Transition Voice

An introduction to the new magazine Transition Voice. It features one of Matt Simmons's last interviews.

Items of Interest, 23 August 2010

John Robb, THE WAR AGAINST WIKILEAKS
Brian Kaller, Tea

Korea Times: Singer Lee Su-young to marry office worker
8-month pregnant Ko So-young still looking stylish 

Chosun Ilbo: N.Korea's Stealth Warfare Manual Revealed
Taiwanese Singer Reveals Underbelly of Korean Showbiz

Asia News:
Bushehr: Iran's strike against sanctions
Iran's uploading of nuclear fuel at the much-delayed Bushehr power plant is tantamount to a torpedo effect on the international sanctions regime. Achieving the goals of getting the plant operational after a 12-year delay and replenishing fuel for a Tehran reactor would represent nothing short of milestones and warrant fresh thinking on the thorny subject of dialogue with Washington. - Kaveh L Afrasiabi

The (propaganda) empire strikes in China
China has enlisted 50 home-grown celebrities to take part in a public relations charm offensive that is hoped to present an image of "prosperity, democracy, openness, peace and harmony" and counter negative perceptions of its rise. However, the worldwide campaign could be undermined by China's close support of other famous figures who lead states such as North Korea, Myanmar and Zimbabwe. - Kent Ewing

Reality check for Asian titans
India and China: The Battle between Soft and Hard Power by Prem Shankar Jha

Arguing that behind India and China's rapid modernization lie dark human costs that will inevitably manifest in economic and social instability, this book takes the shine off the Asian giants' supposed rise to global dominance. The author believes that while "cadre capitalism" in China has created corrupt, predatory authorities, in India the government's pandering to the newly empowered bourgeoisie has triggered a rural crisis. - Sreeram Chaulia

Energy Bulletin:
How will our decline & fall proceed? (original)

Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire

I have recently written that we live according to the Law Of Civilization And Decay, which can be succinctly summarized: what goes up must come down. Just like balls thrown up into the air, civilizations ascend and then fall as though there were some kind of "historical gravity" at work. America is not (and will not be) an exception.

Local government and the Transition Movement (original)

Joanne Poyourow, Transition US

The 12 Ingredients for Transition encourage us to "build a bridge to local government." I used to think that "building bridges" was lovely British poetic language, but recently I'm learning how that pretty phrase brings with it some fairly serious guidance.

Waking up from the air-conditioned dream (original)

Stan Cox, Common Dreams

To suggest that we start reducing our dependence on air-conditioning is to invite dire forecasts of malaise, poor health, social turmoil, and economic collapse. But that need not be the case. Several lines of research indicate that reducing our dependence on chilled air could improve our quality of life. 

Can we solve two problems at once - unemployment and preparing for power down? (original)

George Mobus, The Oil Drum: Campfire

The model is simple and has been done before. From 1933 to 1942 the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) provided jobs for younger workers conserving natural resources (e.g. our national parks) in the US. The program was part of a general jobs creation program proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression to provide a stimulus to the economy and, so to speak, kill two birds with one stone. There was a great deal of resource management work that needed to be done, things like building access roads in national parks, and there were millions of unemployed young men who, without meaningful work, would have likely run amuck. It was, in fact, a brilliant idea.

Remembering the remarkable Matthew R. Simmons

Steve Andrews, Sally Odland, John Theobald and Randy Udall and others, ASPO-USA

Peak Generation's tribute to Matthew Simmons

Matthew Simmons: a tribute (original)
Matthew Wild, Peak Generation
Energy Investment banker and leading peak oil proponent Matthew Simmons died suddenly on Sunday [Aug. 8], following an apparent heart attack. While Simmons did not come up with the idea of peak oil – geophysicist M King Hubbert first published the theory in the 1950s -- he arguably did more than anyone to publicize it. It was Simmons' 2005 classic Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, that turned discussion of peak oil from a fringe environmental concern into something with business pages credibility.

Also from Energy Bulletin:
The law of civilization and decay (original)
Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire
It just so happened that I've been reading Christopher Lasch's The True And Only Heaven: Progress and It's Critics when a friend sent me Philip Mirowski's The Great Mortification Economist's Responses to the Crisis of 2007-(and counting). This latter article led me to James K. Galbraith's Who Are These Economists, Anyway?...I will go a small but significant way toward answering this question today in the first of a series of essays on where we stand in the Modern Age. I can only touch on the main concepts today.

Matt Simmons passes away

EB: Urgent press release re: Matt Simmons

The Oil Drum staff evaluates claims made by Matt Simmons on the Deepwater Spill

A Critical Examination of Matt Simmons’ Claims on the Deepwater Spill

Peak Oil: The End -- An Interview with Matt Simmons (via FTW)

Jay: Thank you so much for coming on our show. I really appreciate it. The term “peak oil” is a very common term among investors these days, thanks in no small part to your work and your book Twilight in the Desert, but just to make sure that everyone listening to the show understands, exactly what you mean by peak oil. Can you define the term?

Matt: Sure. It’s a term that gets widely misunderstood, thinking that the peak oil people said, “we are about to run out of oil,” and we will never run out of oil. What we are running out of is high quality oil that flows easily out of the ground. What we have already passed is a peak sustainable crude oil flow, and that happened five years ago, and we are now going to get further and further behind. So the idea of actually catching back up is becoming pretty remote.

Jay: So that was five years ago, about the time you published the book Twilight in the Desert.

Matt: Yes, just purely by happenstance.

Jay: You noted then that your major concern was, there was a great deal of complacency at the time about the lack of ability to continue producing more and more oil to meet the world’s growing demands, and specifically you thought there was too much faith put in the ability of Saudi Arabia to produce oil. You still feel that way?

Matt: Yeah. Actually not just Saudi Arabia, it was in the Middle East. We somehow created an illusion that the Middle East was a giant sea of oil laying into the sand that was almost inexpensive to produce, it would last forever. And there was never any basis for that; no one ever went back and actually dug into the data and said there is only handful of fields that were ever found, and they are all old.

Jay: Well you did do some digging in the data I think –

Matt: I spent so much time between the spring of 2003 and up till a month before the book came out, I’ve never done so much research in my life.

Jay: Well your source, I think, largely was the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ technical papers that were written by the people who would know those projects the best.

Matt: Right.

Jay: Okay. So, about that time, if I am correct about this, Saudis were producing about 10 million barrels of oil a day. I seem to recall you saying somewhere that they were projecting 50 million barrels day and then they cut it back to about 12, 12.5 million barrels a day. Have they been able to reach that level of production? Are the Saudis putting out anything like that now as far as you know?

Matt: Well, it depends on who you listen to. If you listen to the pronouncements from the Saudi Petroleum Ministry, they have the ability today to produce about 12.5 million barrels a day. If you listen to some of the insiders, they sound like they are struggling to stay close to 8.

Jay: Wow.

Matt: In my opinion, this is first time we ever had no spare capacity.

Jay: So, we had of course a very dramatic drop in the oil price after the Lehman Brothers collapsed in September/October 2008—from $147 of a high to $40 or something.

Matt: 31 and change

Jay: Wow. That would have been, in retrospect, quite a buying opportunity.

Matt: Yeah.

Jay: So, we are back up at what, $70 or $80 now.

Matt: I think 85-86.

Jay: Okay. To my way of thinking, it’s very difficult to say where the price of oil or any commodity is going to in the future because, quite frankly, we have a measuring stick that isn’t very dependable. [I mean] the U.S. dollar. For example, we are creating enormous amounts of money out of thin air to finance all manner of bailouts and government expenditures for one thing or another, so where do you think the price of oil can go?

Matt: Well, first of all we have really basically done away with easy projects, so all of our future projects are going to be very expensive. We have an industry that basically has an asset base largely beyond its original design life, it needs to be rebuilt. If we rebuild 60% of the oil and gas infrastructure globally, it would probably cost at least $100 trillion. So prices need to go way up, where we just won’t get anything done. I am not sure we are working with the people to do that.

Jay: You mean the technicians who know how to do that?

Matt: Yeah, about two-thirds. There are too many studies, way overdue, that are now finally being done that show in the next five to seven years about two-thirds of the energy workforce will retire.

Jay: Okay. You don’t see a pool of new talent coming into the market?

Matt: No, no. We just barely got started when we had our financial collapse, and then all the new pool got fired.

The collapse turned out to be a really cruel hoax of thinking that we’d solved our oil problems and that it’s amazing how fast we bounced back. The problem is we are bouncing back too fast, and we can’t supply it.

Jay: Well, the demand side for oil of course is coming from the Far East—China, India. In India, where we have large numbers of people who for the first time in their lives are starting to enjoy what we have taken for granted here in the West: sort of middle-class comforts, people going from bicycles to cars or from walking to motorbikes, whatever, and this is of course a massive new growth in demand.

The Chinese are very active in various parts of the world—in Africa and places like that—but let’s talk a little bit more about the declining production. I mean, you paid a lot of attention to data from Saudi Arabia; what about Iran?

Matt: Iran’s fields are even older than Saudi Arabia’s and really in a mess. There is a new theory that somehow Iraq is going to come to the forefront and I read analysts’ forecasts that within five or six years Iraq will be producing 16 million barrels a day. Realistically, they will be very lucky to produce what they are doing today because their field is too old.

Jay: What is their current production about?

Matt: It’s about 1.8. We don’t have anything on the horizon that really basically works and we have demand now that you can’t stop. So demand has become a runaway train.

Jay: So staying on the supply side of the ledger, we have a declining level of production, a very rapid decline in Mexico from what I understand, and have a decline in Iran.

Are you saying that these declines are natural and it wouldn’t matter whether we had technical talent or not, they are in decline no matter what? Or would some technical expertise make some difference? Would it help someone?

Matt: Oh! Yeah. What you are really talking about is mitigating the extent of the collapse as opposed to turning an older oil field back into a young field. What also has happened is we’re really quickly running out of light sweet crude, essentially.

Most of those great crude streams have basically disappeared and what we are doing is substituting a steady rise in crude grades that are heavier and sourer, more metallic, and they are just very hard to be refined into finished products, and they’re energy intensive and extremely water intensive.

Jay: And in terms of the refining capability, I guess that’s another issue.

Matt: Refining capabilities in the United States are almost 85 years old and enormously expensive to build if you can even get permitting to build them.

Jay: So what are we going to do?

Matt: Well, that’s a problem. We have a water scarcity and we have a 10 million barrel fossil fuel scarcity, particularly in the form of transportation energy. And then there is an unbelievably interesting and almost totally ignored interdependence between the amount of water it takes to create modern energy, and the role of energy in creating water. It turns out the average gallon of motor gasoline in the world requires about three gallons of water at the refinery; in the cooling towers, 40% of America’s fresh water is used for power generation.

Jay: Is that right?

Matt: Yes. So, shortage of water.

Jay: Another big problem looming over the horizon.

Matt: The problem is already here; one we have ignored far more than peak oil is the interrelation between the two. Most of our remaining usable water comes from Aquifers , so it takes a pump to get it out of the ground. So if you don’t have energy, you can’t get the water out.

Matthew Simmons: “Global crude oil peaked in 2005” (interview)
Lars Schall, MMnews
Matthew Simmons, Chairman of “Simmons & Company International”, is the world’s largest private energy investment banker. Moreover, he is a leading expert on the crucial topic of Peak Oil. In the following interview, Mr. Simmons talks about the on-going recession, explains why we might have reached an end of growth and gives his reading of last year’s oil price spike.

Oil Spin. Ignore the optimists. Peak oil is real. by Matthew R. Simmons

(via Rod Dreher)

Commentary: Interview with Matt Simmons, Part 3
Steve Andrews, ASPO-USA
"The only guy in this administration who is apparently steeped in concern about supply is General James Jones, National Security Advisor. As smart as those guys appear to be, I don’t think that any one of them is about to have the epiphany that—as serious as climate change might be—if we have a supply collapse, the game’s over."
Links to the previous parts here.

Steve Andrews, ASPO-USA, Interview with Matt Simmons, Part 1 and Interview with Matt Simmons, Part 2

Crunchy Con: Matt Simmons: Our crunchy-con future

Stuff from Energy Bulletin

Manufactured nightmares
Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights / Energy Bulletin
There is nothing that says, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," quite like a trip to China with Edward Burtynsky, an internationally known Canadian photographer.

General Motors CEO: oil has peaked
Joshua Dowling, The Age
The world's biggest car maker, General Motors, believes the global oil supply has peaked and a switch to electric cars is inevitable.

The dislodging of another leg from Western primacy
Steve LeVine, The Oil and the Glory
The western oil companies that have swaggered their way through the halls of power since the beginning of the last century are losing out to Aramco, Gazprom, PetroChina, and so on. Now another underpinning of Western primacy in the world -- global finance -- is going the same way.

From Peak oil - Jan 15:
Matt Simmons: Peak oil & beyond
Marin Katusa, Casey Research via Financial Sense

From Solutions & sustainability - Jan 15:
Slow Money Revolution: the global growth of local currencies
Cliona O Conaill, New Consumer magazine via Transition Culture

Toward A Post-Oil Community
Peter Goodchild, CounterCurrents.org

Rob Hopkins interviewed by Ted Trainer (part 4)
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture

Previous installments of the interview:
Parts, 1, 2, 3

Matthew Simmons interview

Matthew Simmons interview: All the Canaries Have Stopped Singing (Audio)
Jim Puplava, Financial Sense News Hour
Matthew R. Simmons graduated cum laude from the University of Utah and received a Masters degree with distinction in Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He then served on the faculty as a research associate for two years. In 1974, he founded Simmons & Company International. He is past Chairman of the National Ocean Industries Association and a trustee of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Associates - Harvard Business School and past President of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association. He serves as a Board Member of Brown-Forman Corporation, the Center for Houston's Future, Houston Technology Center, ICIC and The Atlantic Council of The United States of America. He is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
(18 August 2007)

Forty-five minute interview. No transcript available as of August 22.Forty-five minute interview. Comments on the recent National Petroleum Council (NPC) report, and peak oil trends.

via EB

transcript; mp3

Matthew Simmons video

via EB

Peak Oil: What are some of the Implications and Energy Options for California to Consider? (Video)
Matt Simmons, University of California TV (UCTV)
Peak oil theory states that oil will have a beginning, middle, and an end of production, and at some point it will reach a level of maximum output. It is estimated that approximately half of all oil that will be recovered, has been recovered, and oil production may reach a peak in the near future, or perhaps already has. Then what? (12 March 2007)

Requires RealPlayer.

Matthew Simmons: Or, prove me wrong

EB

Oil has peaked, but where's the data? analyst asks
Barbara Lewis, Reuters

One of the leading exponents of the peak oil theory that reserves have gone beyond maximum production and entered irreversible decline urged the world's oil industry to build a data base to prove whether he is right.

Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, chairman of Houston-based investment banking firm Simmons & Co. International, ... said it was not just national oil companies, but also oil majors,... who should be providing precise data to establish the health of the world's supplies once and for all.

"In my opinion the only way to reliably gauge the timing of the peak is to stipulate a legal requirement for any field producing over 50,000 barrels per day to produce historical data on a quarterly basis," Simmons said in a speech as part of International Petroleum Week.

Data so far in existence are sketchy, with the exception of for the British and Norwegian North Sea, Simmons said.

He noted members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, have never allowed an independent audit of their reserves.

"The world is basing its energy future on a non-audited set of books," he said. (13 Feb 2007)
Sounds like a reasonable proposal! -BA

Matthew Simmons Interview

"Peak oil is now and oil is too cheap."

Published on 1 Feb 2007 by Bloomberg. Archived on 1 Feb 2007.

Simmons says global oil supply has peaked

by Rhonda Schaffler

Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International in Houston, talked yesterday with Bloomberg's Rhonda Schaffler about the need to address energy use, his view that global supply has peaked and the likelihood oil prices could reach as much as $300 a barrel. (Source: Bloomberg)

[Transcription of the first few minutes of the interview]

Q: Tell me how you draw your conclusion that at this point we've hit Peak Oil.

A: If you look at the numbers and you follow what's going on starting with Mexico's giant Cantarell field which is now in a very serious state of decline and then you look at the North Sea and you see just the UK and Norway, it's pretty obvious to me that those three areas alone could actually decline by between 800,000 and 1 million barrels a day in 2007.

That pretty well wipes out almost all the production gains coming onstream and in implicit in that it assumes that everyone else is flat.

So I think basically too many of our oil fields are too old. Too many now are in decline. The Middle East is basically out of capacity. they're some projects that are being worked upon, but most don't hit the market until 2008, 2009 and we're running out of time.

... I am firmly of the belief that over the course of the next year or two, this issue of peak oil will replace global warming as an issue that we're all worrying, debating and talking about.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

UPDATE: The Oil Drum has a You Tube version of the interview.

See the original URL for the complete audio interview which about seven minutes long.
Not sure how long the video will be available. Currently you have to scroll down the page to find it. The date for the video is Feb 1, if you have to search for it.

The impetus for Simmons's remarks may be the decline of the Cantarell field in Mexico that has been in the news during the past couple of weeks (The Oil Drum, Wall Street Journal).

Discussion at The Oil Drum

-BA

Lets not let peak oil 'replace' global warming as an issue that we're all worrying about and debating, as the issues must be considered together.

-AF

Matthew Simmons, Underestimating Demand, Overestimating Supply

his commentary

Recent articles at Energy Bulletin

Interview with Matthew Simmons and James Howard Kunstler

A great sound bite:

KUNSTLER: It's only really been in the last ten years since a group of eminent elder statesman geologists retired from the industry and started to speak their minds, once they were established in their pensions. And started to essentially tell the truth about the world oil supply situation. And you know oddly enough even while that conversation has been going on for ten years most of the American people don't want to believe it and our leaders do not want to believe it. You know there is a question about why our leadership is so bad. My own opinion about it is that the dirty secret of the American economy is that it's mostly about the creation of suburban sprawl. We don't have that much of a manufacturing economy anymore. And if you subtract all the suburban sprawl activities like the housing bubble, the real estate industry, the mortgage mills, all of the accessories of the housing bubble like the strip mall building and all that stuff. If you subtract that from our economy there is not a lot left besides fried chicken and open-heart surgery. And you know neither John Kerry or George Bush or any people at the highest level want get up and say Americans we cannot have a suburban sprawl economy anymore because all it represents is an investment in stuff that we are not going to be able to use in 5 or 10 years.

Thanks also to Energy Bulletin for the following:

Slow Food Nation

Alice Waters

It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825 when he wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that "the destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed." If you think this aphorism exaggerates the importance of food, consider that today almost 4 billion people worldwide depend on the agricultural sector for their livelihood. Food is destiny, all right; every decision we make about food has personal and global repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that the food we eat could actually be making us sick, but we still haven't acknowledged the full consequences--environmental, political, cultural, social and ethical--of our national diet.

These consequences include soil depletion, water and air pollution, the loss of family farms and rural communities, and even global warming. (Inconveniently, Al Gore's otherwise invaluable documentary An Inconvenient Truth has disappointingly little to say about how industrial food contributes to climate change.) When we pledge our dietary allegiance to a fast-food nation, there are also grave consequences to the health of our civil society and our national character. When we eat fast-food meals alone in our cars, we swallow the values and assumptions of the corporations that manufacture them. According to these values, eating is no more important than fueling up, and should be done quickly and anonymously. Since food will always be cheap, and resources abundant, it's OK to waste. Feedlot beef, french fries and Coke are actually good for you. It doesn't matter where food comes from, or how fresh it is, because standardized consistency is more important than diversified quality. Finally, hard work--work that requires concentration, application and honesty, such as cooking for your family--is seen as drudgery, of no commercial value and to be avoided at all costs. There are more important things to do.

It's no wonder our national attention span is so short: We get hammered with the message that everything in our lives should be fast, cheap and easy--especially food. So conditioned are we to believe that food should be almost free that even the rich, who pay a tinier fraction of their incomes for food than has ever been paid before in human history, grumble at the price of an organic peach--a peach grown for flavor and picked, perfectly ripe, by a local farmer who is taking care of the land and paying his workers a fair wage! And yet, as the writer and farmer David Mas Masumoto recently pointed out, pound for pound, peaches that good still cost less than Twinkies. When we claim that eating well is an elitist preoccupation, we create a smokescreen that obscures the fundamental role our food decisions have in shaping the world. The reason that eating well in this country costs more than eating poorly is that we have a set of agricultural policies that subsidize fast food and make fresh, wholesome foods, which receive no government support, seem expensive. Organic foods seem elitist only because industrial food is artificially cheap, with its real costs being charged to the public purse, the public health and the environment.

The contributors to this forum have been asked to name just one thing that could be done to fix the food system. What they propose are solutions that arise out of what I think of as "slow food values," which run counter to the assumptions of fast-food marketing. To me, these are the values of the family meal, which teaches us, among other things, that the pleasures of the table are a social as well as a private good. At the table we learn moderation, conversation, tolerance, generosity and conviviality; these are civic virtues. The pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities--to one another, to the animals we eat, to the land and to the people who work it. It follows that food that is healthy in every way will cost us more, in time and money, than we pay now. But when we have learned what the real costs of food are, and relearned the real rewards of eating, we will have laid a foundation for not just a healthier food system but a healthier twenty-first-century democracy.

She makes the same points Wendell Berry has been making, especially in The Unsettling of America.

One Thing to Do About Food: A Forum
Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Troy Duster, Elizabeth Ransom, Winona LaDuke, Peter Singer, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, Eliot Coleman & Jim Hightower; in The Nation
(Peter Singer? You gotta be kidding me.)

Wendell Berry:

Alice Waters has asked me if I will propose one thing that could change the way Americans think about food. I will nominate two: hunger and knowledge.

Hunger causes people to think about food, as everybody knows. But in the present world this thinking is shallow. If you wish to solve the problem of hunger, and if you have money, you buy whatever food you like. For many years there has always been an abundance of food to buy and of money to buy it with, and so we have learned to take it for granted. Few of us have considered the possibility that someday we might go with money to buy food and find little or none to buy. And yet most of our food is now produced by industrial agriculture, which has proved to be immensely productive, but at the cost of destroying the means of production. It is enormously destructive of farmland, farm communities and farmers. It wastes soil, water, energy and life. It is highly centralized, genetically impoverished and dependent on cheap fossil fuels, on long-distance hauling and on consumers' ignorance. Its characteristic byproducts are erosion, pollution and financial despair. This is an agriculture with a short future.

Knowledge, a lot more knowledge in the minds of a lot more people, will be required to secure a long future for agriculture. Knowing how to grow food leads to food. Knowing how to grow food in the best ways leads to a dependable supply of food for a long time. At present our society and economy do not encourage or respect the best ways of food production. This is owing to the ignorance that is endemic to our society and economy. Most of our people, who have become notorious for the bulk of their food consumption, in fact know little about food and nothing about agriculture. Despite this ignorance, in which our politicians and intellectuals participate fully, some urban consumers are venturing into an authentic knowledge of food and food production, and they are demanding better food and, necessarily, better farming. When this demand grows large enough, our use of agricultural lands will change for the better. Under the best conditions, our land and farm population being so depleted, this change cannot come quickly. Whether or not it can come soon enough to avert hunger proportionate to our present ignorance, I do not know.

Michael Pollan:

Every five years or so the President of the United States signs an obscure piece of legislation that determines what happens on a couple of hundred million acres of private land in America, what sort of food Americans eat (and how much it costs) and, as a result, the health of our population. In a nation consecrated to the idea of private property and free enterprise, you would not think any piece of legislation could have such far-reaching effects, especially one about which so few of us--even the most politically aware--know anything. But in fact the American food system is a game played according to a precise set of rules that are written by the federal government with virtually no input from anyone beyond a handful of farm-state legislators. Nothing could do more to reform America's food system--and by doing so improve the condition of America's environment and public health--than if the rest of us were suddenly to weigh in.

The farm bill determines what our kids eat for lunch in school every day. Right now, the school lunch program is designed not around the goal of children's health but to help dispose of surplus agricultural commodities, especially cheap feedlot beef and dairy products, both high in fat.

The farm bill writes the regulatory rules governing the production of meat in this country, determining whether the meat we eat comes from sprawling, brutal, polluting factory farms and the big four meatpackers (which control 80 percent of the market) or from local farms.

Most important, the farm bill determines what crops the government will support--and in turn what kinds of foods will be plentiful and cheap. Today that means, by and large, corn and soybeans. These two crops are the building blocks of the fast-food nation: A McDonald's meal (and most of the processed food in your supermarket) consists of clever arrangements of corn and soybeans--the corn providing the added sugars, the soy providing the added fat, and both providing the feed for the animals. These crop subsidies (which are designed to encourage overproduction rather than to help farmers by supporting prices) are the reason that the cheapest calories in an American supermarket are precisely the unhealthiest. An American shopping for food on a budget soon discovers that a dollar buys hundreds more calories in the snack food or soda aisle than it does in the produce section. Why? Because the farm bill supports the growing of corn but not the growing of fresh carrots. In the midst of a national epidemic of diabetes and obesity our government is, in effect, subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup.

This absurdity would not persist if more voters realized that the farm bill is not a parochial piece of legislation concerning only the interests of farmers. Today, because so few of us realize we have a dog in this fight, our legislators feel free to leave deliberations over the farm bill to the farm states, very often trading away their votes on agricultural policy for votes on issues that matter more to their constituents. But what could matter more than the health of our children and the health of our land?

Perhaps the problem begins with the fact that this legislation is commonly called "the farm bill"--how many people these days even know a farmer or care about agriculture? Yet we all eat. So perhaps that's where we should start, now that the debate over the 2007 farm bill is about to be joined. This time around let's call it "the food bill" and put our legislators on notice that this is about us and we're paying attention.

The Shocking Truth about Bread

First 4 paragraphs:

Flour, yeast, water and salt - a traditional loaf needs only four ingredients. So why are calcium propionate, amylase, chlorine dioxide and L-cysteine hydrochloride now crammed into our daily bread? Andrew Whitely, Britain's leading organic baker, reveals how our staple foodstuff was transformed into an industrial triumph, but a nutritional and culinary disaster. And, overleaf, he shares essential recipes for making your own slice of homemade heaven

Back in the early 1960s, the national loaf was fundamentally redesigned. The flour and yeast were changed and a combination of intense energy and additives completely displaced time in the maturing of dough. Almost all our bread has been made this way for nearly half a century. It is white and light and stays soft for days. It is made largely with home-grown wheat and it is cheap. For increasing numbers of people, however, it is also inedible.

Now, as technology finds ever more ingenious ways to adulterate our bread, so science is revealing the havoc this may be causing to public health. As recent research suggests, we urgently need to rethink the way we make bread.

British industrial bread commands little respect. This isn't surprising when it is promoted with such mixed messages. Some loaves, described as having 'premium' qualities, seem barely distinguishable from others being sold at less than the price of a postage stamp. 'Healthy-eating' brands, adorned with images of nature and vitality, make detailed claims about the virtues of this or that added nutrient. But the big bakers keep quiet about nutrition when pushing their 'standard' loaves, which still account for over half of the market and are sold on price alone.

Article also includes some recipes! (source)

The California Report Magazine

For small and organic farmers, the San Francisco Bay Area is a pretty good place to be. There are lots of farmers' markets, restaurants that pride themselves on serving local and organic food, and plenty of people who think buying local produce makes sense. It's another story in the far-flung towns across rural Northern California, where it's harder for small farms to make it. But recently, groups of farmers and consumers have begun finding ways to fuel local economies with local food.

Click on the link to read more.

Carless in California: Living in California without owning a car (MP3 Audio)

Michael Krasny (host), KQED
Guests:

• Chris Balish, journalist and author of "How to Live Well Without Owning a Car: Save Money, Breathe Easier, and Get More Mileage Out of Life"
• James Corless, senior planner for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission
• Liz Elliott, co-director of Cyclists Inciting Change through Live Exchange (CICLE), an advocacy organization for bicyclists

(source)

Finally, one more:
Permaculture - Permanent Agriculture (& a mini movie)
Short introduction to the origins of permaculture. Movie here. (source)