Two stories in the news today about climate change and what we might be able to do about. First, on the political front, we now have the text of the complete bill now making its way through the Senate.

Senator Barbara Boxer released a 923-page draft of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act over the weekend, the Senate version of climate and energy legislation, for the first time specifying emissions allocations and costs proposed in the bill.

“We’ve reached another milestone as we move to a clean energy future, creating millions of jobs and protecting our children from dangerous pollution,” Boxer, chairperson of the Environmental and Public Works Committee, who wrote the bill with Senator John Kerry, said on Friday.

In terms of emissions allocation, the Senate bill in many respect mirrors provisions in the House version passed last summer (H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.)

There are links in the original that will take you to the complete texts of both the House and Senate bills as they are now configured. The other news indicates that focusing on emissions from energy plants, industry, and automobiles could be only about half of the solution.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the lifecycle and supply chain of animals raised for food account for 51% of annual emissions caused by humans and should be given higher priority in global efforts to fight climate change, World Bank Group experts argue.

The authors recognise that the 51% figure put forward “is a strong claim that requires strong evidence,” but stress that if their argument is right, “it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives” would have far more rapid effects on the climate than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

This partly due to significant reductions in the amount of methane, produced by enteric fermentation from cattle. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, 37% of human-induced methane comes from livestock. Although methane produced by enteric fermentation from cattle warms the atmosphere much more strongly than CO2, its half-life in the atmosphere is only about eight years, compared to at least 100 years for CO2.

Before anyone decides that what this means is that animals are just as responsible for greenhouse gases as we are, consider this:

“Livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe,” they state.

Another factor involved is the amount of forest land cut down and cleared to make pastures for grazing animals. That not only releases CO2 from the soil, it reduces the forest’s capacity for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

What this all makes apparent is that climate change is a global problem not only in the geographical sense, but also in the sense that it’s a consideration in our entire lives, from the cars we drive, the way we heat our homes and light our cities, even to the kinds of food we eat and how it’s grown. The bills now working their way through Congress are focused on energy and transportation, maybe it’s time to get the Agriculture Committee involved, too.

After three weeks of hideous October weather, today was plenty nice for a morning bike ride which took me past the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market, full of interesting sights and good things to eat.

And, as the saying goes, always leave ‘em smiling.

With the plight of salmon from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska all over the news, every step taken towards recovery is good news.

EPA has announced plans to place additional limitations on the use of three organophosphate pesticides — chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion — to protect endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

Chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion – whose primary manufacturers are Dow Chemical Company, Cheminova, and Makhteshim Agan of North America, respectively – are currently registered for use on a number of agricultural and non-agricultural sites.

EPA is requesting the manufacturers to voluntarily adopt the new limitations on labeling for these pesticides. If the manufacturers decline this request, EPA will pursue regulatory action to impose the limitations.

Dow Chemical for one has been trying to change its image as a polluter and waster. Here’s a chance for them to step up and do what’s right for the salmon.

Atrazine is a pesticide that’s been used extensively enough that most Minnesotans probably recognize the name from advertising aimed at farmers. But just because the name is familiar, doesn’t mean you want to find the stuff in your drinking water. From a report issued by the Natural Resources Defense Council:

Banned in the European Union and clearly linked to harm to wildlife and potentially to humans, the pesticide atrazine provides little benefit to offset its risks. In a new report, NRDC brings together for the first time the results of surface water and drinking water monitoring required by the U.S. EPA to create a more comprehensive analysis of atrazine pollution across the Midwestern and Southern United States.

Approximately 75 percent of stream water and about 40 percent of all groundwater samples from agricultural areas tested in an extensive U.S. Geological Survey study contained atrazine. NRDC found that the U.S. EPA’s inadequate monitoring systems and weak regulations have compounded the problem, allowing levels of atrazine in watersheds and drinking water to peak at extremely high concentrations.

In case you’re wondering just what the harm could be:

The toxicity associated with atrazine has been documented extensively. The adverse reproductive effects of atrazine have been seen in amphibians, mammals, and humans-even at low levels of exposure. Concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb have been shown to alter the development of sex characteristics in male frogs. When exposure coincides with the development of the brain and reproductive organs, that timing may be even more critical than the dose. Also of great concern is the potential for atrazine to act synergistically with other pesticides to increase their toxic effects.

That’s right, this stuff doesn’t just potentially make you sick, it gets right down in to the genes. That ought to be scary enough to get people’s attention right there, but it could very well be that it will take apublic fuss to get the EPA to act.

The last few years have seen an alarming rise in the number of failed bee colonies. Bees, of course, are instrumental in pollination and their presence is valuable in many agricultural endeavours, in addition to all that yummy honey. Various causes have been blamed for the bee’s demise, ranging from pesticides to cell phones to a parasitic fungus. None of those afflictions could account for all cases, however, so there must be some other underlyig cause.

Researchers at the University of Ilinois think they’ve found it.

Researchers have found a reliable marker of colony collapse disorder, a mysterious malady that in 2007-2008 killed off more than a third of commercial honey bees in the United States.

Bees in hives affected by colony collapse disorder were found to have unusually high levels of “ribosomal fragments,” a symptom of infection with multiple picorna-like viruses.

The study is the first to identify a single molecular marker of the disorder, and to propose a data-driven hypothesis to explain the disappearance of American honey bees.

The viruses they identified could easily have led to the other disorders being blamed for the death of bees.

The list of picorna-like viruses that afflict honey bees is long and includes Israeli acute paralysis virus, which was once suspected of being the primary cause of colony collapse disorder.

The loss of ribosomal function would explain many of the phenomena associated with colony collapse disorder, (Mary) Berenbaum said.

“If your ribosome is compromised, then you can’t respond to pesticides, you can’t respond to fungal infections or bacteria or inadequate nutrition because the ribosome is central to the survival of any organism. You need proteins to survive,” she said.

if they’re right, this is really big news. The mystery of the bees deaths is a major problem, and if the cause has finally been found, that’s a big step towards making it a mystery solved.

The problem is huge, it’s right there in front of our face, and yet we still haven’t really tried to do anything about it.

The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area choked by low oxygen levels that threatens marine life, is smaller than expected this year but more deadly, the government said on Monday.

The zone, caused by a runoff of agricultural chemicals from farms along the Mississippi River, measured about 3,000 square miles or about 1.5 times the size of the state of Delaware, compared with estimates that it would measure up to nearly 8,500 square miles, scientists said.

Unlike other efforts in other regions that have dead zones, such as the Chesapeake Bay and the Baltic Sea, numerical goals have not been set for reducing nutrients from areas near the Mississippi basin, (Donald) Boesch said.

The dead zone’s not going away until we control its source, all the crap that gets dumped in to the Mi8ssissippi River. That will take the cooperation of everyone who lives along the river and its tributaries. Given the current economic and political climate, that could take a while. Which means the dead zone will probably be with us for many years to come.

Dow AgroSciences is a major supplier of pesticides and other chemicals to the agriculture industry. No doubt they do many good things, but it doesn’t sound like their latest product in development, sulfuryl fluoride, is one of them.

Public health and environmental advocates Friday asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to deny a request from Dow AgroSciences for a permit allowing it to release large amounts of sulfuryl fluoride onto farm fields in four states. The chemical is a toxic pesticide whose global warming effects are thousands of times stronger than carbon dioxide.

“The hazards of using sulfuryl fluoride in agriculture have not been evaluated. It is also 4,780 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide,” said Dr. Brian Hill, a staff scientist at the Pesticide Action Network. “Either one of those facts makes permitting these tests a major mistake.”

Here’s what Dow wants to do.

Dow AgroSciences proposes using sulfuryl fluoride to sterilize soil in farm fields. The permit would allow the release of 32,435 pounds of sulfuryl fluoride on 65 acres of test plots in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and California. Releasing just 10 percent of that amount into the air would be equivalent to releasing 15.5 million pounds of carbon dioxide. “A car that gets 30 miles per gallon would have to be driven 23 million miles — the distance of a trip circling the world over 930 times — to cause that much global warming,” said Hill.

Yes, farmers need pesticides, but there’s no reason sulfuryl flouride has to be one of them, and plenty good reasons for Dow to find something else.

Collin Peterson, a Representative from Minnesota, is the chair of the powerful House Agriculture Committee. If a climate bill is going to pass the House, it’s a lot more likely to happen if Peterson agrees to support it. The good news out of Congress is that a compromise has been reached, and Peterson is now on board.

Democrats in the House of Representatives on Tuesday said they had reached a deal on difficult agriculture issues in a climate change bill, clearing the way for a vote and probable passage in the chamber this week.

“We have an agreement finally,” said House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, whose support had been widely sought by House Democratic leaders. Peterson declared he is now prepared to vote for the controversial bill.

Representative Henry Waxman, a main proponent for legislation to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide associated with global warming, told reporters: “I think we will have the majority to pass the bill.”

Peterson’s decision means that he must believe that he can sell the bill to farmers and agriculture businesses. Those are his constituents, and while his seat is as safe as any in the House, his support removes a major roadblock towards passing the bill, and he wouldn’t be doing it if he thought the farmers wouldn’t agree.

For the last few years, the federal government has been has been encouraging the growing of corn for ethanol. It’s a policy that farmers have loved and others, like me, have seen as a short-sighted alternative to gas, at best.

Well, get ready to debate the whole thing again, because the Obama Administration is about to change the policy.

The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed renewable fuel standards that could reduce the $3 billion a year in federal tax breaks given to producers of corn-based ethanol. The move sets the stage for a major battle between Midwest grain producers and environmentalists who say the gasoline additive actually worsens global warming.

For much of the last decade, federal officials have touted the potential of corn-ethanol as a substitute for gasoline and a tool for reducing global warming and foreign oil dependence.

In the farming country where I grew up, the last few years have been almost nothing but corn as afar as the eye can see. Over-reliance on one crop, and planting the same crop on the same fields year after year is one consequence of growing corn for ethanol, but the rewards to farmers have been so great that they continue doing so, even against their better judgement. The costs to the rest of us, though, are becoming more and more apparent.

A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that increased ethanol production was responsible for 10% to 15% of last year’s increased U.S. food costs. And the rush to produce more corn for fuel has had a global environmental impact as forests and other vegetation have been cleared to make way for cropland.

There’s got to be a better way, and there is. If we’re going to use ethanol, cellulosic ethanol made from non-food crops is the way to go. There’s till research and development to be done before that happens on any big scale, but the present policy of turning over the best land and growing food crops for fuel just won’t make it in the long run.

Cows passing gas, it’s not just the stuff of adolescent humor and late night jokes anymore. In fact, it’s a topic that the dairy industry is taking pretty seriously.

The U.S. dairy industry wants to engineer the “cow of the future” to pass less gas, a project aimed at cutting the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020.

The cow project aims to reduce intestinal methane, the single largest component of the dairy industry’s carbon footprint, said Thomas Gallagher, chief executive officer of the U.S. Dairy and Dairy Management Inc.’s Innovation Center in Rosemont, Ill.

The serious part of this, of course, is the on-going effort to make agricultural practices less wasteful and more sustainable.
That’s a good thing, and if it contributes even a small amount towards reducing greenhouse gases, the dairy industry is responsible for less than two percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, so much the better.

But if in a year or so the Dairy Association, as they expect, starts touting the development of less flatulent cows, expect the jokes to start flying. Who says you can’t save the planet and have a good chuckle at the same time?