Quotulatiousness

November 8, 2012

The Swiss children of Malthus

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

In sp!ked, Patrick Hayes points out the odd way that Malthusians and xenophobic far-right political groups converge:

For greens, the ends will always justify the means when it comes to saving the planet. In the UK, they have opportunistically latched themselves on to left-wing movements to try to gain purchase with a broader public. But, as Swiss campaign group Ecology and Population (EcoPop) has demonstrated, in an attempt to pursue their Malthusian goals, greens can be equally happy tapping into the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far right.

In a stunt last week, members of EcoPop carried dozens of cardboard boxes into the Swiss chancellery which contained 120,700 certified signatures calling for immigration into Switzerland to be capped at 0.2 per cent of the resident population. Under Swiss law, this means that a referendum will now be held on the proposal. Such a move trumps even the efforts of the far-right Swiss People’s Party, which has long lobbied for greater immigration controls.

But these greens aren’t mobilising for an immigration clampdown with banners claiming ‘keep the darkies out’ as right-wing groups have done in the past. Nor are they using dodgy, discredited scientific arguments to justify racial superiority, wielding books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of The Great Race for evidence.

No, instead EcoPop delivers its demands for immigration curbs carrying a banner asking: ‘How many people can the Earth tolerate?’ The group’s members use the (equally dodgy and discredited) Malthusian science of population growth and babble on about our ‘finite planet’. And they have reportedly been strongly influenced by the theories of US Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.

EcoPop bends over backwards to claim that it is not singling out particular races when advocating its policies. According to the BBC, it claims to be ‘opposed to all forms of xenophobia and racism’. But, the group says, ‘Switzerland must limit immigration to avoid urbanisation and to preserve agricultural land’.

You could almost believe that EcoPop is just a bunch of backward-thinking NIMBYish Luddites wanting to stop a flood of immigrants from destroying what it sees as a rural idyll — until you see what the group has tacked on to its proposed referendum for immigration caps. EcoPop slipped an additional clause into the referendum calling for a tenth of all foreign aid to be used ‘for birth-control measures abroad’. (It’s highly questionable how many people would have signed a petition for that alone.)

So it’s not enough to keep foreigners out of Switzerland, then, it’s also necessary to keep them from breeding too much in their own countries as well. And the fact that most of the aid will go towards stopping poor black and brown families from breeding too much suggests that if they’re not intentionally being racist, then EcoPop’s members should really think very hard about how they come across.

November 5, 2012

Matt Ridley on the real threat to our ecology

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

It’s not global warming:

I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of hope in the fact that ash, unlike elms, reproduce sexually so they are not clones — uniformly vulnerable to the pathogen. But it’s only a glimmer: tree parasites, from chestnut blight to pine beauty moth, have a habit of sweeping through species pretty rampantly, because trees are so long-lived they cannot evolve resistance in time.

The Forestry Commission’s apologists are pleading ‘cuts’ as an excuse for its failure to do anything more timely to get ahead of the threat, but as a woodland owner I am not convinced. An organisation that has the time and the budget to pore over my every felling or planting application in triplicate and come back with fussy and bossy comments could surely spare a smidgen of interest in looming threats from continental fungi that have been spreading out from Poland for 20 years. The commission was warned four years ago of the problem.

Here’s what the commission was up to instead. Just last year, I received a letter from the Forestry Commission demanding access to survey one of my woods to answer the question ‘what are the forecasts for timber, biomass and carbon?’ in order to ‘help the United Kingdom meet international commitments, such as reporting for the Global Forest Resources Assessment and the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE)’.

Notice the Sir Humphrey-esque circular argument: surveys must be done so that the results can be reported to assessment meetings. In other words, as far as I can tell, the Forestry Commission’s priority has been, as in so many government bodies, to supply talking points for the international carbon-obsessed bureaucracy. The implicit assumption here, of course, is that climate change is the greatest threat to Britain’s trees, when in reality far greater threats come from diseases carried around by foresters themselves.

This is happening throughout the world of nature conservation. A climate fetish has sucked all the oxygen from the real threats to species and habitats — indeed it has actually begun to make those threats worse.

October 31, 2012

The economic problem with recycling is that it’s the inverse of retail value

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Tim Worstall at Forbes:

We all understand how pricing in the retail chain goes. Each unit of something in a shipload of them is worth less than each unit when there’s only a container of them, and so it goes on. As we get closer to the retail point each unit rises in value. As we break down the shipment from tens of thousands of units, to a truckload, then a pallet load, finally to the one single item sitting on the store shelf. If you agree to purchase 5,000 iPads you’ll expect to pay less for each one than if you tried to buy just one.

We get that: the thing about recycling is that pricing works entirely the other way around. To a reasonable approximation the value of one unit of anything for recycling is worth nothing. The value of each of 1,000 units in the same place is higher than that solitary one. One scrap car in the middle of a field isn’t worth much if anything. 1,000 cars in a scrap yard might be worth $300 a tonne for the steel content (don’t take these numbers too seriously by the way, they’re examples only). Precious metals refining, scrap metal, recycling: they all share this same economic point. The more of something you have then the more each unit of that something is worth.

[. . .]

… the way we tend to look at the economics of recycling. We hear a great deal about how recycling plastics, or cooking oil, metals, electronics, you name it we hear the same thing, “saves resources”. Sometimes this is absolutely true. Other times however what we get shown is the value of the actual recycling being done. And we’re not told about the costs of collecting what is to be recycled. And as above it’s those costs of collection that are really the key to the whole enterprise.

Just as an example there’s value in 1,000 tonnes of used plastic bags. Among other things you can burn them in a power station and get some energy. Great: but what is the cost of collecting enough used plastic bags to make 1,000 tonnes? That’s the part that seems not to get into the calculations that our green friends present to us.

Cash4Gold seems to have gone under because the collection costs of the materials were higher than the value of recycling those materials. What’s really rather worrying about the larger recycling movement is that this can be/is often true of other materials. But because we don’t properly account for the collection costs we don’t see this as clearly as we do in the accounts of a (failed) for profit company (OK, would be for profit company).

October 29, 2012

Twenty million broken windows

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

At Forbes, Tim Worstall patiently explains that the damage from Hurricane Sandy (or any major storm) will appear to boost GDP, because it only measures money spent to repair damage, not the costs incurred or the opportunities foregone because of the damage:

We know very well that Hurricane (or Frankenstorm as some are calling it) Sandy will leave a trail of destruction across parts of the US today. There will almost certainly be deaths, as there have been in the hurricane’s passage across the Caribbean. And there will also be a boost to the US economy. Which is really evidence of quite how wrong we are in the way that we measure the economy.

[. . .]

The problem with this is that it is only true because of the way that we calculate GDP. In our working of the numbers we assume that it’s final consumption at market prices: that is, the value that consumers put on everything. However, this is not true of government spending. It’s very difficult indeed to work out what government spending is actually worth: for as we’ve not a choice in it then there’s no market price nor accurate valuation from the people who actually get whatever is produced. Some government spending is most certainly worth more than the actual amount spent. The court system say: a pre-requisite of our having a complex society at all. Other parts not so much: what is the true value of a diversity adviser for example? So what we actually do is value all government spending, for GDP purposes, at the cost of that actual spending. Government spends $100, GDP goes up by $100. That’s just how we define it. This can cause amusement in measuring the success of welfare programs for example. Even Census admits that some of the people who receive Medicaid, or food stamps, value what they receive at less than the cost of providing it.

[. . .]

Now imagine that Hurricane Sandy does $10 billion of damage to that wealth (for our purposes it doesn’t matter whether it’s $100 billion or $1 trillion. Although this obviously matters to everyone except for the purposes of this example). The US is now worth $99.990 Trillion. GDP might rise to $15.1 trillion as we repair that damage. But we’re not in fact any richer at all: despite the fact that GDP has gone up. What has actually happened is that some of our stock of wealth has been destroyed and we’re having to do more work in order to rebuild it. This is exactly the same as our pollution example. We’re measuring what we produce but not the capital stock of what we have (or had).

Yes, the rebound from Sandy may well provide a boost to the economy. But that’s a function of the way that we measure that economy, not a real boost in our general wealth.

October 28, 2012

Got Milk (mutation)?

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, History, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:33

Lactose intolerance is part of humankind’s genetic inheritance, which is why the mutation that allowed (some) adult humans to digest milk is of great interest to geneticists:

A genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position. The original mutant was probably a male who passed the gene on to his children. People carrying the mutation could drink milk their entire lives. Genomic analyses have shown that within a few thousand years, at a rate that evolutionary biologists had thought impossibly rapid, this mutation spread throughout Eurasia, to Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, India and all points in between, stopping only at the Himalayas. Independently, other mutations for lactose tolerance arose in Africa and the Middle East, though not in the Americas, Australia, or the Far East.

In an evolutionary eye-blink, 80 percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers; in some populations, the proportion is close to 100 percent. (Though globally, lactose intolerance is the norm; around two-thirds of humans cannot drink milk in adulthood.) The speed of this transformation is one of the weirder mysteries in the story of human evolution, more so because it’s not clear why anybody needed the mutation to begin with. Through their cleverness, our lactose-intolerant forebears had already found a way to consume dairy without getting sick, irrespective of genetics.

[. . .]

A “high selection differential” is something of a Darwinian euphemism. It means that those who couldn’t drink milk were apt to die before they could reproduce. At best they were having fewer, sicklier children. That kind of life-or-death selection differential seems necessary to explain the speed with which the mutation swept across Eurasia and spread even faster in Africa. The unfit must have been taking their lactose-intolerant genomes to the grave.

Milk, by itself, somehow saved lives. This is odd, because milk is just food, just one source of nutrients and calories among many others. It’s not medicine. But there was a time in human history when our diet and environment conspired to create conditions that mimicked those of a disease epidemic. Milk, in such circumstances, may well have performed the function of a life-saving drug.

H/T to Marginal Revolution for the link.

Toronto accused of being deadly waypoint for migratory birds

Filed under: Cancon, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

In the New York Times, Ian Austen examines claims that Toronto’s downtown core is taking a huge toll of migratory birds every year:

There is no precise ranking of the world’s most deadly cities for migratory birds, but Toronto is considered a top contender for the title. When a British nature documentary crew wanted to film birds killed by crashes into glass, Daniel Klem Jr., an ornithologist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who has been studying the issue for about 40 years, directed them here, where huge numbers of birds streaking through the skies one moment can be plummeting toward the concrete the next.

“They’re getting killed everywhere and anywhere where there’s even the smallest garage window,” Professor Klem said. “In the case of Toronto, perhaps because of the number of buildings and the number of birds, it’s more dramatic.”

So many birds hit the glass towers of Canada’s most populous city that volunteers scour the ground of the financial district for them in the predawn darkness each morning. They carry paper bags and butterfly nets to rescue injured birds from the impending stampede of pedestrian feet or, all too often, to pick up the bodies of dead ones.

The group behind the bird patrol, the Fatal Light Awareness Program, known as FLAP, estimates that one million to nine million birds die every year from impact with buildings in the Toronto area. The group’s founder once single-handedly recovered about 500 dead birds in one morning.

Rob Silver finds the claim to be a bit unlikely:

October 27, 2012

Chemophobia, “a fear so rampant that it has infected an entire generation of women”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail:

Ms. Williams is right that our bodies contain trace amounts of pretty much everything that’s in our environment. But toxicity is a matter of degree. And technology is so advanced that we can measure trace amounts in parts per trillion. As yet, research has found no trace of harm. For example, after a comprehensive review of environmental causes and risk factors for breast cancer, the U.S. Institute of Medicine found no conclusive link between any of these chemicals and an increased risk of breast cancer. According to Scientific American, “some research shows the toxic load in breast milk to be smaller than that in the air most city dwellers breathe inside their homes.”

[. . .]

This is not to say there’s no impact from environmental factors. But these effects are small and uncertain. To eliminate them all, we’d have to eliminate modernity and return to being hunter-gatherers again.

But I’m afraid chemophobia is here to stay. Fear sells. Fear of chemicals manufactured by rapacious, greedy, money-sucking capitalist enterprises sells even better. Fear is is the main product peddled by interest groups such as the Environmental Defence Fund, which has been quite successful at marketing the notion that invisible dangers lurk all around us. The media love this stuff because it makes for easy headlines: If your shampoo doesn’t kill you, your lipstick will! Fear is a staple of celebrity experts like Dr. Oz, who has advised readers to avoid toxic sales receipts from fast-food restaurants and gas stations.

October 21, 2012

QotD: Environmental externalities

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

That other people place different values upon the environment than I do worries me not in the slightest. It is precisely such differences of opinions about value that make a market. What does annoy me intensely is that almost all of the environmental problems that are currently being complained about have indeed been studied by economists. And they’ve found solutions to them as well. Just about any and every environmental problem is either about externalities or common access to a resource. In many ways these are just the flip side of exactly the same problem. But we do indeed know how to solve each of them and both of them. Hardin on ownership or regulation, Pigou on tax or regulation, both mediated through Coase on transactions costs (with a decent assit from Ostrom on communal ownership). There, that’s it: far from economics ignoring matters environmental economics has solved the damn problems.

So why won’t the environmentalists listen?

Tim Worstall, “Why won’t the environmentalists learn any economics?”, Adam Smith Institute blog, 2012-10-21.

October 11, 2012

David Suzuki “owes economists an apology”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

In the Globe and Mail, Mike Moffatt examines Suzuki’s latest attack on the economics profession and finds it extremely unpersuasive:

Popular environmentalist David Suzuki has described conventional economics as a form of brain damage. In a documentary called Surviving Progress, he quotes a fictional economist by saying, “who cares whether you keep the forest — cut it down. Put the money somewhere else. When those forests are gone, put it in fish. When those fish are gone, put it in computers.”

Beyond tarring the economics profession, he displays a perplexing lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. First of all, none of the rules taught in undergraduate economics course advise the owner of a resource to deplete it as quickly as possible. Perhaps he was confused with the Tragedy of the Commons problem, where lack of private ownership causes a resource to be overused.

[. . .]

The idea that economists do not care about externalities is a strange one, given how prominently they are featured in economics textbooks. An externality is, simply put, a spillover effect. It is the unintended costs or benefits from a transaction or decision experienced by third parties (that is, they were external to the decision). It does not mean phenomena that are external to economic modelling or things outside the interest of economists. Since, as Dr. Suzuki points out, the world is full of externalities, the concept is crucial in economic research.

September 28, 2012

Reason.tv: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at 50 Years

Filed under: Books, Environment, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

“It’s not polite to talk about brown and black people dying because rich white people in America feel better about themselves when the brown and black people don’t get to use DDT,” says the University of Alabama’s Andrew Morriss, co-editor of the new book Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson.

Published by the Cato Institute, the collection of essays by environmentalists, law professors, economists, and other analysts argues that the legacy of Carson’s best-known book — widely considered the starting point of the modern environmentalist movement and the international ban on the malaria-fighting pesticide DDT — has caused many more problems than it has solved.

Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Morriss to talk about Carson’s work and influence on environmental policy.

September 20, 2012

Potentially deadly legacies of war

Filed under: Environment, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 15:41

A long, fascinating, disturbing blog post at SciencePunk on unexploded munitions from both World War 1 and World War 2, still showing up unexpectedly:

The WMD was discovered, quite by chance, lying by the side of a Bridgeville road in late July by a Delaware state trooper on an unrelated callout. Jutting out of the ground, the 75mm shell was encrusted in barnacles and pitted with rust; barely recognisable as a munition at all. The trooper called in his find and a military team took the bomb to Dover Air Force Base for disposal. As with most conventional rounds, a small charge was placed on the side of the shell and detonated to trigger the vintage munition’s own explosive. But something went wrong, and the bomb failed to explode.

When the two staff sergeants and technician walked over to inspect the failed detonation, they found a strange black liquid seeping out of the cracked mortar. Given that the shell had been under the sea for the better part of fifty years, the men thought little of the foul-smelling substance until hours later, when their skin began to erupt in agonising blisters. All three were rushed to Kent General hospital, where two were released later after minor treatment. A third, more seriously injured serviceman was transported to Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, where he remained in serious but stable condition with what were only described as “burns or blisters” in a statement issued by the Army later that week. A scientific team were sent to Dover to collect soil samples from the area. The results were clear: the shell had been filled with mustard gas. The United States’ forgotten weapons of mass destruction had returned to haunt it.

[. . .]

With three servicemen now lying in hospital, injured by a weapon of mass destruction, officials could no longer ignore the problem of the rogue munitions. On August 4, the U.S. Army announced a $6 million plan to locate and stem the source of the clamshell ordnance. The investigation was led by Robert Williams Jnr of the Army’s Corps of Engineers. It seemed like an impossible task – Williams couldn’t search every clamshell-topped road in the state, and even if he did, there’d be no guarantee he could complete the survey before one of the hidden weapons detonated. Worse still, nobody knew how the munitions were getting from the ocean into driveways, and how to stop more arriving. Then Williams was handed a gigantic stroke of luck: interviews with everyone who discovered ordnance in their driveways revealed that they had all purchased their clamshell mix from one hauler, Perry Butler. And Perry Butler had an exclusive contract to collect waste clamshells from one Milford clam processing plant: SeaWatch International.

As Delaware’s only clam processor, suspicion had already been placed on the Milford plant. In spite of initial claims that no ordnance had been found on site, when the U.S. Army turned their attention to the factory, it was already the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. On inspecting the facility, their suspicions were confirmed: twelve munitions were recovered onsite. Workers had picked the highly unstable ordnance off the conveyor lines and stored them in a bucket of water in the basement. The munitions that they did not spot had been first plunged into conditioning tanks with the live clams, passed through steam cookers, and then raked across an industrial shucker that violently shakes the cooked meat from the shells. From there, the ordnance was picked up by Perry Butler, hidden in containers of empty clamshells, who passed them through a grinder that pulverised the shells into gravel before selling the fill on to various downstate residents. That none of the munitions exploded at any point was nothing short of miraculous. That no chemical rounds had broken open or leaked, even more so. SeaWatch International was fined $9,000 by OSHA for endangering staff and only permitted to continue business with the installation of $15,000 metal detector. Just three days later, the buzzer sounded. Workers reported the discovery of a 75mm shell, identical to the one that had injured three servicemen at Dover.

The problem is much bigger than the incidents in Delaware, however, as all the combatant nations of WW1 dumped their unused chemical weapons into the sea … and not always safely (and that really deserves scare quotes: “safely”).

With the close of the First World War, both defeated and victorious nations of the world were left holding thousands of tonnes of lethal chemical weaponry and no one to launch them at. The weapons were dangerous to transport and difficult to store. And nobody really knew how to neutralize their contents. So it’s easy to see how dumping the weapons in the deep ocean, out of harm’s way, was seen as a sensible solution. Entire ships were loaded with munitions, chemical and conventional alike, and sailed out to sea where the cargo was thrown overboard. As part of the CHASE program (“Cut Holes And Sink ‘Em), entire ships filled with weapons and unwanted hardware were scuttled, some detonating on their way to the seabed. For many decades, countries cast their surplus chemical weapons into ocean water and forgot about them. Over a quarter million tonnes of British bombs filled with mustard and phosgene gas and the nerve agent Tabun lie in the waters around the UK, concentrated off the west coast of Scotland. Somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 tonnes of German, Soviet, US and British chemical agent lies in the shallow Baltic Sea. The USA has also admitted to dumping toxic materiel off the coastlines of other nations rather than risk carrying the volatile cargo home. The James Martin Centre for Non-Proliferation Studies lists 127 known dumpsites across the world, it’s likely even more exist.

September 5, 2012

The positive side to rising food prices

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:06

Tim Worstall responds to an article by Michael Hanlon:

    The storm is coming. One of the great dependables of modern life — cheap food — may be about to disappear. If a growing number of economists and scientists are to be believed, we are witnessing a historic transition: from an era when the basics of life have been getting ever more affordable, to a new period when they are ever more expensive.

Ah, no, I’m afraid you’ve not understood the projections. Yes, food is expected to become more expensive. But also more affordable at the same time.

For the driving force of the rise in food prices is expected to be that people are getting richer. Thus able to afford three squares a day, some of them even containing meat. The rise in incomes is expected to be greater than the rise in food prices: thus food becoming both more expensive and more affordable as a portion of incomes.

BTW, if you think that’s not how the word affordable is used in such contexts then do speak to the booze puritans. They say exactly this: booze has become more expensive but cheaper as a portion of incomes: more affordable.

And if incomes do not rise as predicted we don’t expect to see the food price rises. For it is not the idea of 10 billion people that is predicted to raise the prices. It’s the idea of billions currently on $2 a day becoming billions on $20 that is.

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, a significant part of the rise in global food prices is driven by particularly stupid government policies on ethanol production.

September 4, 2012

True-but-misleading factoid: “7 kg Of Grain To Make 1 kg Of Beef”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:05

Tim Worstall on the mis-use of a vegetarian-friendly data point:

I asked Larry Elliott where the number came from and was sent this from Fidelity Investments (not online so far as I know).

    The demand for more protein has a significant knock-on impact on grain demand. Livestock is reared on grain-feed, making production heavily resource intensive. Indeed, it takes 7 kilograms of grain to produce just 1 kilogram of meat. As demand for meat rises, this increases the demand for and prices of feedstock — these increased costs of productions flow back to the consumers in the form of higher meat prices. Adding to the upward pressure on feedstock price and much to the dislike of livestock farmers, have been US environmental regulations (the Renewable Fuel Standard) that require a proportion of corn crops be used for the production of bio-fuel.

So, case closed, right? We all need to give up eating meat to save Mother Gaia? Not necessarily. The numbers given are accurate, but only in a particular context: that of raising meat for the US (and, probably, Canadian) market. The rest of the world doesn’t do it this way:

It is only in US or US style feedlot operations than cattle are fed on this much grain. Thus the equation is useful if you want information about what is going to happen with US cattle and grain futures: for that’s the general production method feeding those cattle futures. But very little of the rest of the world uses these feedlots as their production methods. I’m not certain whether we have any at all in the UK for example, would be surprised if there were many in the EU. Around where I live in Portugal pigs forage for acorns (yes, from the same oak trees that give us cork) or are fed on swill, goats and sheep graze on fields that would support no form of arable farming at all (they can just about, sometimes, support low levels of almond, olive or carob growing). Much beef cattle in the UK is grass fed with perhaps hay or silage in the winters.

My point being that sure, it’s possible to grow a kilo of beef by using 7 kilos of grain. But it isn’t necessary. The number might be useful when looking at agricultural futures in the US but it’s a hopelessly misguiding one to use to try and determine anything at all about the global relationship between meat and grain production. And most certainly entirely wrong in leading to the conclusion that we must all become vegetarians.

Which brings us to the lesson of this little screed. Sure, numbers are great, can be very informative. But you do have to make sure that you’re using the right numbers. Numbers that are applicable to whatever problem it is that you want to illuminate. If you end up, just as a little example, comparing grain to meat numbers for a specific intensive method of farming really only used in the US then you’re going to get very much the wrong answer when you try to apply that globally.

September 3, 2012

A bit of common sense in food news

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Rob Lyons reviews a new book by Mike Gibney that attempts to bring some common sense back to counteract the epidemic of fear-mongering about food:

Given much of the popular discussion about food, it would be easy to despair that we face a future where half the world’s people starve to death while the other half drown in their own fat. The words ‘new food research’ in a news report are often just the lead into another sorry tale about how some aspect of what we eat is going to kill us or how some specific food will provide ‘miracle’ protection against the chronic illnesses of our age.

Professor Mike Gibney’s new book, Something to Chew On, is a welcome step back from all this noise, offering an expert take on many of these claims. Gibney is director of the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin and has served on many national and international advisory committees.

[. . .]

Take pesticides, for example. Many people are prepared to pay through the nose to buy organic food which is free of artificial pesticides. But as Gibney points out, those people are actually consuming a far greater weight in natural, plant-produced pesticides that are potentially every bit as cancer-inducing as modern chemicals. ‘Nature abounds with chemicals which, while beautifully natural, are nevertheless risk-laden’, he says, from the deadly poison ricin, found in castor beans, to substances in fava beans that induce a lethal form of anaemia in some susceptible people. The key is in the dose: for both natural compounds and their highly regulated artificial counterparts, the amounts that we actually eat are too small to represent any threat to health.

Indeed, Gibney goes on to make mincemeat of all of the claims made for organic foods: they don’t taste better than conventional crops, they offer no nutritional advantage, and, by being less productive, they are actually wasteful of land. That’s hardly environmentally friendly.

Part of the reason we get such overblown nutritional and health “advice” from the media is the difficulty of conducting nutrition research:

While trying to figure out the effect of eating, or not eating, a particular kind of food on cancer or heart disease, for example, there are numerous confounding factors that get in the way of drawing robust conclusions. People lie about what they eat or simply don’t record it accurately; factors that look like cause and effect can turn out to be mere associations. Even finding enough subjects to look at the effect of diet on a relatively unusual disease, like ovarian cancer, can be very difficult.

[. . .]

The truth is that every study’s results need to be treated with caution and there needs to be open-mindedness about other possible explanations. While it is relatively easy to see the effects of vitamin deficiency, for example, for the most part nutrition research moves forward on the basis of a lot of evidence that is unsatisfactory in one way or another. The endless stream of claims that red meat, sugar, eggs and myriad other foodstuffs cause harm should be treated with an almighty pinch of salt (as do claims about salt, for that matter).

Along the way, Gibney offers his thoughts on personalised nutrition — the possibility of creating diets specifically suited to our own DNA — and epigenetics — the idea that different elements of our DNA can be switched on or off by environmental factors in the womb or the first years of life. He also offers a Jacques Cousteau-like tour of the human gut. Did you know there are 10 times more bacteria living in our guts — 100 trillion — than there are cells in the human body? Did you know those bacteria can sometimes switch on or off changes in our bodies to suit their own needs? Gibney describes our relationship to this mass of bugs as a permanent state of ‘armed peace’, with mutual benefits to both parties: body and bacteria.

August 31, 2012

Innovative ways to use huge surplus of beetle-blighted lumber

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

British Columbia has a problem with their trees: too many of them are dead due to a massive increase in the population of the mountain pine beetle. The province is searching for ways to cope with the lumber from all the beetle-killed trees:

When life hands you lemons, goes the old saw, make lemonade. But what if life should hand you 18m hectares (44m acres) of dead trees? That is the problem faced by the province of British Columbia in Canada, which could lose over half its pine trees to the depredations of the fearsome mountain pine beetle. The beetle, no bigger than a grain of rice, is native to the forests of Western North America, where it kills trees by releasing a blue stain fungus that prevents the flow of water and nutrients. While the insect was historically kept in check by spells of cold weather, years of mild winters have unleashed an outbreak whose spread and severity is unlike anything seen previously.

As a result, the province is peppered with billions of dead, grey trees. If they are simply left standing, they will eventually either decay or burn in forest fires. In either case, they will release the carbon dioxide they stored while growing, swelling Canada’s total carbon footprint from 2000 to 2020 by 2%.

[. . .]

Canadian researchers have discovered other uses for BKP. Sorin Pasca, a graduate student at the University of Northern British Columbia, found that rain and snow conveniently wash out sugars and other organic compounds from dead pine trees. By grinding up the dry BKP and adding it to normal cement, he created a hybrid material that is waterproof, fire-resistant and pourable like concrete but that can be worked, cut and nailed or drilled like wood. The material, dubbed Beetlecrete, has already been used to make countertops, benches and planters.

Even more esoteric uses for BKP are on the table. Nanocrystalline cellulose, made up of microscopic needle-like fibres, is a lightweight, ultra-rigid material that can be extracted from wood pulp. Currently used to improve the durability of paints and varnishes, nanocrystalline cellulose promises strong, iridescent films that may find uses in industries ranging from optical computing to cosmetics. And, as a last resort, dead and fallen pine trees can feed British Columbia’s 800MW of bio-mass power plants, which burn pellets of BKP and other waste wood to generate electricity.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress