The impacts of climate change on food prices

Paul Krugman writes today about the high prices of food, which severely injure poor people at home and denizens of third-world countries abroad. He mentioned in his article a few of the major points about how this has come to pass:

1. rising Chinese other foreign economies are producing a booming middle class, raising the demand for meat, which in turn lessens the availability of grain and corn for direct human consumption (something I've covered here and here)
2. this same factor (rising global incomes) has led to an increase in demand for oil, and oil prices directly affect food prices due to fertilizer, diesel fuel, preservation and transportation costs
3. biofuels like corn ethanol provide huge incentives for farmers to move away from other foodstuffs and raise the price of those commodities, even though biofuels are not a climate change solution in any real sense (see here, and I've provided the full-text of that article below)
4. climate change has caused severe droughts, and is itself exacerbated by the aforementioned problems (1-3), as more people clearcut forest to meet the demands for new cattle pastures, arable land and new acres of corn ethanol for biofuels
   

Even though he includes biofuels in his energy policy proposals, I am hopeful that Barack will wake up to these realities about ethanol and take serious action to reverse the issues discussed above.

Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008
The Clean Energy Scam
By Michael Grunwald

From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the "savannization" of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it's going to get worse fast. "It gives me goose bumps," says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. "It's like witnessing a rape."

The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It's been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it's released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked--he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil--but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. "You can't protect it. There's too much money to be made tearing it down," he says. "Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work."

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil's filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn't exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows--it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding. And saving forests is probably an impossibility so long as vast expanses of cropland are used to grow modest amounts of fuel. The biofuels boom, in short, is one that could haunt the planet for generations--and it's only getting started.

Why the Amazon Is on Fire

This destructive biofuel dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island--size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert. "It's approaching a tipping point," says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center.

I spent a day in the Amazon with the Kamayura tribe, which has been forced by drought to replant its crops five times this year. The tribesmen I met all complained about hacking coughs and stinging eyes from the constant fires and the disappearance of the native plants they use for food, medicine and rituals. The Kamayura had virtually no contact with whites until the 1960s; now their forest is collapsing around them. Their chief, Kotok, a middle-aged man with an easy smile and Three Stooges hairdo that belie his fierce authority, believes that's no coincidence. "We are people of the forest, and the whites are destroying our home," says Kotok, who wore a ceremonial beaded belt, a digital watch, a pair of flip-flops and nothing else. "It's all because of money."

Kotok knows nothing about biofuels. He's more concerned about his tribe's recent tendency to waste its precious diesel-powered generator watching late-night soap operas. But he's right. Deforestation can be a complex process; for example, land reforms enacted by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have attracted slash-and-burn squatters to the forest, and "use it or lose it" incentives have spurred some landowners to deforest to avoid redistribution.

The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. Carter, who fell in love with the region after marrying a Brazilian and taking over her father's ranch, says the rate of deforestation closely tracks commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. "It's just exponential right now because the economics are so good," he says. "Everything tillable or grazeable is gouged out and cleared."

That the destruction is taking place in Brazil is sadly ironic, given that the nation is also an exemplar of the allure of biofuels. Sugar growers here have a greener story to tell than do any other biofuel producers. They provide 45% of Brazil's fuel (all cars in the country are able to run on ethanol) on only 1% of its arable land. They've reduced fertilizer use while increasing yields, and they convert leftover biomass into electricity. Marcos Jank, the head of their trade group, urges me not to lump biofuels together: "Grain is good for bread, not for cars. But sugar is different." Jank expects production to double by 2015 with little effect on the Amazon. "You'll see the expansion on cattle pastures and the Cerrado," he says.

So far, he's right. There isn't much sugar in the Amazon. But my next stop was the Cerrado, south of the Amazon, an ecological jewel in its own right. The Amazon gets the ink, but the Cerrado is the world's most biodiverse savanna, with 10,000 species of plants, nearly half of which are found nowhere else on earth, and more mammals than the African bush. In the natural Cerrado, I saw toucans and macaws, puma tracks and a carnivorous flower that lures flies by smelling like manure. The Cerrado's trees aren't as tall or dense as the Amazon's, so they don't store as much carbon, but the region is three times the size of Texas, so it stores its share.

At least it did, before it was transformed by the march of progress--first into pastures, then into sugarcane and soybean fields. In one field I saw an array of ovens cooking trees into charcoal, spewing Cerrado's carbon into the atmosphere; those ovens used to be ubiquitous, but most of the trees are gone. I had to travel hours through converted Cerrado to see a 96-acre (39 hectare) sliver of intact Cerrado, where a former shopkeeper named Lauro Barbosa had spent his life savings for a nature preserve. "The land prices are going up, up, up," Barbosa told me. "My friends say I'm a fool, and my wife almost divorced me. But I wanted to save something before it's all gone."

The environmental cost of this cropland creep is now becoming apparent. One groundbreaking new study in Science concluded that when this deforestation effect is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline. Sugarcane ethanol is much cleaner, and biofuels created from waste products that don't gobble up land have real potential, but even cellulosic ethanol increases overall emissions when its plant source is grown on good cropland. "People don't want to believe renewable fuels could be bad," says the lead author, Tim Searchinger, a Princeton scholar and former Environmental Defense attorney. "But when you realize we're tearing down rain forests that store loads of carbon to grow crops that store much less carbon, it becomes obvious."

The growing backlash against biofuels is a product of the law of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious now that when biofuels increase demand for crops, prices will rise and farms will expand into nature. But biofuel technology began on a small scale, and grain surpluses were common. Any ripples were inconsequential. When the scale becomes global, the outcome is entirely different, which is causing cheerleaders for biofuels to recalibrate. "We're all looking at the numbers in an entirely new way," says the Natural Resources Defense Council's Nathanael Greene, whose optimistic "Growing Energy" report in 2004 helped galvanize support for biofuels among green groups.

Several of the most widely cited experts on the environmental benefits of biofuels are warning about the environmental costs now that they've recognized the deforestation effect. "The situation is a lot more challenging than a lot of us thought," says University of California, Berkeley, professor Alexander Farrell, whose 2006 Science article calculating the emissions reductions of various ethanols used to be considered the definitive analysis. The experts haven't given up on biofuels; they're calling for better biofuels that won't trigger massive carbon releases by displacing wildland. Robert Watson, the top scientist at the U.K.'s Department for the Environment, recently warned that mandating more biofuel usage--as the European Union is proposing--would be "insane" if it increases greenhouse gases. But the forces that biofuels have unleashed--political, economic, social--may now be too powerful to constrain.

America the Bio-Foolish

The best place to see this is America's biofuel mecca: Iowa. Last year fewer than 2% of U.S. gas stations offered ethanol, and the country produced 7 billion gal. (26.5 billion L) of biofuel, which cost taxpayers at least $8 billion in subsidies. But on Nov. 6, at a biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled an eye-popping plan that would require all stations to offer ethanol by 2017 while mandating 60 billion gal. (227 billion L) by 2030. "This is the fuel for a much brighter future!" she declared. Barack Obama immediately criticized her--not for proposing such an expansive plan but for failing to support ethanol before she started trolling for votes in Iowa's caucuses.

If biofuels are the new dotcoms, Iowa is Silicon Valley, with 53,000 jobs and $1.8 billion in income dependent on the industry. The state has so many ethanol distilleries under construction that it's poised to become a net importer of corn. That's why biofuel-pandering has become virtually mandatory for presidential contenders. John McCain was the rare candidate who vehemently opposed ethanol as an outrageous agribusiness boondoggle, which is why he skipped Iowa in 2000. But McCain learned his lesson in time for this year's caucuses. By 2006 he was calling ethanol a "vital alternative energy source."

Members of Congress love biofuels too, not only because so many dream about future Iowa caucuses but also because so few want to offend the farm lobby, the most powerful force behind biofuels on Capitol Hill. Ethanol isn't about just Iowa or even the Midwest anymore. Plants are under construction in New York, Georgia, Oregon and Texas, and the ethanol boom's effect on prices has helped lift farm incomes to record levels nationwide.

Someone is paying to support these environmentally questionable industries: you. In December, President Bush signed a bipartisan energy bill that will dramatically increase support to the industry while mandating 36 billion gal. (136 billion L) of biofuel by 2022. This will provide a huge boost to grain markets.

Why is so much money still being poured into such a misguided enterprise? Like the scientists and environmentalists, many politicians genuinely believe biofuels can help decrease global warming. It makes intuitive sense: cars emit carbon no matter what fuel they burn, but the process of growing plants for fuel sucks some of that carbon out of the atmosphere. For years, the big question was whether those reductions from carbon sequestration outweighed the "life cycle" of carbon emissions from farming, converting the crops to fuel and transporting the fuel to market. Researchers eventually concluded that yes, biofuels were greener than gasoline. The improvements were only about 20% for corn ethanol because tractors, petroleum-based fertilizers and distilleries emitted lots of carbon. But the gains approached 90% for more efficient fuels, and advocates were confident that technology would progressively increase benefits.

There was just one flaw in the calculation: the studies all credited fuel crops for sequestering carbon, but no one checked whether the crops would ultimately replace vegetation and soils that sucked up even more carbon. It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation of Indonesia has shown that's not the case. It turns out that the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels. A study by University of Minnesota ecologist David Tilman concluded that it will take more than 400 years of biodiesel use to "pay back" the carbon emitted by directly clearing peat lands to grow palm oil; clearing grasslands to grow corn for ethanol has a payback period of 93 years. The result is that biofuels increase demand for crops, which boosts prices, which drives agricultural expansion, which eats forests. Searchinger's study concluded that overall, corn ethanol has a payback period of about 167 years because of the deforestation it triggers.

Not every kernel of corn diverted to fuel will be replaced. Diversions raise food prices, so the poor will eat less. That's the reason a U.N. food expert recently called agrofuels a "crime against humanity." Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says that biofuels pit the 800 million people with cars against the 800 million people with hunger problems. Four years ago, two University of Minnesota researchers predicted the ranks of the hungry would drop to 625 million by 2025; last year, after adjusting for the inflationary effects of biofuels, they increased their prediction to 1.2 billion.

Industry advocates say that as farms increase crop yields, as has happened throughout history, they won't need as much land. They'll use less energy, and they'll use farm waste to generate electricity. To which Searchinger says: Wonderful! But growing fuel is still an inefficient use of good cropland. Strange as it sounds, we're better off growing food and drilling for oil. Sure, we should conserve fuel and buy efficient cars, but we should keep filling them with gas if the alternatives are dirtier.

The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can't be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don't use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops--he's been experimenting with Midwestern prairie grasses--as long as they're grown on "degraded lands" that can no longer support food crops or cattle.

Changing the Incentives

That's certainly not what's going on in Brazil. There's a frontier feel to the southern Amazon right now. Gunmen go by names like Lizard and Messiah, and Carter tells harrowing stories about decapitations and castrations and hostages. Brazil has remarkably strict environmental laws--in the Amazon, landholders are permitted to deforest only 20% of their property--but there's not much law enforcement. I left Kotok to see Blairo Maggi, who is not only the soybean king of the world, with nearly half a million acres (200,000 hectares) in the province of Mato Grosso, but also the region's governor. "It's like your Wild West right now," Maggi says. "There's no money for enforcement, so people do what they want."

Maggi has been a leading pioneer on the Brazilian frontier, and it irks him that critics in the U.S.--which cleared its forests and settled its frontier 125 years ago but still provides generous subsidies to its farmers--attack him for doing the same thing except without subsidies and with severe restrictions on deforestation. Imagine Iowa farmers agreeing to keep 80%--or even 20%--of their land in native prairie grass. "You make us sound like bandits," Maggi tells me. "But we want to achieve what you achieved in America. We have the same dreams for our families. Are you afraid of the competition?"

Maggi got in trouble recently for saying he'd rather feed a child than save a tree, but he's come to recognize the importance of the forest. "Now I want to feed a child and save a tree," he says with a grin. But can he do all that and grow fuel for the world as well? "Ah, now you've hit the nail on the head." Maggi says the biofuel boom is making him richer, but it's also making it harder to feed children and save trees. "There are many mouths to feed, and nobody's invented a chip to create protein without growing crops," says his pal Homero Pereira, a congressman who is also the head of Mato Grosso's farm bureau. "If you don't want us to tear down the forest, you better pay us to leave it up!"

Everyone I interviewed in Brazil agreed: the market drives behavior, so without incentives to prevent deforestation, the Amazon is doomed. It's unfair to ask developing countries not to develop natural areas without compensation. Anyway, laws aren't enough. Carter tried confronting ranchers who didn't obey deforestation laws and nearly got killed; now his nonprofit is developing certification programs to reward eco-sensitive ranchers. "People see the forest as junk," he says. "If you want to save it, you better open your pocketbook. Plus, you might not get shot."

The trouble is that even if there were enough financial incentives to keep the Amazon intact, high commodity prices would encourage deforestation elsewhere. And government mandates to increase biofuel production are going to boost commodity prices, which will only attract more investment. Until someone invents that protein chip, it's going to mean the worst of everything: higher food prices, more deforestation and more emissions.

Advocates are always careful to point out that biofuels are only part of the solution to global warming, that the world also needs more energy-efficient lightbulbs and homes and factories and lifestyles. And the world does need all those things. But the world is still going to be fighting an uphill battle until it realizes that right now, biofuels aren't part of the solution at all. They're part of the problem.

I am not a climate change fearmonger, but I grow increasingly concerned about my and my children's futures the more that I learn and see...

The Virginian-Pilot's Bill Sizemore on Pat Robertson

My friend and yours, American Talibanist Pat Robertson, was exposed a while back for his role in denying compensation to a sponsor of his "age-defying shake" and threatening him when he chose to use legal means to recoup $. The Virginian-Pilot exposed Robertson, and he threatened to sue them...only to come back some time later (after talking to a lawyer who told him we have this pesky thing called "freedom of the press" -- Robertson never passed the bar exam after getting his JD in 1955) and try to buy off the paper.

The author of the original expose, Bill Sizemore, now has another great article on Robertson's past and details on how he came into the ministry and got involved with TV.

From Sizemore's piece:

In the decade between the time The 700 Club became a daily program and the midseventies, CBN purchased a new facility in Portsmouth with a 175,000-watt transmitter, then a staggering 2.25-million-watt transmitter that could reach most of the mid-Atlantic coastline. Robertson also purchased five radio stations in New York State and new TV stations in Atlanta and Dallas. Then, in 1976, CBN bought a satellite and, months later, broadcast its first feed from Jerusalem. Robertson’s teleministry was now big business. In 1972, Robertson wrote that you can’t “worry about technical production when the cameraman is caught up in the Spirit and begins to weep over someone’s testimony . . . Who cares about the time if God is moving?” But only a few years later, CBN’s brand of production had become distinctly professional. No longer were broadcast slots subject to whim. No more was airtime filled with homemade puppet shows.

Along with the increasingly political slant of the show came more and more secularized programming, aimed at broadening the network’s appeal. CBN began showing family-friendly reruns like Lassie to help finance pricey advertisements for The 700 Club on other networks. Soon, secular shows took up the bulk of CBN’s airtime. This shift led to Robertson’s first run-in with the government, when the state of Massachusetts realized that the programming on WXNE-TV in Boston, purchased by CBN in 1977, was more than 50 percent secular. The station could be tax-exempt only if it functioned as a church instead of a business. Robertson subsequently shifted his holdings to a new company, Continental Broadcasting—some said this shift was to prevent the state from accessing CBN’s financial records.

This glitch did little to slow CBN’s progress, however. The station was finally beginning to turn a profit, after years of surviving on charity from Robertson’s father and local donors. The gifts had often been generous (a local car dealer, for example, once gave Robertson a free Lincoln), but Robertson’s wife still had to work in a local hospital to support their four children—two boys and two girls. By the middle seventies, though, Robertson’s risky decision to “renounce wealth and privilege” to pursue a life of Christian televangelism was suddenly paying off in a whole lot of wealth and privilege.

Robertson is one of the loudest Religious Right figures, and IMHO, there is more reason for him to be investigated more than the six that Grassley has recently focused on. Why? He's used non-profit resources to push his own for-profit ventures for years now. Even with the shake, for-profit, which he promotes on a tax-free non-profit religious channel. The lines between churches and businesses have become far too blurred, and it's about damned time to levy taxes against churches who sell lots of products and make lots of money -- they forfeit their right to claim tax exemption when they start running like a for-profit entity.

He and Dobson have for years opposed the McCain-Feingold Finance Reforms that put a dent in their ability to buy influence in DC. Not that Robertson doesn't still have enormous clout there, especially with Bush in the WH and a huge percentage of Regent grads in Washington (but not Adam Key). I think much of the public is misinformed: the overwhelming majority of people do want church-state separation, not the other way around. Here are some of Robertson's greatest hits:

“I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Hugo Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.” [Link]

Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke was the result of Sharon’s policy, which he claimed is “dividing God’s land.” [Link]

“You know some of them [college professors] are killers!” [Link]

“I believe it’s [Islam] motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it’s time we recognize what we’re dealing with. … [T]he goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is world domination.” [Link]

[The following are from the American Taliban]:

"The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers?"

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different...More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."

"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved with Adolph Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals – the two things seem to go together."

"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."

"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."

"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."

"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."

"[Planned Parenthood] is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism – everything that the Bible condemns."

Gotta love him.

On morality and hope vs. godlessness

A sometime-reader and commenter of this blog sent me some questions over the weekend via email. I tried to send them twice to him, but I don't know if he's receiving them. Since they were good topics for conversation, I figured I'd paste my response in here.

As best I can remember, I first heard from Jamie Bonnett back in April 2007, randomly, as he looked up the Friel-Tabash debate and found my email as a result. He works for everynation.org as a campus minister at UNCG -- I don't know anything about the ministry, but I read an interesting critique of the organization by Richard Bartholomew at talk2action in which it was compared to Maranatha Campus Ministries. He first wrote me in a somewhat-confrontational manner, challenging me to present arguments for God's nonexistence; but from there, our e-dialog took on a more friendly and conversational tone.

Using income inequality as a measure of political ideology

Courtesy Dani Rodrik, here is American politics in one picture:

It's from this new book by Larry Bartels, an economist at Princeton.

You'll notice I touched up the original by using the font feature in MS Paint to overlay new fonts on the scanned version, which was a little rough. I did my best to align the values with the hash marks, and I obviously did not move the data points, just darkened the lines a little.

Krugman's blog yesterday noted that the lack of a mechanism is daunting to some who would challenge the "correlation vs. causation" issue here.

On cell phones & brain tumors

Having a background in chemistry & physics, I am very skeptical of the new report that mobile phones cause brain tumors. Being a "good" scientist, though, I am willing to hear the detailed arguments and wait and see what evidence is brought forth to support the hypothesis.

The major cause of my skepticism is that electromagnetic radiation in the radio frequencies used by mobile phones (UHF) has wavelengths of around 10 to 100 cm. These energies are only high enough to cause bond rotation and vibration, not homolysis or ionization. If, on the physical level, this is true...what is the mechanism responsible for purported biological tissue damage? Government experts have agreed with this logic for decades.

Before people look at the UHF radiation, they should consider alternative explanations, nearly all of which could be fixed easily: I know that some heat is generated by the phones, and there can be some constructive interference, as well as issues with the batteries and materials in the phones themselves. If it is the case that cell phones cause health issues, I'll bet the ranch that one of these is chiefly responsible.

On a lighter note, check out this hilarious video about Expelled! It's supposed to poke fun at science & scientists, but as with everything else, it just makes creationists look stupid.

Update on Grassley & ministers investigation

I was reading about additional craziness from John Hagee, and it reminded me of something that I'd written about a while back but forgotten about. First, the article on Hagee divulged much of what I already knew -- that he and his ilk want war with Iran, like, yesterday. Why is it that tying this guy and Parsley around McCain's neck isn't a toxic political millstone? The double standard applied to Rev. Wright and Obama is obvious here.

As I read about Hagee's lavish lifestyle and million-dollar salary, it reminded me of Sen. Grassley's investigation into financial impropriety in "prosperity" churches. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has been leading an investigation by the Senate Finance Committee into the finances of six ministries commonly affiliated with "prosperity preaching" with the aim of updating the tax code to appropriately deal with this malfeasance. I admitted a little skepticism at the utility and motives of this investigation when I first read about it. At the time, I said:

I read this the other day and I'm still scratching my head. I mean, I dislike Benny "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" Hinn as much as anyone, and I think the whole lot of those six are probably as corrupt and unethical as it gets. However, I just don't understand the legal power that a Congressperson has to audit the finances of these people.

The IRS? Sure! But Congress...!?!? We'll wait and see if this goes anywhere.

It turns out that three of the six ministries are cooperating, and have until March 31st, according to this press release:

Baucus and Grassley lead the committee with exclusive Senate jurisdiction over tax policy; the ministry inquiry that Grassley launched last November is meant to gauge the effectiveness of certain tax-exempt policies.

“This ought to clear up any misunderstanding about our interest and the committee’s role,” Grassley said. “We have an obligation to oversee how the tax laws are working for both tax-exempt organizations and taxpayers. Just like with reviews of other tax-exempt organizations in recent years, I look forward to the cooperation of these ministries in the weeks and months ahead.”

Grassley wrote to six ministries on Nov. 5, 2007, asking a series of questions on the nonprofit organizations’ expenses, treatment of donations and business practices. The questions were based on presentations of material from watchdog groups and whistleblowers and on investigative reports in local media outlets. One of the six ministries – Joyce Meyer Ministries of Fenton, Mo. – has cooperated substantially with his request and provided the requested information. Benny Hinn Ministries of Grapevine, Texas, has indicated a willingness to cooperate and provided answers to
five of the 28 questions so far.

Representatives for Randy and Paula White of Without Walls International Church/Paula White Ministries, Tampa, Fla., verbally have indicated to Finance Committee staff that they will cooperate. Baucus and Grassley wrote to them on March 11 to thank them for the verbal commitment and to reiterate the committee’s role.

The remaining three ministries have not cooperated, citing privacy protections or questioning the committee’s standing to request the information. Baucus and Grassley wrote to them on March 11 to describe the committee’s jurisdiction and role in determining the effectiveness of tax policy developed by the committee, distinct from the Internal Revenue Service’s role, which is to enforce existing law. The three ministries are: Kenneth and Gloria Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Newark, Texas; Creflo and Taffi Dollar of World Changers Church International / Creflo Dollar Ministries College Park, Ga.; and Eddie L. Long of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church/Eddie L. Long Ministries, Lithonia, Ga.

The committee’s jurisdiction includes the federal tax policy governing the billions of dollars donated to and controlled by the nation’s tax-exempt groups. The federal government forgoes the collection of billions of dollars to tax-exempt organizations every year.

It doesn't surprise me much about the Copelands or the Dollars. I don't know anything about Long, but I am quite familiar with Copeland and his reputation. I was pleasantly surprised about Hinn -- I figured him for one of those likeliest to resist, rather than cooperate. Randy and Paula White have faced enough personal problems recently with the divorce, so facing additional (scandalous) financial ones was probably a smart decision they made.

While you can read the pseudo-justifications for refusing to cooperate proffered by Creflo and Ken at their own sites, Eddie offers no such attempt at saving face. A little digging finds that some of these jokers are getting paid over $1M salaries. Fuc*ing absurd. Long's church has a gym inside ("Samson's Gym") that offers memberships and massages (all for a large fee, of course) -- the divisions between business and church blurred for these individuals long ago.

Blackwell on Obama

Knowing that I support Obama, my Dad (a conservative Republican) sent me a hit piece thoughtful critique of him by crook Ken Blackwell. Here is my emailed response:

Dad,

I did my HW on your article, and my analysis follows below (I'll have to post this to my blog!)

Re: Blackwell's comments

To summarize what Blackwell said:

1. We should judge people by the content of their character
2. Obama is really liberal
3. The press has taken it easy on Obama
4. Obama is bad for foreign policy
5. Obama is bad for the economy
6. Obama is bad for Jesus...uh, I mean social issues

On #1 & 2, I agree.

On #3, I disagree. See the constantly-running loops of Jeremiah Wright, for example. The press gives a free pass to Evangelical white Christian preachers who say that 9/11 or Katrina are "God's wrath on America" for our sin, and who smile as John McCain panders to them and says he's "honored" for their endorsement. For some reason, Rev. Wright is different. For example, look at how people like Sean Hannity and Ralph Reed defended Falwell's comments:

Fundamentally, Falwell and Robertson and Dobson and Parsley and their ilk all say "God Damn America" every day multiple times, just in different language. Rod Parsley, whom McCain calls a "spiritual guide", has called the government's support of Planned Parenthood a plan for "Black Genocide" -- why is there such a double standard? The media gives ZERO TV time to that issue.

Also, it is really important to see the full sermon in context -- for example, the "chickens coming home to roost" comment was echoed by Wright from a Reagan administration official. Here is part of the transcript of the sermon, which you won't ever see on Faux News, which makes it clear he is QUOTING from Ambassador Peck during one of the endlessly-looped quotes meant to shock and disgust viewers:

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him, he was on Fox News. This is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, (Did you see him, John?) --a white man-- he pointed out-- an ambassador-- that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, America's chickens are coming home to roost.

We took this country, by terror, away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arrowak (phonetic) the Comanche, the Arapajo, the Navajo. Terrorism--we took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians -- babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with Stealth Bombers and killed unarmed teenagers, and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working father. [fullest voice] We bombed Khadafi, his home and killed his child. Blessed be they who bash your children's head agains the rocks.

[fullest voice] We bombed Iraq, we killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed the plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy -- killed hundreds of hard working people --mothers and fathers, who left home to go that day, not knowing they'd never get back home. [Even fuller voice] We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school -- civilians not soldiers. People just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and South Africa and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas is brought back into our own front yard.

America's chickens are coming home, to roost. Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism.

[lower voice] A White ambassador said that, y'all, not a black militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and whose trying to get us to wake up, and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said that the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them, and we need to come to grips with that.

Isn't it neat how you can cut and clip and spin someone's words to make them look worse than they are? Do you see the media correcting this spin? Nope.

So that whole argument from Blackwell is a load of crap.

In addition, as Steve Chapman said in the Chicago Tribune, quote,

When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, liberals attacked him for getting support from members of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, which regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a communist agent. Reagan responded: "If anyone chooses to vote for me, they are buying my views. I am not buying theirs."

His career illustrates that political shrewdness often requires attracting not only savory but unsavory people to a cause. When he ran for president, he was criticized for tossing the occasional bone to racist white Southerners by endorsing "states' rights." But by appealing to many of those who had once supported the venomous white supremacist George Wallace, Reagan helped defang those forces, while advancing his own political agenda.

George W. Bush followed a similar route in 2000 by speaking at Bob Jones University, which had lost its federal tax exemption for banning interracial dating and whose president once called Bush's father a "devil." Being politicians, Reagan and Bush found ways to lure in bigots at little cost, while rejecting their most cherished beliefs.

Everyone knows that Obama joined the church originally because it was large and politically-connected. What we've been shown in clips on the news is but a snippet of what the church is about -- AIDS ministry, inner-city youth programs, &c...

Anyway, the NY Times editors took a look at their own coverage of Obama v. Clinton, and here's what they found in their analysis: they've been harder on him than her.

Conservatives make a strong case for Obama on the merit of his policies, so I think it is hardly an issue of "he's just a media darling": Andrew J. Bacevich and Douglas W. Kmiec.

As for #4, McCain will continue Bush's failed policies in the Middle East...Obama won't. Clear (superior) choice in that latter one there. McCain claims he'll follow Bin Laden to the "gates of hell" and everyone claps and cheers. Obama says he'll order the strike even if the Pakistanis don't like it and everyone hisses and boos. Taking nuclear weapons off the table is prudent for "targeted strikes" in other countries for one simple reason: nuclear weapons are not precise (they cause widespread devastation), and striking another country with a nuke should not be done except in retaliation for that country's own usage of WMDs. Consider collateral damage. We've already caused at least (verified numbers) 10x more deaths in Iraq than we suffered on 9/11. Nobody cares. Whatever.

Also, the two things that Petraeus cited as responsible for the "fragile" progress of the surge have been: 1) al-Sadr's ceasfire & 2) the Sunni "awakening". #1 is looking like it's about to dissolve as of this morning. #2 is basically a massive buy-off where we're now bribing and arming our former enemies in order to maintain the semblance of peace. The Rolling Stone has an excellent investigative report on this latter issue.

As for #5, we're now spending $9500 / second in Iraq, using conservative figures based only on what has already been approved for the spending there. (Don't believe me? Take $300 billion and divide it by 365, then by 24, then by 60, then by 60 again.) Some economists have projected that the long-term costs of the war, including especially health care for wounded vets, will top $3 TRILLION. Obama has promised to take that money that we're pissing down the drain in Vietnam II and spend it here at home on infrastructure and new energy projects. For details, see here.

Obama saw the mortgage crisis looming and addressed it long before free market laissez-faire conservatives even saw a problem.

Obama will move the country away from foreign oil, which keeps us locked in a cycle of violence: our billions of $ go to Iran and Venezuela and end up funding terrorists and drug traders. Then, we have to fight drug traders and terrorists with billions more. The cycle is stupid. It's time to get someone in office who can see that and will change it. I'd love to contrast/compare Barack's plans for the economy with McCain's.

As for #6, I don't really care about that. I'm tired of people looking to the federal government to subsidize their religion. I love how Blackwell pulls the classic non sequitur by saying Barack's views are like those of a radical. I'm sure your views on something -- say, gardening or diet -- are like those of Hitler...but how is that relevant? It's a simple (stupid ploy) bait-and-switch.

Re: Ken Blackwell personally

I know he works for the ironically-named "American Family Association" (ironic in the sense that they exist in order to limit and control who can make/have a family), which gives him a veneer of respectability...but, the fact is, he's a crook -- he has been indicted in bribery charges in Ohio and was a part of a voter fraud scheme there in 2004 that may have tipped the election.

So, I did my HW and I come away very unimpressed.

Dan, Something to think about, an article by a black columnist written for a NY newspaper.

Love, Dad

"Beyond Obama's Beauty"
Ken Blackwell - Columnist for the New York Sun

Hope he likes my reply!