. This defence involved the shaping of the public debate by censoring, and sometimes corrupting, scientific research, nurturing scientific uncertainty, and using allies in government, insurance, and medicine.
The book also discusses the problems of asbestos in the environment, compensating victims, and the continued use of asbestos in the developing world. Its global focus shows how asbestos can be seen as a model for many occupational diseases [and a model for a repressive raw material regime of politics]--indeed for a whole range of hazards produced by industrial societies. The book is based on a wealth of documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from the authors' visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.
"Asbestos: The Other White Meat"
The map above displays asbestos deaths from mesothelioma or asbestosis as reported to the federal government via death certificate records from 1979 through 2001. It likely represents less than 20 percent of total asbestos mortality during that time.
http://reports.ewg.org/reports/asbestos/maps/government_data.php
Monday, November 9, 2009
Week 11: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
Post by Sunday at midnight
This is the ecological modernization idea for saving rainforests we were unable to watch in class:
"Willie Smits restores a rainforest"
http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html (20 min)
------------------
The below relates to this week's topic of politicized materials as one rationale why we see the above solutions only rarely...despite many solutions for ecological modernization existing for all manners of environmental and economic problems.
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Ecological Modernization Success Story in Spain (and Political Consumptive Infrastructural Change in Spain)
3. Spain gets 45% of its electricity from wind power, now. (Meanwhile, the U.S. gets around 55% of its energy from coal, and little change in the oil regime at all.)
---------------------
Spain reaches new wind record: 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand
08 de noviembre de 2009
Wind energy in Spain reached a new record last night, providing at its peak 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand – 2.1% greater than the previous record set in November last year.
Spain reaches new wind record: 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand
Spanish electricity grid, Red Eléctrica, said that today’s record is a first since it was sustained over several hours during last night. Between 00.40 and 06.20 on 5 November wind met over 40% of electricity demand.
“There have been several peaks over 40% in Spain, but this new one – lasting nearly six hours compared to around one hour the previous time - shows the huge part that wind can play in meeting Spain’s electricity demand,” Jacopo Moccia, regulatory affairs adviser for EWEA said.
The surge in wind power last night triggered water pumping stations which transport water into reservoirs. This store of water will then be released over the day generating electricity via water turbines at times of peak demand.
The Spanish Wind Energy Association said the sustained peak in wind powered electricity production proves that “wind energy is no longer marginal”. By 2020 Spain is expected to double its wind-power producing capacity from the current level of 16 gigawatts to 40 GW. “With this expected growth in capacity we could envisage wind meeting the vast majority of demand during times of peak supply by 2020,” Moccia said.
On average throughout the year, wind energy meets 12% of Spain’s electricity demand. The largest producer of wind power in Spain is Iberdrola, with 27 percent of capacity, followed by Acciona on 16 percent and Endesa with 10 percent. Spain's wind farms are on track to meet a government target of 20,000 MW in capacity by 2010.
Installed wind capacity in Spain reached 16,740 MW in 2008 with the addition of 1,609 MW. Expectations for the Spanish wind energy industry for 2009 are very high, with 18,500 MW of total capacity will be installed.
The wind sector expected this growth after the 3,500-MW increase in 2007, a special year in which companies made an effort to start up the greatest number of wind farms so they could benefit from the previous support system. The total of 16,740 MW establishes Spain as the third country in the world in terms of installed capacity and will allow the 2010 objective (20,155 MW set by the Renewable Energies Plan 2005–2010) to be reached.
The addition of 1,609 MW in 2008 is an increase of 10.63%, the third highest increase in absolute terms in the short history of wind energy in Spain. The only higher annual increases were in 2007 (3,505 MW or 30%) and 2004 (2,297.51 MW or 37%).
Electrical energy demand in 2008 was 266,485 GWh, a growth of 1.21% over 2007. Wind energy met 11% of this demand and was the fourth largest contributing technology in the generation system, besting hydropower (7% of demand). The other contributors to the system were gas combined-cycle power plants (32% of total demand), nuclear power plants (20%), and coal power plants (16%).
On several occasions in 2008, wind energy covered more than 40% of hourly demand, and for several days it supplied more than 30% of daily electricity demand. For instance, on November 24, wind energy supplied more than 35% of the total electricity demand. And on several occasions, production of wind energy reached more than 40% of hourly demand.
Wind energy in Spain has also emerged as a driving force for industrial development. In 2008, investment was more than 2,250 million €, and about 50% of Spanish wind energy equipment production is dedicated to the export market. According to the “Macroeconomic Study on the Impact of the Wind Energy Sector in Spain,” the number of jobs related to wind power reached more than 40,000 in 2008. Of this total, the number of direct jobs in operation and maintenance of wind farms, manufacturing, assembly, research, and development is estimated at more than 21,800. The number of indirect jobs (linked mainly to components) is estimated to be more than 17,000.
The industrial sector participating in the Asociación Empresarial Eólica, or (Spanish Wind Energy Association) has established a new objective of 40,000 MW for 2020. Use of wind power has lowered CO2 emissions by about 18 million tons just during 2008. Furthermore, wind generation has saved up to 6 million tons of conventional fuels. Wind production has supplied the electrical consumption of more than 10 million households.
Gamesa installed more than 50% of new capacity, according to the Spanish Wind Energy Association’s Wind Observatory, with more than 9,480 MW (including the subsidiary company MADE) in Spain, which consolidates its leadership among manufacturers. VESTAS, the second largest manufacturer, installed more than 15% of new capacity in 2008, adding 242.2 MW.
www.ewea.org/
www.aeeolica.es/en/
demanda.ree.es/eolica.html
TAGS: AEE, Asociación Empresarial Eólica, wind energy, Spain, wind power, Spanish Wind Energy Association
---
http://www.evwind.es/noticias.php?id_not=2148
This is the ecological modernization idea for saving rainforests we were unable to watch in class:
"Willie Smits restores a rainforest"
http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html (20 min)
------------------
The below relates to this week's topic of politicized materials as one rationale why we see the above solutions only rarely...despite many solutions for ecological modernization existing for all manners of environmental and economic problems.
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Ecological Modernization Success Story in Spain (and Political Consumptive Infrastructural Change in Spain)
3. Spain gets 45% of its electricity from wind power, now. (Meanwhile, the U.S. gets around 55% of its energy from coal, and little change in the oil regime at all.)
---------------------
Spain reaches new wind record: 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand
08 de noviembre de 2009
Wind energy in Spain reached a new record last night, providing at its peak 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand – 2.1% greater than the previous record set in November last year.
Spain reaches new wind record: 45.1% of Spain’s total electricity demand
Spanish electricity grid, Red Eléctrica, said that today’s record is a first since it was sustained over several hours during last night. Between 00.40 and 06.20 on 5 November wind met over 40% of electricity demand.
“There have been several peaks over 40% in Spain, but this new one – lasting nearly six hours compared to around one hour the previous time - shows the huge part that wind can play in meeting Spain’s electricity demand,” Jacopo Moccia, regulatory affairs adviser for EWEA said.
The surge in wind power last night triggered water pumping stations which transport water into reservoirs. This store of water will then be released over the day generating electricity via water turbines at times of peak demand.
The Spanish Wind Energy Association said the sustained peak in wind powered electricity production proves that “wind energy is no longer marginal”. By 2020 Spain is expected to double its wind-power producing capacity from the current level of 16 gigawatts to 40 GW. “With this expected growth in capacity we could envisage wind meeting the vast majority of demand during times of peak supply by 2020,” Moccia said.
On average throughout the year, wind energy meets 12% of Spain’s electricity demand. The largest producer of wind power in Spain is Iberdrola, with 27 percent of capacity, followed by Acciona on 16 percent and Endesa with 10 percent. Spain's wind farms are on track to meet a government target of 20,000 MW in capacity by 2010.
Installed wind capacity in Spain reached 16,740 MW in 2008 with the addition of 1,609 MW. Expectations for the Spanish wind energy industry for 2009 are very high, with 18,500 MW of total capacity will be installed.
The wind sector expected this growth after the 3,500-MW increase in 2007, a special year in which companies made an effort to start up the greatest number of wind farms so they could benefit from the previous support system. The total of 16,740 MW establishes Spain as the third country in the world in terms of installed capacity and will allow the 2010 objective (20,155 MW set by the Renewable Energies Plan 2005–2010) to be reached.
The addition of 1,609 MW in 2008 is an increase of 10.63%, the third highest increase in absolute terms in the short history of wind energy in Spain. The only higher annual increases were in 2007 (3,505 MW or 30%) and 2004 (2,297.51 MW or 37%).
Electrical energy demand in 2008 was 266,485 GWh, a growth of 1.21% over 2007. Wind energy met 11% of this demand and was the fourth largest contributing technology in the generation system, besting hydropower (7% of demand). The other contributors to the system were gas combined-cycle power plants (32% of total demand), nuclear power plants (20%), and coal power plants (16%).
On several occasions in 2008, wind energy covered more than 40% of hourly demand, and for several days it supplied more than 30% of daily electricity demand. For instance, on November 24, wind energy supplied more than 35% of the total electricity demand. And on several occasions, production of wind energy reached more than 40% of hourly demand.
Wind energy in Spain has also emerged as a driving force for industrial development. In 2008, investment was more than 2,250 million €, and about 50% of Spanish wind energy equipment production is dedicated to the export market. According to the “Macroeconomic Study on the Impact of the Wind Energy Sector in Spain,” the number of jobs related to wind power reached more than 40,000 in 2008. Of this total, the number of direct jobs in operation and maintenance of wind farms, manufacturing, assembly, research, and development is estimated at more than 21,800. The number of indirect jobs (linked mainly to components) is estimated to be more than 17,000.
The industrial sector participating in the Asociación Empresarial Eólica, or (Spanish Wind Energy Association) has established a new objective of 40,000 MW for 2020. Use of wind power has lowered CO2 emissions by about 18 million tons just during 2008. Furthermore, wind generation has saved up to 6 million tons of conventional fuels. Wind production has supplied the electrical consumption of more than 10 million households.
Gamesa installed more than 50% of new capacity, according to the Spanish Wind Energy Association’s Wind Observatory, with more than 9,480 MW (including the subsidiary company MADE) in Spain, which consolidates its leadership among manufacturers. VESTAS, the second largest manufacturer, installed more than 15% of new capacity in 2008, adding 242.2 MW.
www.ewea.org/
www.aeeolica.es/en/
demanda.ree.es/eolica.html
TAGS: AEE, Asociación Empresarial Eólica, wind energy, Spain, wind power, Spanish Wind Energy Association
---
http://www.evwind.es/noticias.php?id_not=2148
Monday, November 2, 2009
Week 10: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
Post by Sunday at midnight
1. Mark Whitaker
2. "Meat Creates More than Half of Greenhouse Gases": Another Model (Social Construction) Calls Into Question Previous Models (equally Social Constructions) on Climate
3. If a more accurate framework, it would argue that agriculture and animal raising--instead of industrial pollution--is the largest contributor to CO2 from humans in the atmosphere. Though what scale does the environment itself make CO2 and what percentage of it is anthropogenic? Or is even CO2 the major important chemical involved in climate?
------------------
Study claims meat creates half of all greenhouse gases
Livestock causes far more climate damage than first thought, says a new report
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.
In a paper published by a respected US thinktank, the Worldwatch Institute, two World Bank environmental advisers claim that instead of 18 per cent of global emissions being caused by meat, the true figure is 51 per cent.
Related articles
* Graphic: The real climate culprits?
They claim that United Nation's figures have severely underestimated the greenhouse gases caused by tens of billions of cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry and other animals in three main areas: methane, land use and respiration.
Their findings – which are likely to prompt fierce debate among academics – come amid increasing from climate change experts calls for people to eat less meat.
In the 19-page report, Robert Goodland, a former lead environmental adviser to the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, a current adviser, suggest that domesticated animals cause 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), more than the combined impact of industry and energy. The accepted figure is 18 per cent, taken from a landmark UN report in 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow.
"If this argument is right," write Goodland and Anhang, "it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.
"In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy."
Their call to move to meat substitutes accords with the views of the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who has described eating less meat as "the most attractive opportunity" for making immediate changes to climate change.
Lord Stern of Brentford, author of the 2006 review into the economic consequences of global warming, added his name to the call last week, telling a newspaper interviewer: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources."
Scientists are concerned about livestock's exhalation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows and other ruminants emit 37 per cent of the world's methane. A study by Nasa scientists published in Science on Friday found that methane has significantly more effect on climate change than previously thought: 33 times more than carbon dioxide, compared with a previous factor of 25.
According to Goodland and Anhang's paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, scientists have significantly underestimated emissions of methane expelled by livestock. They argue that the gas's impact should be calculated over 20 years, in line with its rapid effect – and the latest recommendation from the UN – rather than the 100 years favoured by Livestock's Long Shadow. This, they say, would add a further 5bn tons of CO2e to livestock emissions – 7.9 per cent of global emissions from all sources.
Similarly, they claim that official figures are wrong to ignore CO2 emitted by breathing animals on the basis that it is offset by carbon photosynthesised by their food, arguing the existence of this unnecessary animal-based CO2 amounts to 8.7bn tons of CO2e, 3.7 per cent of total emissions.
On land use, they calculate that returning the land currently used for livestock to natural vegetation and forests would remove 2.6bn tons of CO2e from the atmosphere, 4.2 per cent of greenhouse gas. They also complain that the UN underestimated the amount of livestock, putting it at 21.7bn against NGO estimates of 50bn, adding that numbers have since risen by 12 per cent.
Eating meat rather than plants also requires extra refrigeration and cooking and "expensive" treatment of human diseases arising from livestock..., they say.
One leading expert on climate change and food, Tara Garnett, welcomed Goodland and Anhang's calculations on methane, which she said had credibility, but she questioned other aspects of their work, saying she had no reason to dispute the UN's position on CO2 caused by breathing. She also pointed out that they had changed scientific assumptions for livestock but not for other sources of methane, skewing the figures.
She said: "We are increasingly becoming aware that livestock farming at current scales is a major problem, and that they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But livestock farming also yields benefits – there are some areas of land that can’t be used for food crop production. Livestock manure can also contribute to soil fertility, and farm animals provide us with non food goods, such as leather and wool, which would need to be produced by another means, if it wasn’t a byproduct from animal farming.”
While looking into the paper's findings, Friends of the Earth said the report strengthened calls for the Government to act on emissions from meat production. "We already know that the meat and dairy industry causes more climate-changing emissions than all the world's transport," said Clare Oxborrow, senior food campaigner.
"These new figures need further scrutiny but, if they stack up, they provide yet more evidence of the urgent need to fix the food chain. The more damaging elements of the meat and dairy industry are effectively government-sponsored: millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent propping up factory farms and subsidising the import of animal feed that's been grown at the expense of forests."
Justin Kerswell, campaign manager for the vegetarian group Viva!, said: "The case for reducing consumption of meat and dairy products was already imperative based on previous UN findings. Now it appears to have been proven that the environmental devastation from livestock production is in fact staggeringly more significant – and dwarfs the contribution from the transport sector by an even greater margin.
"It is essential that attention is fully focused on the impact of livestock production by all global organisations with the power to affect policy."
Post a Comment LiveJournal
Subject: Message:
View all comments that have been posted about this article. [just a few comments from the thread]
Comments
( Leave a comment )
[info]catherineib wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 12:49 am (UTC)
I'm not usually an annoying smug vegetarian, but after reading this I do feel a little that way inclined!
Link | Reply | Thread
Meat and greenhouse gases
[info]rbtgoodland wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 12:53 am (UTC)
From Robert Goodland: As the Telegraph reports today, my co-author and I have assessed the life cycle and supply chain of meat and dairy products. We have deduced that at least 51% of worldwide human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are attributable to livestock, and our full report is viewable on Worldwatch's website.
We show that a 25% reduction in livestock products worldwide can be achieved at minimal cost, while yielding at least a 12.5% reduction in human-caused GHGs. This is about as much reduction as is considered possible to achieve in an agreement at the upcoming U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen.
The FAO’s prior estimate is based on a simple model of the carbon cycle. However, a virtuous carbon cycle model does not work these days in the real world, which is much more complex. A simple carbon cycle model does not account for the tens of millions of hectares of forest converted in recent decades to grazing land and cropland to feed tens of billions more livestock each year.
In ranching in tropical regions, forest is cut and burned to create new pastures. Soil is depleted in a few years, so then more forest is cut and burned. That, added to by livestock’s breath and other excretions, has resulted in high levels of atmospheric carbon, significantly fuelling climate change.
In responses to Lord Stern, meat and dairy producers claim that their products use grass more efficiently than in tropical regions, and therefore should not be targeted in Copenhagen. However, in British pastures and other temperate regions, large amounts of soil carbon are released over time.
Moreover, while meat and dairy producers do not often reveal this, most British cattle – as elsewhere – graze for the first part of their lives, and then are fed carbon-intensive grains and legumes for the second part. In fact, a majority of the world’s crops become feed for cattle and other livestock.
Feed, meat and dairy products are global commodities, so they get flown, shipped and trucked all over the world. Then British and other tables get laden with highly carbon-inefficient foods. And global warming is trans-boundary, which means that Lord Stern and others must look beyond British borders in considering the impacts of meat and dairy products on climate.
In both tropical and temperate regions, much of the same land used to graze livestock and grow feed could instead regenerate tall grasses and forest, among which -- as well as in the soil beneath – much more carbon could be absorbed and sequestered than in land set aside for grazing and feed.
If regeneration of pasture and forest would occur on a large, global scale, then as much as half of today’s atmospheric carbon could potentially be absorbed. At the same time, many carbon emissions from livestock’s breathing and other excretions could be stopped. Most important, carbon absorption in forest, grasses and soil reclaimed from livestock and feed would be the only feasible way to absorb a significant amount of today’s atmospheric carbon in the near term. This analysis shows why Lord Stern dares to imagine a world where not all land today dedicated to livestock and feed would remain so.
Following submission of our article for publication, we learned that the number of livestock worldwide in 2007 was actually 56 billion, many more than we accounted for in our article. That would raise our estimate of GHGs worldwide attributable to livestock. On the other hand, our article noted that further work remained to be done on producing a reliable estimate of global carbon from methane not attributable to livestock. Once that estimate is available, it would offset some carbon attributable to the new numbers of livestock that we have learned about.
It will not suffice to substitute one meat product with another that has a somewhat lower carbon footprint. Marketing campaigns should pitch meat and dairy substitutes that can be eaten all week long – because they are tasty, economical, easy to prepare, and healthful. Most important, by replacing meat and dairy products with better alternatives, consumers can collectively take a single powerful action to reverse climate change. Action is needed now, before it is too late.
Link | Reply | Thread
Re: Meat and greenhouse gases
[info]reinertorheit wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 01:07 am (UTC)
Thank you for this vitally important and ground-breaking research. Let's hope it puts the misleading information about carbon footprints into context.
...
and another:
the gas emissions allegedly produced from livestock retained for the use of human consumption pails almost into insignifigance, when compared to the gasses produced in the wild by Wildebeest's, variety's of Antelope of which there are many and other great consumers of vegetation. Plus the fact the greatest producer of methane gas can be laid at the door of the trillions and trillions of termites who run amok across the globe.
..
and another:
Now for the farmers and other vested interests backlash. Never mind, we vegetarians will weather the storm, I feel the hand of history...........
and another:
...
Some of our most beautiful countryside rich in nature exists for no other reason
than meat and dairy production. We must resist any attempt to destroy this sustainable and ecologically sound land use.
and another:
...
Concrete manufacture is a major source of CO2 in the atmosphere. Something we could change without causing starvation.
...
---
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/meat-creates-half-
of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html
-----------------------------------------------------
[2]
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Another Post about Historical Environmental Degradation in South America: The Nazca, near the Incan Empire
3. Seems another issue of a short term 'good idea' that led to long term difficulties. The Nazca unravelled their forest they depended upon which contributed to their demise. Interesting article:
-------------------
Why the Nasca's big mistake was to cut down the huarango tree
Clearing key trees left pre-Inca culture exposed to floods and drought
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Monday, 2 November 2009
An ancient huarango tree. The Nasca cut down the keystone species in the desert of Peru's coastal plains to make way for crops
At the height of their power, the Nasca had mastered the craft of weaving elaborate textiles and the art of painting fine, multicoloured pottery. They etched giant figures in the desert that only made sense if seen from the air, and they irrigated their crops with a network of underground aqueducts.
For more than eight centuries, the Nasca culture prospered in the coastal valleys of Peru until its sudden downfall around 600 AD, which many experts put down to the torrential rains and dramatic flooding brought on by one of the worst El Nino events in a millennium.
But a team of archaeologists has now found convincing evidence that this was only part of the story. The researchers believe the decline was self-inflicted and began with the cutting down of a tree that could have protected them from devastating climate change.
Related articles
* Money is the key to the success of Copenhagen
* The unwanted equation: poverty vs climate change
The Nasca, one of the most important of the pre-Inca civilisations of South America, are most famous for the "Nasca Lines", a series of elaborate geoglyphs etched into the desert covering huge areas, depicting animals, deities and geometric shapes.
After the Nasca Lines were discovered by the first passenger flights over the region, some pseudoscience authors suggested that since they could only be seen from above, they must have been made with the help of space aliens. It is now accepted [first time I heard this "accepted, anonymous" thing] that the geoglyphs were created mundanely with long ropes tied to stakes in the ground,...
The Nasca survived in the semi-arid region by building irrigation canals to grow crops such as maize, squash, sweet potato and manioc.
This reliable food supply enabled them to build a relatively sophisticated civilisation based on art and ritual, which nevertheless included the unpleasant practice of collecting severed heads as trophies.
All this came to an abrupt end, according to a new study, because the Nasca made the mistake of cutting down the huarango tree which would have protected them from the El Nino flooding and subsequent soil erosion and drought that turned the lush agricultural land into desert.
"The huarango is a remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree and it was an important source of food, forage, timber and fuel for the people," said David Beresford-Jones, an archaeologist and Nasca expert at the University of Cambridge. "It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture, ameliorating desert extremes in the microclimate beneath its canopy and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known."
The researchers have excavated the lower Ica Valley of the Nasca domain and found clear evidence that vast swathes of huarango trees had been cut down to make way for crops. Dr Beresford-Jones believes that the Nasca eventually changed the landscape forever. "In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold, which is sharply defined in such desert environments, exposing the landscape to the region's extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Nino floods."
The huarango tree plays a "profound role" in preserving the sort of semi-arid environments where the Nasca lived, the scientists say in their study. "Successful agriculture is just not possible here without the protection afforded by trees. Indeed, these findings have undoubted contemporary resonance."
When the El Nino struck, the river [after they cut all the trees, now] cut [deep] into its floodplain, washed away the soil and destroyed the Nasca irrigation systems, making the farmland unworkable. The generations of Nasca that followed suffered higher infant mortalities and lower adult life expectancy.
Eventually, the Nasca capital of Cahuachi was abandoned and all that was left of the culture were archaeological artifacts.
Lost civilisations: Destroyed by nature
*Easter Island
It is thought that the native people felled the majority of the island's trees between 1200 AD and 1500 AD. [Actually, no, the latest bit from Easter Island is the introduced rats species eating the seeds of the emergent palms, and making them unable to grow, then] The loss of palm trees upset the eco-system, driving away wildlife and drying up water supplies.
*Maya
Mayan civilisation stretched across the Yucatan Peninsula until 900 AD when cities were mysteriously abandoned. It is believed that the culture was wiped out by a series of droughts [and human decisions to ignore the issues as elite houses were still being built with ever greater wood and plaster products as the crisis mounted over decades, then these palaces were burned, likely by rebellion that disbelieved in their elites anymore, and habitation ceased to be urban among the Maya.].
---
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-the-nascas-big-mistake-
was-to-cut-down-the-huarango-tree-1813180.html
1. Mark Whitaker
2. "Meat Creates More than Half of Greenhouse Gases": Another Model (Social Construction) Calls Into Question Previous Models (equally Social Constructions) on Climate
3. If a more accurate framework, it would argue that agriculture and animal raising--instead of industrial pollution--is the largest contributor to CO2 from humans in the atmosphere. Though what scale does the environment itself make CO2 and what percentage of it is anthropogenic? Or is even CO2 the major important chemical involved in climate?
------------------
Study claims meat creates half of all greenhouse gases
Livestock causes far more climate damage than first thought, says a new report
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Climate change emissions from meat production are far higher than currently estimated, according to a controversial new study that will fuel the debate on whether people should eat fewer animal products to help the environment.
In a paper published by a respected US thinktank, the Worldwatch Institute, two World Bank environmental advisers claim that instead of 18 per cent of global emissions being caused by meat, the true figure is 51 per cent.
Related articles
* Graphic: The real climate culprits?
They claim that United Nation's figures have severely underestimated the greenhouse gases caused by tens of billions of cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry and other animals in three main areas: methane, land use and respiration.
Their findings – which are likely to prompt fierce debate among academics – come amid increasing from climate change experts calls for people to eat less meat.
In the 19-page report, Robert Goodland, a former lead environmental adviser to the World Bank, and Jeff Anhang, a current adviser, suggest that domesticated animals cause 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), more than the combined impact of industry and energy. The accepted figure is 18 per cent, taken from a landmark UN report in 2006, Livestock's Long Shadow.
"If this argument is right," write Goodland and Anhang, "it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.
"In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy."
Their call to move to meat substitutes accords with the views of the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who has described eating less meat as "the most attractive opportunity" for making immediate changes to climate change.
Lord Stern of Brentford, author of the 2006 review into the economic consequences of global warming, added his name to the call last week, telling a newspaper interviewer: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources."
Scientists are concerned about livestock's exhalation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows and other ruminants emit 37 per cent of the world's methane. A study by Nasa scientists published in Science on Friday found that methane has significantly more effect on climate change than previously thought: 33 times more than carbon dioxide, compared with a previous factor of 25.
According to Goodland and Anhang's paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, scientists have significantly underestimated emissions of methane expelled by livestock. They argue that the gas's impact should be calculated over 20 years, in line with its rapid effect – and the latest recommendation from the UN – rather than the 100 years favoured by Livestock's Long Shadow. This, they say, would add a further 5bn tons of CO2e to livestock emissions – 7.9 per cent of global emissions from all sources.
Similarly, they claim that official figures are wrong to ignore CO2 emitted by breathing animals on the basis that it is offset by carbon photosynthesised by their food, arguing the existence of this unnecessary animal-based CO2 amounts to 8.7bn tons of CO2e, 3.7 per cent of total emissions.
On land use, they calculate that returning the land currently used for livestock to natural vegetation and forests would remove 2.6bn tons of CO2e from the atmosphere, 4.2 per cent of greenhouse gas. They also complain that the UN underestimated the amount of livestock, putting it at 21.7bn against NGO estimates of 50bn, adding that numbers have since risen by 12 per cent.
Eating meat rather than plants also requires extra refrigeration and cooking and "expensive" treatment of human diseases arising from livestock..., they say.
One leading expert on climate change and food, Tara Garnett, welcomed Goodland and Anhang's calculations on methane, which she said had credibility, but she questioned other aspects of their work, saying she had no reason to dispute the UN's position on CO2 caused by breathing. She also pointed out that they had changed scientific assumptions for livestock but not for other sources of methane, skewing the figures.
She said: "We are increasingly becoming aware that livestock farming at current scales is a major problem, and that they contribute significantly to greenhouse gases. But livestock farming also yields benefits – there are some areas of land that can’t be used for food crop production. Livestock manure can also contribute to soil fertility, and farm animals provide us with non food goods, such as leather and wool, which would need to be produced by another means, if it wasn’t a byproduct from animal farming.”
While looking into the paper's findings, Friends of the Earth said the report strengthened calls for the Government to act on emissions from meat production. "We already know that the meat and dairy industry causes more climate-changing emissions than all the world's transport," said Clare Oxborrow, senior food campaigner.
"These new figures need further scrutiny but, if they stack up, they provide yet more evidence of the urgent need to fix the food chain. The more damaging elements of the meat and dairy industry are effectively government-sponsored: millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is spent propping up factory farms and subsidising the import of animal feed that's been grown at the expense of forests."
Justin Kerswell, campaign manager for the vegetarian group Viva!, said: "The case for reducing consumption of meat and dairy products was already imperative based on previous UN findings. Now it appears to have been proven that the environmental devastation from livestock production is in fact staggeringly more significant – and dwarfs the contribution from the transport sector by an even greater margin.
"It is essential that attention is fully focused on the impact of livestock production by all global organisations with the power to affect policy."
Post a Comment LiveJournal
Subject: Message:
View all comments that have been posted about this article. [just a few comments from the thread]
Comments
( Leave a comment )
[info]catherineib wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 12:49 am (UTC)
I'm not usually an annoying smug vegetarian, but after reading this I do feel a little that way inclined!
Link | Reply | Thread
Meat and greenhouse gases
[info]rbtgoodland wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 12:53 am (UTC)
From Robert Goodland: As the Telegraph reports today, my co-author and I have assessed the life cycle and supply chain of meat and dairy products. We have deduced that at least 51% of worldwide human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are attributable to livestock, and our full report is viewable on Worldwatch's website.
We show that a 25% reduction in livestock products worldwide can be achieved at minimal cost, while yielding at least a 12.5% reduction in human-caused GHGs. This is about as much reduction as is considered possible to achieve in an agreement at the upcoming U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen.
The FAO’s prior estimate is based on a simple model of the carbon cycle. However, a virtuous carbon cycle model does not work these days in the real world, which is much more complex. A simple carbon cycle model does not account for the tens of millions of hectares of forest converted in recent decades to grazing land and cropland to feed tens of billions more livestock each year.
In ranching in tropical regions, forest is cut and burned to create new pastures. Soil is depleted in a few years, so then more forest is cut and burned. That, added to by livestock’s breath and other excretions, has resulted in high levels of atmospheric carbon, significantly fuelling climate change.
In responses to Lord Stern, meat and dairy producers claim that their products use grass more efficiently than in tropical regions, and therefore should not be targeted in Copenhagen. However, in British pastures and other temperate regions, large amounts of soil carbon are released over time.
Moreover, while meat and dairy producers do not often reveal this, most British cattle – as elsewhere – graze for the first part of their lives, and then are fed carbon-intensive grains and legumes for the second part. In fact, a majority of the world’s crops become feed for cattle and other livestock.
Feed, meat and dairy products are global commodities, so they get flown, shipped and trucked all over the world. Then British and other tables get laden with highly carbon-inefficient foods. And global warming is trans-boundary, which means that Lord Stern and others must look beyond British borders in considering the impacts of meat and dairy products on climate.
In both tropical and temperate regions, much of the same land used to graze livestock and grow feed could instead regenerate tall grasses and forest, among which -- as well as in the soil beneath – much more carbon could be absorbed and sequestered than in land set aside for grazing and feed.
If regeneration of pasture and forest would occur on a large, global scale, then as much as half of today’s atmospheric carbon could potentially be absorbed. At the same time, many carbon emissions from livestock’s breathing and other excretions could be stopped. Most important, carbon absorption in forest, grasses and soil reclaimed from livestock and feed would be the only feasible way to absorb a significant amount of today’s atmospheric carbon in the near term. This analysis shows why Lord Stern dares to imagine a world where not all land today dedicated to livestock and feed would remain so.
Following submission of our article for publication, we learned that the number of livestock worldwide in 2007 was actually 56 billion, many more than we accounted for in our article. That would raise our estimate of GHGs worldwide attributable to livestock. On the other hand, our article noted that further work remained to be done on producing a reliable estimate of global carbon from methane not attributable to livestock. Once that estimate is available, it would offset some carbon attributable to the new numbers of livestock that we have learned about.
It will not suffice to substitute one meat product with another that has a somewhat lower carbon footprint. Marketing campaigns should pitch meat and dairy substitutes that can be eaten all week long – because they are tasty, economical, easy to prepare, and healthful. Most important, by replacing meat and dairy products with better alternatives, consumers can collectively take a single powerful action to reverse climate change. Action is needed now, before it is too late.
Link | Reply | Thread
Re: Meat and greenhouse gases
[info]reinertorheit wrote:
Sunday, 1 November 2009 at 01:07 am (UTC)
Thank you for this vitally important and ground-breaking research. Let's hope it puts the misleading information about carbon footprints into context.
...
and another:
the gas emissions allegedly produced from livestock retained for the use of human consumption pails almost into insignifigance, when compared to the gasses produced in the wild by Wildebeest's, variety's of Antelope of which there are many and other great consumers of vegetation. Plus the fact the greatest producer of methane gas can be laid at the door of the trillions and trillions of termites who run amok across the globe.
..
and another:
Now for the farmers and other vested interests backlash. Never mind, we vegetarians will weather the storm, I feel the hand of history...........
and another:
...
Some of our most beautiful countryside rich in nature exists for no other reason
than meat and dairy production. We must resist any attempt to destroy this sustainable and ecologically sound land use.
and another:
...
Concrete manufacture is a major source of CO2 in the atmosphere. Something we could change without causing starvation.
...
---
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/meat-creates-half-
of-all-greenhouse-gases-1812909.html
-----------------------------------------------------
[2]
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Another Post about Historical Environmental Degradation in South America: The Nazca, near the Incan Empire
3. Seems another issue of a short term 'good idea' that led to long term difficulties. The Nazca unravelled their forest they depended upon which contributed to their demise. Interesting article:
-------------------
Why the Nasca's big mistake was to cut down the huarango tree
Clearing key trees left pre-Inca culture exposed to floods and drought
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Monday, 2 November 2009
An ancient huarango tree. The Nasca cut down the keystone species in the desert of Peru's coastal plains to make way for crops
At the height of their power, the Nasca had mastered the craft of weaving elaborate textiles and the art of painting fine, multicoloured pottery. They etched giant figures in the desert that only made sense if seen from the air, and they irrigated their crops with a network of underground aqueducts.
For more than eight centuries, the Nasca culture prospered in the coastal valleys of Peru until its sudden downfall around 600 AD, which many experts put down to the torrential rains and dramatic flooding brought on by one of the worst El Nino events in a millennium.
But a team of archaeologists has now found convincing evidence that this was only part of the story. The researchers believe the decline was self-inflicted and began with the cutting down of a tree that could have protected them from devastating climate change.
Related articles
* Money is the key to the success of Copenhagen
* The unwanted equation: poverty vs climate change
The Nasca, one of the most important of the pre-Inca civilisations of South America, are most famous for the "Nasca Lines", a series of elaborate geoglyphs etched into the desert covering huge areas, depicting animals, deities and geometric shapes.
After the Nasca Lines were discovered by the first passenger flights over the region, some pseudoscience authors suggested that since they could only be seen from above, they must have been made with the help of space aliens. It is now accepted [first time I heard this "accepted, anonymous" thing] that the geoglyphs were created mundanely with long ropes tied to stakes in the ground,...
The Nasca survived in the semi-arid region by building irrigation canals to grow crops such as maize, squash, sweet potato and manioc.
This reliable food supply enabled them to build a relatively sophisticated civilisation based on art and ritual, which nevertheless included the unpleasant practice of collecting severed heads as trophies.
All this came to an abrupt end, according to a new study, because the Nasca made the mistake of cutting down the huarango tree which would have protected them from the El Nino flooding and subsequent soil erosion and drought that turned the lush agricultural land into desert.
"The huarango is a remarkable nitrogen-fixing tree and it was an important source of food, forage, timber and fuel for the people," said David Beresford-Jones, an archaeologist and Nasca expert at the University of Cambridge. "It is the ecological keystone species in the desert zone, enhancing soil fertility and moisture, ameliorating desert extremes in the microclimate beneath its canopy and underpinning the floodplain with one of the deepest root systems of any tree known."
The researchers have excavated the lower Ica Valley of the Nasca domain and found clear evidence that vast swathes of huarango trees had been cut down to make way for crops. Dr Beresford-Jones believes that the Nasca eventually changed the landscape forever. "In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold, which is sharply defined in such desert environments, exposing the landscape to the region's extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Nino floods."
The huarango tree plays a "profound role" in preserving the sort of semi-arid environments where the Nasca lived, the scientists say in their study. "Successful agriculture is just not possible here without the protection afforded by trees. Indeed, these findings have undoubted contemporary resonance."
When the El Nino struck, the river [after they cut all the trees, now] cut [deep] into its floodplain, washed away the soil and destroyed the Nasca irrigation systems, making the farmland unworkable. The generations of Nasca that followed suffered higher infant mortalities and lower adult life expectancy.
Eventually, the Nasca capital of Cahuachi was abandoned and all that was left of the culture were archaeological artifacts.
Lost civilisations: Destroyed by nature
*Easter Island
It is thought that the native people felled the majority of the island's trees between 1200 AD and 1500 AD. [Actually, no, the latest bit from Easter Island is the introduced rats species eating the seeds of the emergent palms, and making them unable to grow, then] The loss of palm trees upset the eco-system, driving away wildlife and drying up water supplies.
*Maya
Mayan civilisation stretched across the Yucatan Peninsula until 900 AD when cities were mysteriously abandoned. It is believed that the culture was wiped out by a series of droughts [and human decisions to ignore the issues as elite houses were still being built with ever greater wood and plaster products as the crisis mounted over decades, then these palaces were burned, likely by rebellion that disbelieved in their elites anymore, and habitation ceased to be urban among the Maya.].
---
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-the-nascas-big-mistake-
was-to-cut-down-the-huarango-tree-1813180.html
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Week 9: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
WITHOUT BLOG POST FOR MID-TERM WEEKEND
Post by Sunday at midnight, by November 1
Post by Sunday at midnight, by November 1
Friday, October 16, 2009
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