Seed Magazine starts by questioning at our shopping habits. Organic food at Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and the like certainly is presented well, and seems less prone to spoil as soon as we get it home than some other supermarkets. But can we really shop our way to better agriculture?

Unfortunately, what may have begun as a revolt against fake food or, for many, the horrors of concentrated animal feed lots, has given way to a culture that increasingly fetishizes organic, natural, and whole foods with little agreement on what such terms even mean, outside of an emphatic devotion to what they are not: They aren't in any way related to industrial-scale farms or big-box grocery chains; chemical herbicides or pesticides; biotechnology or its subgenre, genetic engineering. And by those criteria, they are deemed to be safer, more nutritious, and less damaging to the environment.

Nutritionally, there is no clear evidence that organic foods trump conventional ones. ...

Nor are they part of a plan for sustainable farming. And we can't escape our expanding population and resulting overconsumption:

Today, agriculture--thanks to deforestation, nitrous oxide, methane from cattle and rice paddies--is considered by many experts to be an overlooked environmental disaster. Speaking at a special Earth Institute symposium earlier this month on how to improve global agriculture, economist Jeffrey Sachs told the audience, "Agriculture is the main driver of most ecological problems on the planet. We are literally eating away the other species on the planet."

I was no fan of Cash for Clunkers, but when Edmunds claimed that C4C cost taxpayers $24K per car, I thought their math was a bit tortured.

But now AP claims that FOIA data shows that thousands of buyers replaced their old gas guzzling trucks with newer gas guzzling trucks with scarcely better mpg, and occasionally even worse mpg. So in those cases, we handed out at least $4,500 per buyer, but gained no environmental and fuel efficiency benefits from the transaction.

Clunker pickups traded for new pickups

The single most common swap - which occurred more than 8,200 times - involved Ford 150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford 150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.

Owners of thousands more large old Chevrolet and Dodge pickups bought new Silverado and Ram trucks, also with only barely improved mileage in the middle teens, according to AP's analysis of sales of $15.2 billion worth of vehicles at nearly 19,000 car dealerships in every state. Those deals helped the Ford 150 and Chevy Silverado - along with Ford's Escape midsize SUV - climb into the Top 10 most-popular vehicles purchased with the government rebates. The most common truck-for-truck and truck-for-SUV deals totaled at least $911 million.

In scores of deals, the government reported spending a total of $562,500 in rebates for new cars and trucks that got worse or the same mileage as the trade-ins - in apparent violation of the program's requirements. The government said it is investigating those reports and said in some cases they were probably entered incorrectly by dealers or based on outdated fuel economy figures.

The new data, obtained by the AP under the Freedom of Information Act, include details of 677,081 clunker trade-ins processed by the government through Oct. 16. More than 95,000 of the new vehicles purchased under the program - or about one in seven - got less than 20 mpg, according to the data.

No program is perfect, and a lot of buyers responded to the rising fuel prices and the spirit of the program, but this is disappointing. I wonder how many of these buyers complain about wastefulness in government as they drive their taxpayer-funded guzzlers around town?

I was raised eating plenty of meat. My Dad had occasionally gone hungry in the great depression, but was very prosperous as an adult. He liked for Mom to cook a lot of beef. I still like the taste, but in view of the environmental and health costs, and the grocery store prices, I have cut back on all sorts of meat.

Even on a family farm, slaughtering and eating animals isn't a kind, warm and fuzzy process, but it has become difficult to reconcile our appetites with the realities of industrial scale of food production. Agribusinesses respond by essentially asking if we'd rather go hungry.

The LA Times reports how Harris Ranch is pushing back against new ideas about farming:

California agribusiness pressures school to nix Michael Pollan lecture

Threatening to pull donations from the school, a major California agribusiness has succeeded in turning what was to be a campus lecture by Pollan tomorrow into a panel discussion involving Pollan, a meat-science expert and one of the largest organic growers in the U.S.

"While I understand the need to expose students to alternative views, I find it unacceptable that the university would provide Michael Pollan an unchallenged forum to promote his stand against conventional agricultural practices,'' David E. Wood, chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co., wrote in a scathing Sept. 23 letter to the Cal Poly president.

Wood has pledged $150,000 toward a new meat processing plant on campus. In his letter, he said Pollan's scheduled solo appearance had prompted him to "rethink my continued financial support of the university.'' He also criticized an animal sciences professor who said that conventional feedlots like the one run by Harris Ranch were not a form of sustainable agriculture.

(Isn't a meat-processing plant on a campus sort of redundant?)

[Pollan] said the Harris letter raised troubling questions about academic freedom.

"The issue is about whether the school is really free to explore diverse ideas about farming,'' he said. "Is the principle of balance going to apply across the board? The next time Monsanto comes to speak at Cal Poly about why we need [genetically modified organisms] to feed the world, will there be a similar effort? Will I be invited back for that show?"

On the other hand, in Gagging Michael Pollan, Counterpunch, which is trying to raise funds to stay afloat, notes:

... agribusiness has the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal with.

The land grant, ag-based university, in the middle of dairyland, clearly doesn't remember its roots. It gave Pollan's In Defense of Food ... free to all incoming freshmen as part of its common book read program ...

Protesting farmers who came to hear Pollan speak at the university's 17,000-seat Kohl Center in September wearing matching green T-shirts which said "In Defense of Farming: Eat Food. Be Healthy. Thank Farmers." were clearly outnumbered. So were bumper stickers reading No Food; No Farms and Don't Criticize Farmers With Your Mouth Full in the parking lot.

Students get all their facts from writers like Pollan, the farmers, who were bussed in by Madison-based feed company Vita Plus, told the Capital Times. They have never visited a farm for first-hand knowledge of food production and don't know what they're talking about.

But efforts to open farms to the public are not always successful.

This month United Egg Producers' "Opening the Barn Doors" media tour at Morning Fresh Farms in northern Colorado, for example, only confirmed the size of today's egg farm that make humane conditions impossible (36 barns; 23,000 birds each, 23 million dozen eggs a year) and raised further questions about environmental blight by showing the press wearing white HazMat suits to enter the barns.

Clearly, the farms have grown into agribusinesses in response to demand. But, no matter what ag students learn, what sort of change in demand could lead to more sustainable practices?

Some people I used to read at peak oil webblog The Oil Drum have formed their own weblog, The Automatic Earth, which focuses on the economic crisis.

This is a very wide-ranging article with many helpful graphics, a few pieces of which I have quoted here:

The Case for Deflation

Deflation is ultimately psychological. Without trust we will see hoarding of the cash which will be very scarce in the absence of the credit that currently comprises the vast majority of the effective money supply. The combination of scarce cash and a very low velocity of money will be toxic.

Money is the lubricant in the economic engine and without enough of it that engine will seize up as it did in the 1930s, when farmers dumped milk they couldn't sell into ditches while others were starving for want of the money to buy food. There was plenty of everything except money, and without money, one cannot connect buyers and sellers.

Potential buyers will have no purchasing power as they will have lost access to credit and their ability to earn an income will be hit by spiking unemployment. Those who still have jobs will find that they have no bargaining power and there is therefore no wage support.

Sellers and producers will have no market and will themselves lose the means to purchase supplies or raw materials for the things they would like to produce.

If conditions remain frozen for any length of time, they will go out of business. The deeper the collapse, the more protracted the trough and the more difficult the eventual recovery.

...

Unemployment will go through the roof as the prospects for selling most goods and services decline dramatically. In the developed world we are nations of middle men - generally service economies where we make a living figuratively taking in each other's laundry.

Most of us produce relatively little. Even those who do will find almost no market for their exports, and those who could find buyers may not be able to send shipments as credit contraction prevents shippers from getting the letters of credit they need to ship goods. ...

Unfortunately middlemen are almost completely expendable, and the services of others are likely to become unaffordable for the majority very quickly. While there will be a huge surplus of labour, and the few who retain purchasing power will be able to hire anyone they want for very little, most people will have to do everything for themselves, as poor people have done throughout history and as most of the population of the world does now.

Not only will we lose access to the paid labour of others, but we will lose our virtual energy slaves as well. This will represent an enormous fall in the standard of living for the vast majority.

Update: Rainforest treaty 'fatally flawed'

A vital safeguard to protect the world's rainforests from being cut down has been dropped from a global deforestation treaty due to be signed at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

Under proposals due to be ratified at the summit, countries which cut down rainforests and convert them to plantations of trees such as oil palms would still be able to classify the result as forest and could receive millions of dollars meant for preserving them. An earlier version of the text ruled out such a conversion but has been deleted, and the EU delegation - headed by Britain - has blocked its reinsertion.

Environmentalists say plantations are in no way a substitute for the lost natural forest in terms of wildlife, water production or, crucially, as a store of the carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere when forests are destroyed and intensifies climate change.

As climate change legislation creeps ahead in the US Congress, activity prior to the formal negotiations on emissions that will take place in December is picking up. Last Monday a meeting of officials from the major greenhouse gas emitting countries ended with hints that progress is being made in discussion between the rich countries that currently emit most of the greenhouse gases and the developing countries that fear their economic development will be choked off by carbon ceilings.

In the meantime, China and India, which account for one quarter of global emissions, announced a plan for an alternative to the climate treaty that is to be signed in Copenhagen. China remains opposed to specific emissions caps and prefers more general plans to cut emissions in proportion to economic growth. The China-India plan may either be incorporated in any agreement reached at Copenhagen or may become an alternative should negotiations break down.

Beijing is starting to realize that it is among the most vulnerable to climate change as its rivers and crops start to dry up, water tables drop, and sea levels rise. The government is making major efforts to switch to green technologies, but policy is still overshadowed by the perceived need for rapid economic growth and the generally linked need to consume more and more coal and oil.

Ironically, recent polls show public sentiment in the US swinging away from the need to do anything about greenhouse emissions. Part of this comes from the barrage of industry advertising aimed at derailing climate change legislation in the Congress by focusing on increased costs to consumers during difficult economic times.

There are so many forces now at work applying pressure to climate change policy, financial systems, currencies, economic growth, and fossil fuel consumption that a clear outcome to all this is impossible to foresee. It seems likely that major changes will be forced on the global economy within the next few years despite widespread denial of the real problems.

Copenhagen Is Supposed to Fail. DIY! Jan Lundberg

Don't be taken in by Gordon Brown or any other approved savior regarding the climate crisis.

My prediction for the UN Copenhagen meeting is that it cannot and will not do anything but promise policies that hinge on the technofix, instead of actually moving toward the immediate slashing of greenhouse gas emissions. After all, how could any head of state or climate official in a corporate-dominated world really try to cut back on industrial activity to a significant degree? It would be not just political suicide but literally.

The only way that expected discussed "cuts" can be arrived at is by designing theoretical reductions from the switching of energy practices over time. Too much time, too many people, no way to adequately replace petroleum.

It does not matter how sincere or passionate any of the official international compromisers are who "represent' humanity. Their technofix is a lie, and that's what the so-called leaders are signed up for. So shouldn't the rest of us act accordingly, pro-actively? Perhaps a promise of reaction could be issued to them beforehand, announcing that we know they intend to only fail. At least it could make clear to a large audience, somehow, that we know that the process is set up for failure and that we're always being bullshitted.

Keep in mind that the passionate messengers of dire effects of climate change earn trust by identifying the problem, and then they revert to imbeciles or deceivers by claiming the answer is different energy technology to be expanded or developed. Never a cultural change, never the abandonment of the car, or rejection of the whole bankrupt System. A lot of people have been fooled by the technofixsers, the only "good actors" to get a consistent forum in the play of good cop/bad cop (the bad cops are fossil fuels & nuclear business-as-usual). The game is rigged and is a fraud, so another game (culture) is overdue.

What we ultimately do or don't do about climate change will probably be determined by energy supply limitations. The Guardian reports that Global Witness has joined the Peak Oil chorus:

Oil prices hit high but report warns of supply crunch

A report from the non-governmental organization Global Witness - famous for its exposé of so-called "blood diamonds" - pointed to an impending oil supply shock that could be so severe that many of the world's poor countries would simply be shut off from the world of energy by sky-high prices.

Two years in the preparation, Global Witness's report, Heads in the Sand, accused governments of ignoring the fact that the world could soon start to run short of oil. This would lead to huge consequences in terms of price shocks and much higher levels of violence around the world than last year's food riots.

"There is a train crash about to happen from an energy point of view. But politicians everywhere seem to have entirely missed the scale of the problem," said the report's author, Simon Taylor.

...

Taylor said the four key issues about oil - declining output, declining discoveries, increasing demand and insufficient projects in the pipeline - have been apparent for many years.

"But governments and multilateral agencies have failed to recognise the imminence and scale of the global oil supply crunch, and most of them remain completely unprepared for its consequences," he said.

"There has been a decade of dithering and it is now too late to avoid the consequences unless the authorities move like there is no tomorrow."

If we run short of oil, we will likely turn to natural gas, then coal, which will exacerbate global warming. Then again, the world economy may contract enough to offset the carbon emissions from coal, meaning that millions will be out of work, cold and hungry.

Zugzwang

Lacul Valiug On Flickr, Lake Valiug looks picturesque, but locals are dumping trash in the nearby woods to avoid collection fees.