by Katie Valentine and Whitney Allen

Thanksgiving is a time of plenty – or, maybe more accurately, of vast over-consumption — from the meal to the midnight shopping rampage afterward.

But across the United States this year, “plenty” has not been enjoyed by many farmers. A historic drought devastated crops over the summer, causing a spike in grain prices that led to farmers slaughtering cows early, selling their herds or feeding them candy as a cheap alternative to corn.

This year’s historic drought is still having an impact as we move into the holidays. In most cases the influence on food prices has been very modest — with only very slight increases in food products. But for those buying in bulk, the price increases have become a greater factor. For example, government purchases through the Emergency Food Assistance Program have dropped by half, from $723 million three years ago to $352 million. And that is putting pressure on food banks that rely on donations from these programs to keep their shelves full.

The drought, which at one point covered nearly 80 percent of the contiguous U.S. this summer, is now working its way through products in the grocery store. Here are some ways your Thanksgiving is influenced by this year’s severe drought — an event that Midwestern scientists say is “consistent with an observed warmer climate.”

Wheat: This summer’s drought decimated wheat crops in the U.S. and Russia, and this winter’s crop isn’t faring much better. As drought continues in much of the Great Plains region, winter wheat quality has declined for the past three weeks – as of November 19, only 34 percent of the crop was rated good or excellent by the USDA, and about 24 percent was in poor or very poor condition. This has caused the price of wheat in the U.S. to spike from $266.32 per ton in April 2012 to $358.20 in October. The increase in price won’t likely put a damper on your Thanksgiving shopping – the price of rolls increased only 3 cents since last year – but the poor wheat crop coupled with failures in other grain harvests has run the U.S. grain stockpiles to historically low levels, which could spell trouble for future Thanksgivings.

Turkey: The drought-induced increase in wheat and corn prices has driven turkey prices up too – though marginally. The average cost of a 16-pound turkey will be about $22.23 this year – a total increase of 66 cents from 2011. The increase may not mean much for consumers buying a single turkey for dinner, but it may be influencing their desire to donate turkeys to others. Several charities have reported being short the number of turkeys they want to serve needy families this year. Turkey prices are expected to remain higher through at least 2013.

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The leading contenders for the GOP presidential nomination are already jockeying for title of ‘most anti-scientific’.

The title of most ironic anti-scientist goes to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who proudly displayed his anti-intellectualism in a new GQ interview:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Uhh, Sen. Rubio, may not be a scientist but he is a member of the Senate’s Commerce, Science, & Transportation Committee. And presumably because he’s from Florida, home of the Kennedy Space Center, Rubio is actually on the Science and Space Subcommittee (!) which “has responsibility for science, engineering, and technology research and development and policy; calibration and measurement standards; and civilian aeronautical and space science and policy.”

The painful irony is that it is science and space science and NASA that have provided us with an accurate dating of the Earth – 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years:

This age is based on evidence from radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples.

Ah but I guess Rubio believes that kind of complicated sciency stuff is best left to scientists, not the people who oversee them and fund them. After all,  there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created — and we should “teach them all,” including “The World Turtle (also referred to as the Cosmic Turtle, the World-bearing Turtle, or the Divine Turtle),” which is “a giant turtle (or tortoise) supporting or containing the world.” And as I’m sure you know, this theory is entirely self consistent, hence the dictum “It’s turtles all the way down.”

For the record, while people can believe whatever they want, teaching them whatever someone happens to believe is not the path to a competitive 21st-century workforce — so it isn’t irrelevant to how our economy will grow as Rubio suggetss. The National Center for Science Education posted this statement on creationism from “scientists at universities and colleges in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana”:

Students who accept this material as scientifically valid are unlikely to succeed in science courses at the college level. These students will need remedial instruction in the nature of science, as well as in the specific areas of science misrepresented by Answers in Genesis.

Rubio naturally denies the reality of manmade climate change, too – if you reject the basic, universally-accepted stuff like radiometric dating, you’re gonna have trouble acknowledging things that are accepted by only 97% to 98% of climate scientists.

TPM has more in its piece, “Creationism Controversies The Norm Among Potential Republican 2016 Contenders.”

Food waste is a big deal in America. As grocery stores stock their shelves with holiday goodies, preparing for the rush of feasting consumers, much of what retailers sell won’t end up in people’s stomachs — it’ll end up in the trash.

Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted around the world, much of it in rich countries where grocery stores throw out imperfect products and consumers toss uneaten food. Since the 1970′s, America has seen a 50 percent jump in the amount of food wasted, according to the National Resources Defense Council. Consumers play a major role, tossing away roughly 250 pounds of food per person every year. But supermarkets play an even bigger role, discarding 10 percent of America’s total food supply at the retail level.

All that uneaten food accounts for nearly one quarter of U.S. methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than CO2.

This problem has spawned a range of reports and education programs designed to get Americans and retailers to waste less. But there’s another option that often gets overlooked: why don’t we just eat more of the food that grocery stores are throwing in the dumpster? That cuts back on both consumer and retailer waste.

There are already plenty of people, often called “freegans,” who do this. (A few years ago when living in New Hampshire, I was one of them for a short time; although not nearly to the degree that some of the most hardcore, full-timers are). The term freegan, which blends together “free” and “vegan,” is finally becoming more widely known in mainstream culture — even if it is a practice that has been around for as long as food itself.

Part money-saving opportunity, part political-statement, and part environmentalism, the modern freeganism movement — also known simply as dumpster diving — has spawned a culture of its own.

A new short documentary film, called “Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest,” intimately explores this culture. The film follows groups of dumpster divers in New York City and paints a portrait of the people who dig for wasted food. (Full disclosure: the Director, Alex Mallis, is an old friend of mine).

I really like the film because it doesn’t try to pretentiously puff up the importance of dumpster diving — which, in my experience, people who engage in the practice sometimes do. It simply provides a raw look at how it’s done. To me, these characters are the urban equivalent to our romanticized notion of indigenous cultures that “live off the land” and take only what they need.

Watch the 20-minute film below. It’s something to consider as you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal this week.

Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest from Alex Mallis on Vimeo.

CNN's Candy Crowley

by Matt Wasson, via Appalachian Voices

During a campaign season in which climate change featured most prominently as a laugh line at the Republican National Convention, the low point was when CNN’s Candy Crowley addressed “all you climate people” in her explanation of why climate didn’t come up during the presidential debates. Who knew that human disruption of the global climate had become such a narrow, provincial concern?

But there’s important information in the fact that a senior reporter for a major network could dismiss climate change as essentially a special interest issue. It’s evidence, if more were needed, that “all us climate people” got our butts kicked in the battle for the narrative in the 2012 election.

And like the Republican Party, which is now undergoing the usual soul searching that follows a big electoral defeat, those of us who believe that inaction on climate is the greatest threat facing our civilization (never mind the economy) have some serious soul searching to do about our own defeat, which occurred long before any votes were counted.

Crowley’s explanation was consistent with the conventional wisdom on why the president didn’t make climate an issue. Because it was an “Economy election” and everyone in the DC press must accept that government action on climate change could do serious harm to the economy (because “it’s become part of the culture,” even if it’s not true), any discussion of climate policy by the president would have been off-message and worked against his chances for re-election.

The unconventional wisdom, popular among “climate people,” is that the Obama campaign failed to recognize the high level of popular support for action on climate change and missed a golden opportunity to seize a winning wedge issue when they chose the more politically expedient route of ignoring it.

There’s probably some truth to both of these explanations, but here’s a third one that is particularly useful in the context of a presidential election: the campaigns avoided talking about climate policy because they believed that raising the issue would be harmful in a few swingy areas of key swing states that would likely decide the election.

Look, it’s tempting to point to all the national polls showing popular support for climate policy and say, “climate is a winning campaign issue.” But a political strategist would find nothing useful in those polls because campaigns are not won by appealing to the sentiments of the average American. Similarly, when a presidential candidate is speaking to a national audience, it’s easy to believe they are speaking to us — all of us. But they’re not. By and large, the candidates’ speeches are written to appeal to a handful of undecided voters in a few swing states, with just enough partisan red meat thrown in to motivate the party base to volunteer for the campaign and turn out to vote.

Americans understand that those swingy areas are the “tail that wags the dog” of our national elections but don’t necessarily think about the logical conclusion of that fact; the concerns and attitudes of swing voters in swing states are the “tail that wags the dog” of campaign messages, media coverage, and thus public understanding of what issues are important in the campaign.

The problem is fossil fuel interests have figured out how to wag that dog. They know they can’t win public opinion nationally, but by focusing resources in key areas of swing states such as Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, they can frame the local discussion of climate policy and environmental regulations to their advantage (i.e., as a “Job-killing war on coal“) and essentially neutralize those issues at the national level — at least during the election season.

If the Obama campaign’s pre-election polling looked anything like the maps of election results in coal-mining regions of southwestern Virginia and southern Ohio, it’s easy to imagine strategists telling the president, “Don’t exacerbate this ‘war on coal’ thing or it could hurt us in swing states” (see map):

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by Chris Williams

A few months ago, I reported on the largest geothermal heat pump project in the United States currently under construction at Ball State University in Indiana. The project is a breakthrough for the geothermal heat pump industry for a couple reasons. First, its massive size. Second, it is extremely economical and shows that geothermal heat pumps are ready for district heating and cooling applications.

To give you a sense of the size, the project is a 10,000 ton system, which is equivalent to 35 megawatts of power. That’s large enough to heat and cool 47 buildings — replacing four old, dirty coal-fired boilers. The project will also help create 2,300 direct and indirect jobs throughout the construction period.

The project will cost $60 million dollars, which equals $1.71 per watt of power, beating the cost of utility-scale solar projects. Utility-scale solar PV projects have an average installed cost of $4.69 according to the Open PV Project in November 2012; although this number if falling.

Geothermal is a great technology because it’s cheap and because it’s extremely energy dense, meaning it produces a large amount of valuable energy in a small amount of space.

A 35 MW solar PV project would generate roughly $3.8 million worth of electricity every year in Indiana and would likely cost around $105 million dollars to build. In contrast, the 35 MW geothermal project will generate $2 million dollars worth energy per year. The project is also being installed under parking lots and and sports fields, so it will take no additional room on campus. An equivalent 35MW solar PV facility would take up about 140 acres.

Those are some of the very clear benefits to geothermal that don’t get a lot of attention.

I want to follow up on the Ball State project with a quick snapshot of two other great geothermal projects that are helping drive adoption of this valuable and under-appreciated technology.

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The worst U.S. drought in more than half a century has weakened the safety net for the 50 million Americans who struggle to get enough to eat, and the nation’s food banks are raising the alarm as the holiday season gets into full swing. [Reuters]

A free-market auction has established a price for pollution in California: for each metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted, businesses, utilities and industries that bought allowances last week will pay just $10.09. [New York Times]

A Missouri appeals court has upheld polices developed by state utility regulators to implement a voter-approved law that requires greater use of renewable fuels. [Businessweek]

The Central Intelligence Agency has disbanded its Center on Climate Change and National Security, a unit formed in 2009 to monitor the interplay between a warming planet and intelligence and security challenges. [New York Times]

Even after the worst drought in a half century shriveled crops from Ohio to Nebraska, U.S. farmers are having their most-profitable year ever because of record- high prices and insurance claims. [Bloomberg]

The effects of climate change are already evident in Europe and the situation is set to get worse, the European Environment Agency has warned. In a report, the agency says the past decade in Europe has been the warmest on record. [BBC]

Talks on a new climate change treaty in Qatar next week will not advance unless rich countries promise more ambitious cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, four major developing nations said. [Reuters]

A U.N. report on rising greenhouse gas emissions reminded world governments Wednesday that their efforts to fight climate change are far from enough to meet their stated goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). [Associated Press]

China on Wednesday published a report detailing policies and efforts that have been made over the past year in facing up to the challenges of global climate change. [China Daily]