Category: Uncategorized

Agency approves $7.7 million for solar and other renewable projects at homes and businesses.

Source: State may expand funding for dairy farm digesters

I’m all for alternative energy sources, but putting any kind of tax funding or other subsidies into manure digesters in the belief that they will somehow help deal with the impact of manure on water pollution, well contamination, quality of life problems caused by manure from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) is utterly ridiculous.

CAFOs like the mega dairy farms here in Wisconsin and other parts of the country, large animal feedlot operations and pork operations that raise thousands upon thousands of animals, produce such large amounts of manure that it is mind boggling. One single dairy farm here in Wisconsin produces as much manure as a city of 180,000 people.

And, of course, that manure has to be disposed of somehow. One of these days I’m going to have to tell you horror of manure disposal here in Wisconsin. I don’t want to get into that now because if I could probably do a thousand words on just that. So let’s stick to digesters.

The idea behind digesters has been around for a long time. The manure is put into air tight holding tanks. Bacteria is added to the mix. The bacteria thrive in this environment, and as they grow and multiply, they produce, among other things, methane gas. Because the tank is sealed, the methane accumulates and is piped off and used to power engines which drive generators to produce electricity.

It sounds rather logical, I suppose. You can produce electricity from cow poo, or pig poo, or whatever kind of poo you shove into the tank. It sounds all ‘green’ and environmental and good for the planet, doesn’t it, producing electricity from manure. It solves a lot of problem, doesn’t it? Gets rid of the manure, makes electricity to keep all of our gadgets running…

Only doesn’t do any of that. Not really. Especially not the getting rid of the manure part.

These things are ridiculously expensive, first of all. We’re talking millions of dollars even for a relatively small one. Without heavy taxpayer subsidies, no farm could afford to put one of these in. Special holding tanks have to be built, first of all, because they have to be completely sealed to keep the gas in. Otherwise all that methane is going to go straight up into the atmosphere, and since methane is a green house gas that is much worse than CO2.

The gas that comes off these things  is highly corrosive. That means all of the pipes, tanks, even the engines used to run the generators, are extremely expensive to make because special materials have to be used to prevent them from just corroding away. Special filter systems have to be installed to remove unwanted elements from the gas, dryers to remove moisture… The list goes on and on.

The whole process is neither efficient, nor is it ‘clean’ by any stretch of the imagination.

Oh, and did I mention they explode sometimes? Like this one that happened at a digester here in Wisconsin. If you click the link to the jsonline article, you’ll note that the project has been plagued with problems from the beginning. And this isn’t the only one that’s had major difficulties. Plug ‘manure digester explosion’ into Google and you’ll see what I mean.

But they generate electricity, right? Well, sort of. Not much. Certainly no where near enough electricity to pay for building and maintaining one of these systems. And it isn’t “clean” energy by any stretch of the imagination because it still generates electricity the good old fashioned way, by burning stuff. Burning methane is cleaner than burning coal or oil, but it still produces waste material like CO2 and other gases.

They’re pushing these things by claiming that they somehow help to eliminate the manure disposal problems CAFOs have. So let’s look at that.

They don’t. I’m sorry, they just don’t. They do nearly nothing to eliminate manure disposal problems.

The digestion process does alter the chemical composition of the manure, I’ll grant you that. It will reduce the amount of phosphorus, and that’s important because it is a major problem around here. Phosphorus runoff causes toxic algae blooms in lakes, causing major fish die offs. We have huge dead zones in the Bay of Green Bay on Lake Michigan that seem to get bigger every year, due to phosphorus.

But that’s all these digesters do, remove some of the phosphorus. And only some of it. About half of it still remains. And the other pollutants in the manure remain virtually unscathed.

And then there’s the quantities involved. You put 100,000 gallons of manure into a digester and what you get out the other end when the process is done is, well, 100,000 gallons of manure. It does absolutely nothing to reduce the sheer quantity of manure.

The single biggest problem with manure is the sheer volume of it, and digesters do absolutely nothing about that. All the digesters seem to be is little more than a lame attempt at ‘greenwashing’, trying to cover up the real problem.

I would really, really like to take whoever designed this website out behind the shed and introduce them to my little friend, Mr. Smackupsidethehead.

Vertical columns that scroll up and down at different speeds from the main columns, inconsistently colored headlines, a refresh system that constantly updates the main page even as you’re viewing it so it abruptly drops you to a different part of the page while you’re still reading. Go off to read an article and click the back button and you have no idea where you’ll end up. Even more interesting, now the story blurbs on the main page are different, moved, some gone, others added. Auto-start videos that you have to manually click to turn off. Only to have them start up again as soon as you scroll. Headlines that needlessly move as you scroll.

Dear lord, my cats could design a better website than this.

I don’t really comment on politics here, and I don’t plan on starting (Aren’t you relieved? I am.). Unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, you already know what’s going on out there, what a bizarre circus our political system has become. I’m not going to talk about that. I’m more interested in the responses of the GOP faithful to what’s happening, what the politicians, the power brokers, the GOP leadership are doing and saying.

And it’s been interesting, to say the least. I don’t think I have ever seen such astonishing mental contortions, such grasping at straws, so many ridiculous attempts at rationalization in my entire life as these people attempt to defend the indefensible. For “the good of the party”.

I think that’s the key, here, that phrase, ‘the good of the party’. I think that the GOP and the Democrats both,  the politicians on both sides,  have forgotten one little fact. They weren’t elected ‘for the good of the party’, were they? They were elected for the good of the country as a whole, the good of the people who elected them.

They all seem to have forgotten that, though. They’ve forgotten that they were elected to protect the welfare of all of us. They were elected to protect the entire country. They were elected to safeguard all of the people in the United States, not just those who support a particular political party.

It looks like The Great Mayonnaise War is finally over as the USDA issues rulings on the antics the egg board was engaged in that started the war.

If you don’t remember the Mayonnaise War, I don’t blame you. As such things go, it made barely a blip on the media’s radar. But for some it was a very big deal indeed.

The war began when a company called Hampton Creek released a vegan mayonnaise that they called Just Mayo. Unlike ‘real’ mayonnaise, Just Mayo was made without the use of eggs.

Just Mayo was the kind of product that would probably not have made much of dent in the marketplace, to be honest. It might have gotten exposure in places like Whole Foods and other speciality retailers, but it’s unlikely that it would have been all that popular in most mass market grocery store chains. Vegan foods intended to replace more traditional non-vegan options generally don’t do all that well in the mass market.

The egg producers, and especially the American Egg Board, the egg industry’s marketing organization, didn’t see it that way, though. They looked at Just Mayo and went full Chicken Little, running around in circles like a chicken with it’s head cut off, clucking that the sky was falling, and that they had to do something, right now, to shut this down, before they were left with (Oh, no, he’s not really going to say it, is he? Yeah, he is) egg on their faces.

Now, have I gotten all of the chicken references out of the way in this little item? Lord, I hope so. I hate it when I start doing that. Are there no depths to which I will not stoop in order to grab for a cheap laugh? Uh, well, no, not really. Ahem, let’s get on with this.

The egg board went a bit loony, to be honest. It launched attacks against Just Mayo, claiming it wasn’t ‘real’ mayonnaise because it didn’t have eggs, filing complaints with the FDA, USDA and any other agency that had blank complaint forms laying around in the lobby.

But the board’s efforts to derail Hampton Creek and it’s vegan mayonnaise weren’t limited to just legal objections.

An alleged industry consultant, someone named Zolezzi, got in touch with the board and during a strategy session in 2013 claimed he could make a phone call and get Whole Foods to pull the product line from it’s shelves. An offer that was, for a time at least, taken seriously. In a note written to the president of the board, the head of United Egg Producers offered to get in touch with Zolezzi and actually try to do it.

Internal memos and emails showed one instance where it was suggested egg board members pool their money and hire a hit man to take out the founder of Hampton Creek.

This was, they say, a joke.

And it was also a ‘joke’ when another member offered to have his old buddies in Brooklyn to pay a visit to the founder of Hampton Creek with the apparent intent to, I’m sure, have a nice, pleasant chat with him and not at all do him bodily injury.

Investigators from the USDA said that the actions and comments of the egg board were “inappropriate discussions about an action which, if acted upon, would have significantly exceeded the provisions of the Egg Research and Consumer Information Act” that was responsible for setting up the board and defining its duties.

(Good heavens, really? How can an egg board operate if can’t take out a hit on the competition? What’s the world coming to?)

The board did take some action, including trying to rig internet advertising services so searches for Hampton Creek’s products would bring up the board’s own ads. It discussed spending money for “research and coordination with key influential bloggers in food and health/nutrition space, drafting key messaging and coordinating posts”, according to the reports I’ve read. In other words, trying to hire or otherwise influence food bloggers to present a message that was pro-egg and anti Just Mayo.

I should point out that Hampton Creek allegedly wasn’t behaving in exactly an ethical fashion either. An investigative reporter for Bloomberg news filed a report that claimed Hampton was running a covert operation to buy up large amounts of its own products in order to inflate sales figures and make it more attractive to investors.

According the the Bloomberg report (click the link to jump to the story) executives at the company launched a large scale undercover operation to buy back its own products in order to make it seem the company was selling far more than it really was. Five former workers came forward to talk about it, hundreds of receipts, expense reports, cash advance records and emails were discovered by Bloomberg describing how the scheme worked. In addition, Bloomberg claims that the company had contractors calling store managers asking about Just Mayo, requesting they stock it.

Bloomberg’s report also shows contractors and employees bought large quantities of product from Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Walmart, Target and Whole foods around the country. Employees were assigned specific stores, instructed in techniques for making the buys so they wouldn’t be seen buying mass quantities of the product.

The CEO claims the purpose of the purchases was to check quality of product, not to inflate sales. But internal memos and emails from company executives don’t back that up. Emails from from a Hampton Creek vice president actually outlined how contractors should use self checkout lanes or make several transactions at different lanes to avoid appearing to be buying large amounts of product and to avoid wearing Hampton Creek logoed clothing. One email specifically said “this is an undercover project.” according to Bloomberg.

The company was being investigated by the SEC and the Justice Department, but I haven’t heard of any results from those investigations as yet.

But let’s get back to the marketing board, which is what I started out talking about.

The whole thing was just silly, and it points out just how out of control these product marketing boards have become, and how cutthroat product marketing can be.

The whole kerfuffle ended up with the egg board getting a slap on the wrist from the government, and a promise that the board would ‘retrain’ its employees on just what it could and could not legally do.

This entry was sparked by an article I read over at NPR’s website about the failure of GM corn, and the seed companies desperate search for something to replace it. You can read it yourself by clicking here. As the article points out, one of the original commercially available genetically modified plants, BT corn, is failing. But a lot of my readers aren’t farmers and don’t know what BT corn is or know about the problem it was developed to cure, so let me tell you about that first.

The problem is this guy here:

This is the european corn root worm, otherwise known as the corn borer, and its rather nondescript parent moth. The european corn root worm is not native to North America. It first appeared in the US around 1917, and quickly spread throughout the US and up into Canada. The moth itself is harmless. It’s offspring, however, loves to eat the roots of corn plants, tunneling through them, weakening them, reducing yields, and even killing the plant. Over the years it became a serious problem, infesting much of the corn belt. There were pesticides that could kill it, but they are expensive, and a lot of the most effective pesticides are toxic and many have been outright banned because of their toxicity over the years.

BT corn was one of the first genetically engineered plants to be approved for commercial use. It incorporated genes from bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacteria that lives in the soil. The modification causes the corn plant to produce a protein called Bt delta endotoxin, which kills the larvae of the corn borer. The BT toxin itself is not new. It’s been available for use as a pesticide since the 1960s, and it has a pretty good safety record. It is generally recognized as safe for humans, other mammals, fish, birds, and most insects.

BT corn worked very well indeed. So well that it quickly dominated the market and a large number of different varieties of BT corn are now available. But there’s a problem. It’s not working very well any longer.

In just twelve years the corn borer began to develop a tolerance for the BT toxin, and it began to spread. We are rapidly approaching the point where BT corn will no longer be effective against the pest and we’ll be right back where we started.

The same thing is happening with the other big GM cash cow, engineered plants like soybeans that are immune to glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp from Monsanto. As was the case with BT corn, it wasn’t long before the so-called ‘super weeds’ began to emerge which were immune to glyphosate. And they are spreading throughout the country.

In both cases, these products were supposed to be quick and easy fixes for problems that have no quick and easy solution. And in both cases these ‘solutions’ were doomed to fail from the beginning. And everyone knew that they were not going to be long term solutions. Even as they were developing these products, the researchers involved were warning that sooner or later the pests they were intended to fight would eventually develop resistance and we’d be back where we started again. They recommended various techniques to help to reduce the spread of resistance. Those techniques were ignored because most companies these days operate on the basis of generating as much profit as possible right now and the hell with the future.

And that seems to be the problem with a lot of the GM products I’ve seen. They’re little more than quick fixes. Very little thought seems to go into determining if the products are going to be viable, useful, over the long term. The focus is profit, as much profit as possible, and profit right now. And hopefully the CEOs can cash out their stock options and bank their bonuses before the whole thing falls apart and leaves the company, and the farmers, worse off than before.

I’m not anti-GMO. Genetically modifying organisms has the potential to be incredibly beneficial. But as long as this current business climate where the only thing that matters is profit, right now, and the hell with the future, remains in effect, it is never going to fulfill that potential.

We are now at a point in politics, a new book warns, where reality has lost its authority: Facts are considered a matter of opinion.

Source: Conversation Becomes Shouting in a Society Without Authority – The Daily Beast

I put up that post about the ‘Age of Stupidity’ too quickly, or I could have brought up this item over at the Daily Beast, which also touches on the matter of belief vs. facts.

The writer of the article believes that is due almost entirely to a lack of some kind of authority figure.

I don’t believe that’s true, however. We are in a situation now where a significant number of people base their beliefs not on actual fact or evidence, but on what someone tells them to believe, exactly such an ‘authority figure’ that the writer claims we need.

But we have ‘authority figures’, and they are part of the problem. The anti-vaccination crowd that puts it’s mindless belief in the ‘authority figures’ of B-list celebrities who know nothing of science or biology, the climate change deniers who blatantly ignore facts and evidence, and spout opinions based on ridiculous conspiracy theories, quasi-supernatural explanations or outright lies that offer them some kind of financial or other personal gain. The list goes on and on.

Charles Sykes, one of the right wing radio ranters here in the state, did an interview in which he explained how this is largely the fault of himself and people like him. For years now, he and others like him, like Limbaugh, Hannity, Jones and the other far right pundits, have been deliberately doing everything they can to undermine any kind of ‘authority figure’ that the public might rely on for accurate information. They’ve worked hard to undermine the mainstream media, government agencies, even science itself in order to further their own agenda.

The mainstream media itself has to take some of the blame for this current climate. In its effort to generate a never ending string of clickbait headlines, generate controversy where there is none, cause fear and panic in order to pump up its ratings and profits, it’s given voice to loony conspiracy theories, blatantly inaccurate statements by politicians and others, ridiculous health claims and I don’t know what all else. It’s failed to call out politicians over outright lies. It has just — just failed. In everything except generating profits, of course.