Deaths In The Fields: Why State Agencies Need Help Protecting America's Workers

I'm a blogger fellow with Brave New Films on their 16 Deaths Per Day campaign for worker safety. Join us on Facebook.



It's hard to find a tougher job in America than harvesting in the fields. Throughout California, known as the nation's salad bowl, farmworkers, frequently migrants with little knowledge of their rights as workers or even the English language, toil in triple-digit heat, often without shade or water breaks. Needless to say, this dangerous work has resulted in serious injury and even deaths.

Jose Rosario Valencia started feeling nauseated just after 9 a.m. on July 17. His heart rate sped up and his knees buckled.

Valencia was scared. He'd heard of other farmworkers dying of heat stroke in the fields.

"I thought about my family and how they would suffer," said Valencia, 46, who moves irrigation pipes in the onion fields.

Even though California passed a groundbreaking law in 2005 to protect farmworkers from heat illness and death, there have been as many as 10 heat-related fatalities in the years since. Among the victims in 2008 were a pregnant teenager who died when her body temperature climbed to 108 degrees after working in a Lodi vineyard and a 37-year-old man who suffered heat stroke after loading table grapes near Bakersfield. The state has confirmed heat as the cause of six of the deaths and said it may have been a factor in the others.

Farmworkers get paid by the piece, based on how much they load, and their employers set quotas that they are expected to cover. They have every incentive to avoid breaks and work as hard as possible; in some cases, the water is simply out there for display. As a result, farmworkers skip bathroom breaks. They skip water breaks. They stay out in the fields under 100-degree heat with the fear that they would be fired if they did not. And as a result, workers die.

The most celebrated case in recent years was that of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, a 17 year-old farmworker who died of heat strike in the fields in the summer of 2008. She was pregnant at the time.

Maria collapsed while working for Merced Farm Labor in a vineyard owned by West Coast Grape Farming outside of Stockton, CA. Maria worked for nine hours in temperatures that reached 101 degrees. There was no water nearby. There was no shade.

After about 2 hours of delays, Maria was finally taken to a clinic. Her temperature upon arrival was 108.4 degrees. Maria's heart stopped six times in the next two days before she passed away. Doctors said if emergency medical help had been summoned or she had been taken to the hospital sooner, she might have survived.

In 2009, Cal-OSHA, the state occupational safety board, delivered regulations to combat heat-stress related injuries and deaths. The employers first tried to amend the regulations, trying to classify the vines in the vineyard as "shade." But they failed, as Cal-OSHA refused to rewrite the laws.

However, lobbying for changes in the law is only one way that employers evade oversight. Under the Schwarzenegger Administration and during the historic budget crisis in the state, funding for Cal-OSHA has shrunk. Only two HUNDRED inspectors monitor all the worksites in the nation's most populous state, including the 35,000 farms. There are more fish and game wardens in California than worksite inspectors.

And if an employer is cited, they can use a favorable appeals process to reduce the fines or dismiss the violations, something which has been done repeatedly in recent years. All violations can be appealed to a judge, appointed by the appeals board. Then the appeals board can vacate the judge's ruling. This offers many opportunities to game the system.

The head of the state Senate's Labor Committee accused a workplace safety board Wednesday of being biased toward employers and ignoring a law that requires fines for failing to report on-the-job injuries.

After a hearing, Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) said he might introduce legislation that could lead to criminal charges against board members if they continue to disregard the law that calls for a $5,000 fine for employers' failing to report accidents in a timely manner.

The hearing came after a Times investigation last fall that found that the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health appeals board repeatedly dismissed and reduced the penalties levied by division inspectors, even in situations in which workers had died or were seriously injured.

One recent case was dismissed based on a spelling typo in one document. And this is more about ideology than budget problems: for example, Cal-OSHA received stimulus money to hire more inspectors, but has so far declined to do so.

Despite all of these obstacles, the new emphasis on worker safety by Cal-OSHA in the last growing season did pay some dividends. Last year, more vigorous training and enforcement efforts did serve to reduce heat-related illnesses and deaths. But already Cal-OSHA is talking about backing off, content that the media storm over the plight of the farmworkers has largely ended.

Rising compliance and awareness, Welsh said, may allow his agency to relax its inspection efforts in 2010.

"The 3,400 inspections we did last year was a little more than we can sustain," he said.

This is why we need HR 2067, the Protecting America's Workers Act (PAWA). A fully resourced OSHA could fill in the gaps where the state-level agencies often fail. They could deliver larger penalties without the byzantine appeals process at agencies like Cal-OSHA. They could provide the ability for families to seek justice from employers through the courts. Simply put they could restore the promise of a safe and health workplace for everybody in America.

Even in the fields.

China Can Go Ahead And File A Complaint

I mentioned briefly China's counter-charge against the United States in exchange for extending tariffs on tire production. They have decided to probe US chicken and auto parts sales in China, accusing American exporters of "dumping" (selling goods at less than cost). Marcy Wheeler has a look at this:

I assume China is targeting chicken because our Ag is subsidized and the meat industry has a lot of clout in this country.

I'm more fascinated by China's decision to go after auto parts (and note, some of the announcements on this say "automotive products," which might include cars themselves).

In truth, China imposes huge tariffs on cars coming into its country (and ties permission to import cars to sourcing in China--for example, GM might get to import a certain number of Cadillacs in exchange for sourcing another part of its Chinese-production in China). And the import of parts is often limited to more complex parts that are the same in China as they are in the US. There's not much there there.

It looks like China is targeting auto parts because the government is highly involved in GM and Chrysler, and China can using a threatened cut-off of those markets to leverage a scale-back on the tire tariffs. But the problem is that there's a mechanism to settle these disputes called the WTO, and with China as a member this so-called "trade war" will actually be settled by the governing body through a normal resolution process, including whatever retaliation China offers. And on that front, the US action was available under the existing trade agreement, and I can't see how any amount of legal wrangling can deny that fact. In the end, China and the US are symbiotic trading partners, and this tariff raise doesn't have to lead to any escalation at all. We'll see who stands their ground.

The Maze Of Food Policy

Ezra Klein premiered a column about food policy in the Washington Post today, with a sort-of review of Food, Inc., the latest movie about the problems with what we eat. Klein praises the film but wonders if it could be more specific:

"Food, Inc." is certainly an important film. But, like the movement that spawned it, it's also a frustrating one. It's driven less by a thesis than by an intuition: Something is wrong with our food production system. It's just not clear what. Over the course of 94 minutes, we wander through meatpacking plants and fast-food drive-throughs and the halls of Congress. We meet a mother who lost her son to tainted meat and a farmer who can no longer stomach Tyson's treatment of her chickens. We stop in with a hyper-charismatic farmer who pets his pigs and preaches sustainability and loathes corporate cash cows, then travel with a hippie yogurt baron who touts his company as the ethical future of big-box food.

The sense that something is wrong with our food quickly blurs into the suggestion that everything is wrong with our food. It has too much bacteria but also too many pesticides. It is too expensive, but we do not spend enough money on it. We need fewer corporations, or maybe more corporations run by the yogurt guy. With so much wrong, it is hard to know where to start. And sometimes, in fact, it seems that fixing one problem would create another: Making fruits and vegetables cheaper, for instance, is hard to do if you also want them to be organic.

Klein is right to consider the complexity and enormity of our food system. It has an impact on every major domestic policy challenge in this Administration, and yet we barely mention it. Meat production accounts for more carbon emissions that car travel. Health care costs soar in part due to obesity and child diabetes, much of which comes from the food we eat. But the biggest problem that he singles out is one of accountability and transparency - small groups direct our food policy, they refuse to allow sunlight to shine on the process, and as a result consumers lose. This goes all the way from giant chemical and agribusiness corporations to the Congressional Agriculture Committees, which are feeding troughs (pardon the pun) for the parochial interests of farm-state lawmakers.

This plays out in very deliberate ways. This interesting study on food deserts - urban areas without access to affordable, nutritious food - finds that, in many respects, this gets caused by an overabundance of bad, cheap food options, rather than a lack of good ones. Who makes those decisions? Which comes first, the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood or the crappy fast-food joints at every corner? How can we use local zoning to improve this? How can Congress get involved? How can businesses be made to face the externalities they cause with food that makes us sick? There used to be a mandate for educational programming from television - could a mandate for legitimate healthy food options make sense?

It seems like we all watch films like this and Super Size Me and read books like Fast Food Nation and nothing ever really changes, because the audiences for those films all talk to themselves and never figure out the pressure points for action. I'm hopeful that Klein's column, or sites like La Vida Locavore can elucidate these points for us and come up with some tangible actions.

The Nexus Of Drug War Failure And War War Failure

In Afghanistan, we may be adding troops to an already chaotic situation with little chance of them being able to dislodge the Pashtun insurgency from their isolated villages, but we do seem to be trying some new things. A vow to curtail civilian airstrikes can't hurt if implemented effectively (although almost all the airstrikes that have yielded civilian casualties have been mistakes anyway, so how will this help?), and now this positive step:

The United States announced a new drug policy Saturday for opium-rich Afghanistan, saying it was phasing out funding for eradication efforts and using the money for drug interdiction and alternate crop programs instead.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, told The Associated Press that eradication programs weren't working and were only driving farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, where he said it had been warmly received, particularly by the United Nations [...]

In a report released earlier this week, the U.N. drug office said opium cultivation had dropped by 19 percent last year, but was still concentrated in three southern provinces where the Taliban insurgency is strongest.

Holbrooke said the previous U.S. policy, which focused on eradication programs, hadn't reduced "by one dollar" the amount of money the Taliban earned off opium cultivation and production.

"It might destroy some acreage," Holbrooke said. "But it just helped the Taliban."

Exactly. It increased their share of the market, and didn't cut into their profits at all. I don't know that interdiction works all that well either, but the focus on alternate crops is interesting. If we can give the subsistence farmers in Afghanistan another way to survive, we can at least develop the country in such a way that doesn't fatten the wallets of the insurgency. In the end, we can extricate ourselves from Afghanistan faster using pomegranates than using guns and bombs.

I still question the troop increase, but this is a smart move.

...by the way, can we admit now that eradication doesn't work in Latin America, either, and stop that as well?

Welcome to 2007

The Blue Dogs and the Energy and Commerce Committee have finally reached agreement on an energy and climate bill, says Jay Newton-Small:

Ending a turf war, Waxman – whose committee has jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency -- allowed the Agriculture Department, not the EPA, to oversee a potentially lucrative program of energy offsets for farmers (Peterson allowed that the Obama Administration could weigh in on the EPA's role in the issue, if any). And Waxman agreed to bar the EPA for five years from calculating how much greenhouse gas emissions are generated when forests are converted to crop fields for ethanol and biofuels. The move helps get ethanol and biofuels counted as renewable energies, thus benefiting from a big renewable investment in another part of the bill that aims to see 20% of U.S. energy derived from green sources by 2025.

When asked Peterson said he believed the bill would enjoy “broad support” and even “draw a few Republicans.” Peterson's changes will be added as an amendment when the 900+ page bill reaches the House floor Friday.

I know that Waxman has throughout this process focused on the cap, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and he's been willing to bargain around the edges to bring that cap into reality. But these are really abominable changes. For example, by enabling farm-state Dems through holding off the calculation of biofuel land use in emissions, Waxman keeps in place the failed structure of corn-based ethanol, which takes up more energy to produce than it saves. And keep in mind that the bill out of the House is likely to be BETTER than the craptastic bill that will emerge from the Senate.

This sounds like something the Democrats would do two years ago, when they held the House and would go through compromise after compromise to get something through on an agenda item, only to see the Senate do nothing with it. What's the point?

The EPA had a good analysis of the consumer implications of the bill (it would probably lower electricity costs for most people), and the energy efficiency standards are still pretty good. But at some point, "revolutionary in its intent" just doesn't cut it. And even Podesta, in the previous link, admits the Senate bill is unacceptable. Some advocacy groups like the League of Conservation Voters are going to the mattresses, saying that "In light of the tremendous importance of this legislation, LCV has made the unprecedented decision that we will not endorse any member of the House of Representatives in the 2010 election cycle who votes against final passage of this historic bill. "

Is the bill historic? I guess, but it won't come close to doing what is needed, and furthermore the pressure needs to be exerted in the Senate. Combine the sketchy work from the enviro groups, the endless willingness to compromise from liberals, the plain old avarice from Blue Dogs and farm-state Democrats, and the sloth of the Senate, and you have a bill that won't do what's necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. We'll be switching to an adaptation strategy - climate-controlled plastic bubbles for everyone - within half a decade.

When CBO Scores Vanish

When a partial Congressional Budget Office score revealed that health care would be more expensive than expected and not cover as many Americans, mainly because it was scoring something, you know, PARTIAL, the press had a field day, egged on by Republicans. Hell, they're still talking about it.

"Meet the Press" has really got to step up its game on the health-care debate. Last week, host David Gregory tweeted "Compelling fact today: dem-wh health care plan would only cover 16 of the 50 mill uninsured. That makes it a harder sell. Info from cbo." Problem was, his fact wasn't much of a fact. CBO didn't score a "Dem-White House" plan. It scored a partial version of the Senate HELP Committee's plan. The White House wasn't involved. And nor, for that matter, would that plan have only covered 16 million. The version of the bill examined by CBO was missing the employer mandate and the specifics on the individual mandate. It was missing, in other words, the parts of the bill that would cover people. Gregory was right to say that the CBO score was a setback. But not for the reasons he suggested.

By contrast, over the weekend, that same CBO scored the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill to determine the annual cost per household of a cap and trade system and a renewable energy standard.

On that basis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and the associated slowing of climate change. CBO could not determine the incidence of certain pieces (including both costs and benefits) that represent, on net, about 8 percent of the total. For the remaining portion of the net cost, households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020, while households in the highest income quintile would see a net cost of $245.

In other words, in another partial score, since it doesn't take into account the benefit of mitigating climate change, low income households would actually benefit slightly from the impacts of the bill, while high-income households would see a fairly nominal cost. Republicans have argued for months that doing anything on greenhouse gas emissions would cost anywhere from $1,600 to $3,100 a family.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this score will have absolutely no impact on the debate over whether or not we should enact climate and energy legislation. Those who want to cover for polluting industries will still lie that the impact on "working families" will be too costly, and the press will "cover the controversy." In other words, the CBO only matters when it matters.

Meanwhile, Democrats have, apparently, a global warming denier in charge of the House Agriculture Committee, and he's doing whatever he can to stop the bill.

House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) on Friday said climate change bill negotiators are heading back to the drawing board after discussions between Democrats “blew up last night.”

A meeting between chairmen drafting the climate bill and Democrats on the Agriculture Committee “by and large blew up last night” over the issue of offsets, Peterson said.

Specifically, he said, Agriculture Democrats rejected a concept pitched by bill drafters that would set money aside for a new greenhouse gas conservation program tied together with some offsets [...]

“We’re back to how do we deal — we want USDA to run our offset program; they want EPA to run it,” Peterson said. “Not that we’re necessarily against the EPA; they just speak a different language. They don’t have the infrastructure out there to deal with us.”

Added Peterson, “I’m tired of this running around in circles.”

Funny, I was about to say the same thing.

I'm beginning to think that humans have a better chance of adapting with gills than adapting legislatively with meaningful climate change legislation. After all, lawmakers have to protect those poor families from getting that $40 in ten years.

Breaking Up Big Corn

The Administration's new biofueld strategy was better than it looked at first glance, especially if it means the death of ethanol subsidies.

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.

However, environmentalists and others have questioned the wisdom of that support.

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.

I believe in alternative fuels as part of the solution, but not when it competes with that other type of fuel, the food that fuels our bodies. Not only does corn-based ethanol expend more in energy for its production than it saves, but it artificially raises food prices globally and impedes efforts to reduce world hunger. If the President is serious about following the science, he will allow the EPA tests on emissions of biofuels to show that corn and soy-based biodiesel do not meet the test. Already the Energy Department has used stimulus money to boost the cellulosic ethanol industry.

Speaking of following the science, watch Mike Pence stumble his way through an interview where he denies global warming, questions stem cell research and equivocates on evolution, and then claim not to be "anti-science." Fun stuff.

As The Swine Flu Turns

Let's move from Specter, donkeys and elephants, over to swine flu. We're up to 68 cases in the United States and 98 cases outside of Mexico in the rest of the world. We've seen hospitalization here but not as virulent a sickness as in Mexico, where reports show up to 150 dead. The expert at the WHO said yesterday that the spread of the virus cannot be contained, and now we need to work on mitigating its worst effects. And considering that we're starting to see new cases in new countries, that seems correct.

While the WHO has raised the global pandemic alert, they're also keying in on the source of the outbreak.

In Mexico, where the only related deaths have been reported, state health authorities looking for the initial source of the outbreak toured a million-pig hog farm in Perote, in Veracruz State. The plant is half-owned by Smithfield Foods, an American company and the world’s largest pork producer.

Mexico’s first known swine flu case, which was later confirmed, was from Perote, according to Health Minister José Ángel Córdova. The case involved a 5-year-old boy who recovered.

But a spokesman for the plant said the boy was not related to a plant worker, that none of its workers were sick and that its hogs were vaccinated against flu.

Tom Philpott has been all over this since Friday. The Smithfield farms in Perote are thought to have infected the water supply and the atmosphere. Drinking pig shit will tend to do that. Can we finally have this debate about factory farming?

The latest news is that the LA County Coroner is investigating two deaths that may have resulted from swine flu. Obviously this is concerning, but at the same time, the large majority of strains here have been less virulent, and we have no confirmation on this case in LA.

...It's amusing to hear media types talking about how people should stay home from work if they're sick when nearly half of private-sector workers don't have paid sick days. I'm one of them. As a freelancer, I only get paid if I come to work. So if you want to keep America prepared in the event of an outbreak, you have to set up ways for Americans to be able to stay home from work without threatening their financial livelihood. Not to mention the 47 million without health insurance. This highlights the need for a bigger public health safety net.

...John Barry, author of a great book about the deadly 1918 influenza that killed 670,000 in the United States, has a good piece about where the swine flu will strike next.

Ignoring The Obvious

Over the weekend, the New York Times had an article with the thesis statement that the legislative machinery is rusty and unused to the kind of ambitious policy agenda that Barack Obama has proposed.

Lawmakers, senior staff members and other experts agree that a combination of divided government, thin majorities, the running battle for Congressional control and an emphasis on national security caused a decline in the old-school legislative give-and-take that will be required to deliver major health, energy and education measures to President Obama.

“We have been miniaturized,” said Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine and a veteran of health care negotiations. “You have three talking points on a card. We are going to have to be taught and relearn the process, crack the notebooks.”

Congress has not even managed to produce its basic spending bills on time in recent years and has exhausted considerable energy dealing with recurring tax and Medicare snags. Big bills have been few and far between — the 2003 Medicare drug plan and a 2007 energy law are examples — as lawmakers nibbled around the edges of problems [...]

As members of Congress and analysts look at the daunting demands for legislation emanating from the White House, some wonder if Congress is up to the task.

“Do we have a Lyndon Johnson in the Senate at the moment, someone who can push through legislation?” asked Stanley E. Collender, a former top aide on Capitol Hill and a longtime observer of Congressional budget fights. “We haven’t seen it in a while.”

There's no doubt that some of this is true. The "Masters of the Senate" have come and gone, and the reasons cited do tell part of the story. Furthermore, the internal dynamics of the Republican opposition tend them in the direction of unthinking opposition, behaving like perpetual candidates in a contested primary (Similarly, the glory-seeking Evan Bayhs of the world see value in obstructionism and shining attention on themselves). But this article never gets around to mentioning the special interests who frustrate progress on a daily basis. And we see them lining up, one by one, particularly with respect to the domestic agenda, to throw sand in the gears of the legislative machinery. As campaigns grow more expensive, and as inequality increases with the biggest firms getting bigger, these impediments have simply metastasized.

For example, lobbyists for practically every corporation want to halt the move to tax overseas profits from offshore tax havens, something the entire world came to an agreement on at the G-20. Corporate farming interests succeeded in removing cuts to farm subsidies from the budget resolution. And despite the rhetoric that action on the climate and on the economy are inextricably linked, oil companies have flat out given up on renewable sources of energy, and appear to have convinced the Administration to cave on the 100% auction element of their cap and trade proposal.

The Obama administration might agree to postpone auctioning off 100 percent of emissions allowances under a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas pollution, White House science adviser John P. Holdren said today, a move that would please electricity providers and manufacturers but could anger environmentalists [...]

During the presidential campaign, Obama called for auctioning off all greenhouse gas emissions permits at the outset, rather than just a portion of them. Many industry leaders say a phase-in will be essential to easing the transition to a low-carbon economy.

"The idea, obviously, is to end up with a bill that reflects both the thinking of Congress and the administration, a bill that the president can sign," Holdren said, adding that when it comes to a 100 percent auction, "Whether you get to start with that or get there over a period of time is something that's being discussed."

We have a model for "getting there over a period of time," in Europe, where they wasted a decade making almost no progress on reducing carbon until they just went ahead and moved to a full auction. The whole point of cap and trade is to price carbon, not give it away for free, because the pricing element encourages the innovation needed to make the needed reductions.

Some, like Chris Bowers, are optimistic that public investment will continue to grow. The question remains whether that will manifest in government spending that improves lives, or the kind of corporate welfare and Treasury raids we have seen over the last decade. Call me skeptical. And I think the reason is simple - a political class too intertwined with a corporate elite, too attentive to their concerns over the concerns of their constituents. Perhaps full public financing of all campaigns is the answer, and what we should be fighting for. Or maybe we just need A New Way Forward to sever that symbiotic relationship and restructure the economy.

Lost in the talk of tea parties by anti-tax zealots are the A New Way Forward demonstrations this weekend. It is crucial that we send a message that real structural change is not optional but necessary. I urge you to find the demonstration in your area and attend.

Budget Odds And Ends

There are these little glories tucked into the budget outline, and they all seem to have the same trajectory - marvelous, progressive, and yet not quite good enough for what's needed.

For example, the ending of direct payments to Big Agriculture farmers. This has been sorely needed for years, and yet it's not going to radically alter our food policy, which many say is broken.

The good news (and better than I speculated at ObFo): Bam wants to eliminate direct payment for farmers with SALES greater than $500,000. That will affect a lot more farmers than using income as the basis for a limit. But before you start cheering, know that the administration fully expects the lost subsidy will be replaced by "alternate sources of income from emerging markets for environmental services, such as carbon sequestration, renewable energy production, and providing clean air, clean water, and wildlife habitat." So no worries, Big Ag! The money will continue to flow.

The same distorted crop subsidies will remain as well, making it a fairer system but still not a fixed one.

Then there are the energy cap and trade proceeds - noble, but insufficient (though the Administration could be fudging).

First, the projected revenue seems strikingly low. Partly this is a function of the fact that the targets themselves, particularly in the short term, are fairly weak -- 14 percent under 2005 levels by 2020, 83 percent by 2050. (Sane climate policy would reduce emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, at least.)

Still, the proposal explicitly says that the administration expects 100 percent of the permits to be auctioned off. As Kate noted, the CBO estimated (PDF) that "the value of those allowances could total between $50 billion and $300 billion annually (in 2006 dollars) by 2020." The administration's estimate -- $83 billion a year by 2020 -- is well at the bottom end of those projections.

My guess -- apparently confirmed by "senior White House officials" who don't invite me to their conference calls -- is that this is simple conservatism. The inclusion of any carbon revenue at all is sure to spark controversy, so they're simply being cautious not to lay too ambitious a marker.

The bigger question is whether the $15 billion/year investment in clean energy will really tip the economy toward a paradigm shift.

Let me throw in one universally good element: the shuttering of Yucca Mountain.

Washington -- President Obama is taking the first step toward blocking a nuclear waste dump at Nevada's Yucca Mountain by slashing money for the program in his first budget, according to congressional sources.

Obama's budget, which is expected to be announced today, will eliminate nearly all funding for the Yucca project with the exception of money needed for license applications submitted last year to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said sources who asked not to be identified because the document has not been made public.

"The Yucca Mountain program will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear-waste disposal," the Energy Department will say as part of the budget document, the sources said.

This will save close to $80 billion dollars as well as force better solutions to energy than nuclear.

I am genuinely happy with the budget, and in 1993 this would be an incredible document. The problems are just so big right now in 2009, that it may not be enough. But I'm pleased it's even gone this far.

The (Very) Quiet Revolution

I would say that not everyone is happy with Barack Obama's choice for Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack:

While Vilsack has promoted respectable policies with respect to restraining livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting genetically engineered crops and animal cloning. Equally troubling is Vilsack's support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production, which has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The Organic Consumers Association is calling on organic consumers and all concerned citizens to join our call to action and block Vilsack's confirmation as the next Secretary of Agriculture. Please help us reach our goal of 100,000 petition signatures against Vilsack' nomination. Sign today! Your email will be sent to your Senators and the President-Elect's office.

I think Tom Philpott has this right - these issues weren't really included in Obama's message of change, and hopes that there would be anything radically different in ag policy were unfounded.

People in the sustainable-ag world -- including me -- are having a tough time time accepting that Obama has picked an a ethanol-loving, GMO enthusiast as his USDA chief.

But then again, Obama himself is a strong supporter of both GMOs and ethanol, so maybe we shouldn't be too surprised.

That said, if you didn't expect ag policy to be much of a concern for this Administration, Vilsack is actually a fairly decent choice on the margins, though obviously not in the big picture. He supports labeling GMO food and a stricter approval process at the FDA for biotech. His outlook on ethanol sucks, as you might expect from a former Iowa governor, but he does support ending the tariffs on Brazilian sugar cane ethanol and even phasing out corn ethanol subsidies, as well as researching second-generation biofuels that are less resource-intensive. He has spoken of using food to support in Obama's foreign policy message of soft power, to aid those suffering from malnutrition and famine. And he wants to revamp the school nutrition program.

Vilsack has been fairly open and accessible on his beliefs, and while ultimately the status quo will probably maintain, I think there's room for him to listen to progressives and even implement some policies they like.

Vilsack.

In his eleventy-teenth press conference (probably more than the current President has done since 2006), Barack Obama will announce today that Ken Salazar will be the Secretary of the Interior, and Tom Vilsack will be the Secretary of Agriculture. I went over Salazar yesterday. Vilsack is probably a better pick than a couple of the others floated for this job, but as a former Iowa governor it's unlikely he'll do anything but the status quo on corn policy, which is easily the worst part of our food policy (If I wasn't clear enough, I'm talking about ethanol and biofuels, which expend more energy than they produce). I agree with Mick Kristof that the name ought to be changed to the Department of Food. We are not nearly the agricultural society that we were when the Department was launched, and a focus on food would be much more relevant to, er, the eaters. Our food policy, where we pay subsidies to farmers not to grow and subsidize the corn growers beyond all reason, is very out of whack. Industrial factory farms and their lobbyists set the policy. We could limit subsidies to the richest farmers and create a new food culture based on eating locally and supporting organic farming. A good manifesto for a saner food policy is here.

I don't think Vilsack is going to promote this drastic a change. I'm sure he's competent, and hopefully open to new ideas, but I don't see a revolution on the horizon. That said, his name is fun to say!

Farm Bill Follies

Apparently the House f'ed up and left a big piece out of the farm bill when the President signed it. While at some level it's annoying that we're still applying an 18th-century standard of signing a piece of paper and all of the attendant papers having to be in a bundle, it's circumstances like this that led to Don Young slipping the Coconut Road earmark into the highway bill without it ever being voted upon. I'm sure they'll sort this out, but Republicans are using it as a way to cause mischief.

Meanwhile, I see a lot of liberal bloggers like Ezra Klein praising John McCain for his resistance to the pork-laden farm bill. And I agree to an extent, but the 2002 farm bill was much worse, and the consequence of not passing this one means that the funding levels of the old one remain in place. So McCain is essentially advocating for worse subsidies and a worse bill. In addition I don't believe that McCain's vision of agricultural policy is some sort of organic food-heavy, no-GM, end to all agribusiness kind of nirvana. He actually doesn't much care about agricultural policy, but he likes to bluster about any "wasteful spending" that isn't military spending so he can rail against the farm bill without articulating any broader strategy.

The farm bill sucks, and it is an example of power politics trumping sensible policy, but let's not kid ourselves that John McCain has some larger principle about agriculture - or anything at all about it - in his back pocket.

The Last Bastion of Sausage Making

The farm bill is still a joke. Commodity prices have skyrocketed so farmers, particularly agribusiness, is profiting in a big way, but the subsidies have remained in the bill. It's a five-year bill so it ought to have some flexibility, but married couples making $1.5 million dollars don't need an extra incentive to grow. The bill isn't as horrible as in previous years, but it still ought to have some balance to it. Of course, this is one of the ultimate pork-barrel bills, where lawmakers of both parties reward the farmers in their states and the commodities they make. It's very hard to get any kind of reform in there.

World Food Crisis Update

Though broadcast media types have it in their contract to avoid talking about starving people at all costs - just too, too depressing, you know? - US print media actually has caught up to the story and are delivering some decent reports.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

This is an international crisis that's decades in the making, and attributable to a variety of factors. But this one bad crop can wipe out all of the gains on global poverty made in the past 10 or 20 years.

And of course, the food crisis is inextricably linked with the fuel crisis, as oil reached $115/barrel today.

This is the result:

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

The short-term answer is immediate food aid from the North. Longer-term, I think subsistence farming as a patriotic and economic imperative must return. The technology exists to grow something inside a planter even if you live in an apartment. A windowsill can be your farm. That's a piece of the puzzle; we also must end delivering so much agricultural product to alternative energy, and also become oil independent, which seems like a contradiction but is manageable by smart policy choices. Also, agribusiness is destroying family farms and driving up prices, and unquestionably contributing to what we're facing. Most of these are linked somewhat.

Today On America's Least Brilliant Idea

So the plan now in Afghanistan is to win the war through angering the civilians?

It is seriously being proposed that the way to win the war in Afghanistan is to ... spray herbicide on the crops of Afghan farmers. I'd say that this is the kind of project that historians, with the perspective of a century, could say "Hey, that was really counter-productive and stupid." The problem is that reasonable people, with the perspective of eight seconds, can now say "Hey, this is really counter-productive and stupid."

There may be a way to stop the Taliban and anti-government forces from profiting off of the opium trade so much, but it's not like the fields have little flags on them saying "Taliban". There's no way to know. And in the absence of any alternative agricultural product, I don't see how you can deny the farmers their livelihood. Opium does not only make heroin, it makes medicine. It is far from an illegal crop. And in addition, farmers plant FOOD next to the poppy fields. Are we seriously planning to starve the population?

If the government came up with a scheme to subsidize the growing of alternative crops, maybe there's an opportunity here. In fact, the Bush Administration is pushing that idea publicly. But mass spraying is insanity.

UPDATE: It should be noted that boneheaded ideas like this, as well as mission-creeping the war on terror into the war on drugs, is part of the reason why we are losing ground.

Six years after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the "war on terror" is failing and instead fueling an increase in support for extremist Islamist movements, a British think-tank said on Monday.

A report by the Oxford Research Group (ORG) said a "fundamental re-think is required" if the global terrorist network is to be rendered ineffective.

"If the al Qaeda movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England.

Six years later, we've yet to even begin to understand.

UPDATE II: Great catch by Matthew Yglesias. All of our previous ambassadors to Afghanistan were Near East specialists with contacts throughout the Muslim world. But:

Now, though, our man in Kabul is William Wood someone who, though certainly qualified to be an ambassador, has no experience or expertise in the region. Instead, our top political official in the key battleground against al-Qaeda's main qualification seems to be that his previous post was as ambassador to Colombia. Implicitly, then, the decision is being made to view Afghanistan primarily as a drug control problem rather than as a Taliban-and-al-Qaeda problem. That's just crazy.