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resource, and, while burning agrofuels creates the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the feedstock plants absorb an equivalent amount of CO 2 as they grow. So what’s not to love? That’s certainly the attitude of the U.S. government, which offers a |
51-cent credit to fuel companies for every gallon of ethanol they blend with gasoline (U.S. ethanol consumption topped 5 billion gallons in 2006 and is climbing). The European Union aims to replace 10 percent of its vehicle fuel with agrofuel |
by 2020. But the rosy picture collapses completely when you do the math. A “life cycle analysis” of our current system of corn ethanol production (including growing crops, distilling fuel, transporting inputs and outputs long distances, and making farm machinery) |
shows that the whole process burns nearly as much fuel energy as it makes. In many estimates, it burns more than it makes. This is not a fuel source—it’s a massive exercise in greenwashing theater, a cycle that burns extra |
oil and adds to global warming. The force behind it is not environmentalism, but the political power of Big Corn. Biodiesel has a better energy balance, but like corn ethanol it has very ugly global effects on people and the |
environment. These effects are built into the agribusiness-based farming model fostered by public policy today—a model that sucks up water, erodes soil, pollutes groundwater, and produces N 2 O (an extremely powerful greenhouse gas) at unsustainable rates. THERE’S ONLY so |
much farmable land on the planet. From Brazil to Indonesia, rain forest is being hacked down or burned at a rapacious rate to feed wealthy countries’ appetite for sugarcane, soy, and palm oil. Torching a lush ecosystem to factory-farm agrofuels |
does not do the environment any favors. It’s even worse if you’re burning a tropical peat swamp forest, which stores huge amounts of sequestered carbon (this is how Indonesia became the world’s biggest greenhouse gas producer other than the U.S. |
and China). And it’s not just irreplaceable biodiversity that large-scale monocropping plantations push aside—it’s also poor communities, including indigenous groups, whose land is bought or strong-armed away from them, destroying livelihoods and traditional ways of life. What’s also bad news |
for the poor is that agrofuels burn food—lots of food. To fill one SUV tank with ethanol takes 450 pounds of corn, enough to feed a person for a year, and thousands of gallons of water. The thirst for agrofuels |
has already started raising world corn prices, spelling malnutrition and disaster for many of the world’s poor. One kind of agrofuel that does show promise, if grown ethically, is ethanol distilled from cellulose (using woody plants) rather than from starch |
(using corn or other food crops). Cellulosic fermentation technology, which is still being developed, may eventually produce fuel from crops such as switchgrass, which needs less fertilizer than corn and which needs replanting only once a decade. The funding currently |
going to Big Corn must be switched to things that will work. Locally produced cellulosic ethanol should take its place among a combination of renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, tide, geothermal, and small-scale dams. But the most important take-home |
lesson is conservation: We must stop using so much power. If we converted into ethanol every single grain of corn, wheat, rice, and soy the U.S. grows, that ethanol would power only about 4 percent of the country’s current yearly |
energy consumption. Fortunately, there’s a lot of waste we can cut. We don’t need to ship practically everything we buy thousands of miles across the ocean. (Don’t put that New Zealand apple in your mouth—it’s soaked in low-grade maritime fuel!) |
We don’t need to drive sport-utility behemoths, live in McMansions, or avoid mass transit. It’s not going to be easy, but in return we will get better-tasting food (in season), a coastline that’s not under water, and a planet for |
our grandchildren to live on. Want to read more about agrofuels? This highly readable article from Foreign Policy in Focus lays out some of the social actors pushing for agrofuels made by large-scale monocropping and some of the social consequences: |
Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, considers the effects that turning food into fuel will have on world food supplies and political instability: Here’s a useful page recapping a number of concerns about agrofuels’ impact on |
the planet and on human society This accessible, in-depth report by the International Forum on Globalization and the Institute for Policy Studies is a comprehensive introduction to “The False Promise of Biofuels”: This slightly dry six-page report gives you the |
rundown on different ways in which agrofuels can increase greenhouse gas emissions and harm rainforests and other sources of biodiversity. The summary of life-cycle analyses—that is, studies of whether you get more energy out of biofuels than you expend in |
Author: Ishikawa, 1908 Two dorsal fins with ungrooved, large spines, first dorsal fin height less than 2/3 of its length from origin to base. First dorsal spine origin over pectoral inner margins, long, very angular prenarial snout with distance from tip to inner nostril greater than distance from nostril to |
upper labial furrow, tricuspidate lateral denticles, no white spots, oblique-cusped cutting teeth in both jaws, no subterminal notch on caudal fin, no anal fin, and upper precaudal pit and lateral keels on caudal peduncle. Body fairly slender. Snout angular, broad-based but narrow-tipped, and very long, diagonal distance from snout tip |
to excurrent aperture of nostril greater than that from excurrent aperture to upper labial furrow, preoral snout about 1.5 to 1.9 times mouth width, preorbital snout at least twice eye length; eyes closer to first gill slits than snout tip; nostrils closer to mouth than snout tip; anterior nasal flap |
with posterior secondary lobe small and considerably narrower at base than distance from its base to inner corner of nostril. First dorsal spine moderately long, much less than fin base and with tip falling well below apex of fin; second spine long, slightly lower than fin, and usually less than |
6% of total length; first dorsal fin anteriorly situated, with fin origin over pectoral inner margins and spine origin over or slightly behind pectoral rear tips; first dorsal fairly low, height slightly less than 2/3 of its length from origin to rear tip; second dorsal markedly smaller than first, with |
height less than 5% of total length; pectoral fins broad and sernifalcate, posterior margins slightly concave, rear tips narrowly rounded; pelvic midbases about equidistant between first and second dorsal bases; caudal fin narrow-lobed and long, with long ventral lobe and strongly notched postventral margin. Precaudal pits strong. Lateral trunk denticles |
tricuspidate and with weakly scalloped posterior borders in adults. Colour: no white spots present on sides of body, dorsal fins with white edges, caudal without dark markings. Size moderate, up to slightly less than 1 m. Western North Pacific: Southeastern Japan and East China Sea, including the Republic of Korea |
and the Philippines. A common but little known temperate and tropical dogfish of the outer continental and insular shelves and uppermost slopes at 150 to 300 m depth, presumably on or near bottom. Maximum total length 91 cm, females mature at 79 cm. Interest to Fisheries: Apparently common in its |
range and taken in fisheries off Japan, but details not available. This species is usually synonymized with S. mitsukurii or S. fernandinus, but is recognized here following Chen, Taniuchi and Nose (1979). Holotype: Types not named and apparenity not extant (see Chen, Taniuchi and Nose, 1979). Type Locality: Ishikawa (1908) |
mentioned three specimens, 2 from Tokyo Market and apparently from the Sagami Sea, and one from Kagoshima, Japan, on which he based his description of S. japonicus and deposited in the National Science Museum, Japan. |
Learning about food and nutrition is fun. At least, I think it is. Having taught introductory nutrition for over 25 years, I know students can be challenged by the diversity of topics covered in the class – from food and nutrients, to physiology and biochemistry, studying nutrition can be tricky. But what really makes nutrition challenging, and what originally drew me to a career |
in nutrition, is the real-world application of nutrition knowledge. People see themselves eating hamburgers and orange juice, not protein and vitamin C. The idea for what would come to be known as Build-a-Sandwich came to me while attending Angel Day, a technology seminar at Penn State. At Angel Day, I saw a fun, interactive online activity demonstrating how multiple environmental systems impact weather. I |
wanted to create a similar activity to show students how the food choices they make impact their nutrition. With the help of multimedia specialist Mark DeLuca and instructional designer Elizabeth Pyatt, Build-a-Sandwich was born. Build-a-Sandwich is a colorful, interactive online activity that operates like a game and is designed to help students learn how real-world food choices impact their overall nutrition. Students create sub |
sandwiches using a variety of breads, cheeses, meats and toppings similar to what they would find in any given sub shop. After all their selected ingredients are assembled, students’ sandwiches are given a nutritional score. The score can range from 0 to 100 and is based on 10 nutritional criteria: fiber, fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron and sodium levels, |
as well as how many food groups the sandwich contains. A detailed report provides students with information about how the scoring system works. Students can then easily modify their sandwich’s ingredients and see how those modifications impact the nutritional score. To create Build-a-Sandwich, my team and I interviewed local sub shop owners to obtain information such as the most commonly selected ingredients and portion |
sizes. A nutritional scoring system was developed, so both positive and negative aspects of a sandwich’s nutrient content would be evaluated. Since every food is composed of a variety of nutrients, the way the nutrients interact in your meal is crucial. The game makes learning about nutrition fun yet challenging by summoning students to try to create a sandwich with a healthy set of |
nutrients. For example, cheese is high in saturated fat, sodium and calcium. Eliminating cheese from your sandwich improves saturated fat and sodium levels, but worsens the calcium level. Creating a sandwich with an ideal nutrient composition is quite a challenge. One unanticipated setback to creating Build-a-Sandwich was determining how to use the program effectively in a teaching environment. I wanted the experience to be |
fun, but I needed it to be gradable. In the end, I was able to create an assignment that incorporated both of those goals. For the assignment, students build three sandwiches. The first is made with set ingredients so there are set answers. The second is made of students’ favorite ingredients so they can see how nutritional their favorite sandwich is. The final sandwich |
must be within specific range of calories and have a nutritional score of at least 80. Frequently, this requires students to only make small changes, such as adding vegetables to their favorite sandwich. Ingredients: 12-inch white bread, salami, mayonnaise Ingredients: 12-inch white bread, american, ham, lettuce, tomato, black olives, mayonnaise, ranch dressing Ingredients: 12-inch wheat bread, swiss, tuna salad, extra tomato, extra spinach, extra |
red and green peppers, extra sprouts, horseradish sauce Students have reacted positively to Build-a-Sandwich. In fact, several students reported spending multiple hours trying to build a sandwich that earned a perfect 100-point nutritional score. Unfortunately for those students, it was discovered the highest attainable nutritional score is 92. The reason for this is that the scoring system is based on actual values and set |
nutrition standards, not a perfect score. Although this initially seemed to be a flaw, it became a great opportunity to teach students that sub sandwiches with regular ingredients will never meet some recommended standards (such as sodium standards), so it is really up to the individual to make their choices as healthy as possible. Build-a-Sandwich has been a great tool to help students think |
Surprising findings about Hepatitis C and insulin resistance We have known for several years that Hepatitis C, a common cause of liver cirrhosis and cancer, also makes people three to |
four times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. In studying the insulin resistance of 29 people with Hepatitis C, Australian researchers have confirmed that they have high insulin resistance, |
a precursor to diabetes. However, almost all insulin resistance was in muscle, with little or none in the liver, a very surprising finding given that Hepatitis C is a liver |
disease. Dr Kerry Lee Milner and Professor Don Chisholm from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in collaboration with Professor Jacob George from the Storr Liver Unit, University of Sydney |
at Westmead Hospital, have published their study in the prestigious international journal, Gastroenterology, now online. Insulin, a hormone made by the pancreas, helps the body use glucose for energy. The |
two most important organs that respond to insulin are the liver and muscle. A healthy liver responds to insulin by not producing glucose, while healthy muscle responds by using glucose. |
An insulin resistant liver produces unwanted glucose, while insulin resistant muscle cannot absorb it from the bloodstream, leading to high levels of sugar in the blood. “Contrary to all expectations, |
not only did we find no significant insulin resistance in the liver of the patients in the study, half of them suffered from a strain of Hepatitis C that causes |
about three times the normal level of fat to accumulate in the liver,” said Professor Chisholm. “The fifteen people with very high levels of fat in the liver had the |
same degree of insulin resistance as the fourteen that didn’t have fatty livers.” “A number of important investigators around the world have been arguing that fat in the liver is |
an extremely important determinant of insulin resistance, perhaps the most important. At least in this context, we’ve shown that not to be the case.” “Before you get Type 2 diabetes, |
you must become insulin resistant and your insulin producing cells must also fail to compensate. Insulin resistance alone will not give you diabetes.” “In our study, we gave intravenous glucose, |
a specific stimulus to insulin secretion, and showed that insulin secretion was not impaired in Hepatitis C patients compared to our control group.” “This finding tells us that people with |
Hepatitis C who develop diabetes probably have susceptible insulinproducing cells, and would probably get it anyway – but much later in life. The extra insulin resistance caused by Hepatitis C |
apparently brings on diabetes at 35 or 40, instead of 65 or 70.” “More work now needs to be done into why Hepatitis C causes insulin resistance in muscle. That |
will give us better insight into the behaviour of the disease.” “At this stage, it is helpful for people with Hepatitis C to understand insulin resistance and what it can |
mean for them. If they have relatives with Type 2 diabetes, they will be genetically prone to developing it themselves and so would be advised to manage their diets very |
carefully and take plenty of exercise – to slow onset.” Notes to Editors Hepatitis C is a blood-borne virus and in Australia is caused mainly by drug users sharing needles, |
but also by unsterile tattooing or body piercing. There are roughly 10,000 new infections each year. There is no vaccine for Hepatitis C, unlike Hepatitis A and B. There are |
6 strains of Hepatitis C – the participants in this study were selected because they had either of two common strains in Australia, Genotype 1 and Genotype 3. The latter |
strain causes significant fat deposits in the liver. While it is not noted in the media release above, the study observed that the degree of insulin resistance is a negative |
predictor of anti-viral treatment. In other words, the greater the insulin resistance, the less responsive people will be to treatment. Between 50-80% of people who are treated for Hepatitis C |
do not respond to treatment. Treating with lifestyle changes or an insulin sensitiser should reduce this percentage – as well as delaying onset of diabetes. The study found that predictors |
of insulin resistance were viral load and subcutaneous fat. This suggests the possibility that the virus alters either fat supply or alters the cell signalling proteins released from subcutaneous fat, |
Urban Ore: Trail In the past few years, the business development team at Trail Operation has been working to adapt Teck’s Trail smelter complex furnace technology to responsibly recycle thousands |
of tonnes of end-of-life TVs, monitors, computers and printers – or “e-waste” – in Western Canada and the United States. E-waste is generated in enormous and increasing volumes every year; |
Environment Canada estimates that Canadians produced 156,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2005, and predicts that amounts will reach approximately 224,500 tonnes by 2010. The projected 34% increase over eight years |
reflects consumer trends favouring ‘disposable’ technology; this is most apparent in the average three-year turnover for laptops and two-year turnover for cell phones . In addition to the sheer volume |
of trash our society gen¬erates, there is another issue to consider: e-scrap contains metals and hazardous materials that escape their protective casings when these are broken during disposal, and leak |
into the soil and waterways surrounding landfills. Landfilling of e-waste, therefore, is a questionable practice for environmental reasons in addition to being a loss of valuable metals. Rapid innovations and |
turnover of electronic equipment has far outpaced industry’s ability to handle its disposal; e-waste destined for recycling often finds its way to developing countries, where it is manually dismantled in |
unregulated, outdated and unhealthy ways. Taking care of our own e-waste in Canada breaks this cycle of exporting the problem to countries less capable of dealing with it safely. In |
Trail Operation’s fuming process, shredded e-waste is added as supplemental feed to the furnace. Metals such as germanium, zinc, indium and lead are recovered as metal powder and integrated into |
the standard products of Trail Operation. Plastics and wood from old TVs are consumed as fuel, generating steam that is recovered and used to heat vessels elsewhere onsite. Materials such |
as silica and iron are incorporated into the final product, which is then sold for use in Portland cement manufacturing. Over 6,600 tonnes of e-waste was processed through the fuming |
furnace in 2006 and 2007, representing about 150 tonnes of lead that has been recovered, reused and kept out of landfills. By the end of 2007, Trail Operation had been |
accepted as a processor for the BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan provincial electronic recycling programs, having met their strict environmental and responsible processing requirements. In 2008, the process continues to evolve. |
For example, due to the high demand for responsible recycling of leaded cathode ray tube glass found in old TVs, a second recycling stream is now sent directly to the |
Operation’s KIVCET smelter. This offsets some minor reagent costs, and is a more efficient processing point for leaded materials. To handle the growing amounts of e-waste and related materials, engineering |
studies are underway to expand the capacity of the recycling facilities at Trail. Teck is also researching capabilities to recycle other types of e-waste such as DVD players, VCRs, audio/visual |
November 07, 2012 The Dark Side of Scientific Rationality During the 1980s and 1990s, experts working for the World Bank and development agencies persuaded African nations like Malawi to stop subsidizing fertilizer. Subsidies for fertilizer were extremely popular among Malawi's people -- roughly 90 percent are small farmers growing staples |
on depleted soils who cannot afford fertilizer at market prices. Malawi's political leaders resisted the expert advice for years. But donor nations are powerful in aid-dependent countries, and Malawi eventually acceded to their demands. The results were disastrous. Malawians were not able to produce enough corn to feed themselves. By |
2005, more than one out of three Malawians were dependent on foreign food aid, and the country was on the brink of famine. In an agriculture-dependent region where poor harvests can have devastating effects, Malawi's government changed tack, and later that year started subsidizing nitrogen fertilizer over the objections of |
its expert Western advisers, who predicted a worsening of the disaster. Instead, the opposite happened. Over the next four years, corn production per hectare of land tripled. Acute child hunger rates plunged. Malawi was able to turn away powdered milk from Unicef and export food to its neighbors. Britain's Department |
for International Development evaluated the program and found that Malawi's $74 million annual corn fertilizer subsidy was worth $120 to $140 million annually -- a nearly 100 percent return on investment. Malawi wasn't alone. In Rwanda, corn yields rose 75 percent after it started subsidizing the distribution of fertilizer. Zambia |
and Mali launched their own efforts to expand fertilizer use. Egg on its face, the World Bank was forced to admit, albeit in its crabbed bureaucratic vernacular, that subsidies "may be justifiable on a temporary basis to stimulate increased fertilizer use in the short term." How did the experts get |
it so wrong -- and for so long? There's nothing to suggest mal intent. The experts in question have in many cases dedicated their lives to helping poor nations develop. All are highly-educated, not ignorant. Writing in Breakthrough Journal, innovation expert Daniel Sarewitz blames something else: "scientific rationality unchecked by |
experience, empathy, and moral grounding." By "scientific rationality," Sarewitz, a geologist by training, doesn't mean science, per se, but rather the reductive chains of logic that end up conflating science with policy. It's not the rationality itself that's the problem, but rather its detachment from a larger social, moral, and |
historical context. The logic of ending fertilizer subsidies was, for example, ironclad. The law of comparative advantage says that nations will grow faster if they focus on doing things they can do better or more cheaply than other nations. For countries like Malawi and Rwanda, that meant producing (and thus |
subsidizing the production of) more high-value crops for export, like tea and coffee, and less of low-value food crops for domestic consumption, like corn and wheat. Experts produced rigorous, scientific studies showing that eliminating fertilizer subsidies would result in faster economic growth. But this rationality only worked in a vacuum. |
Cutting fertilizer subsidies required ignoring Malawi's history of depleted soils. It required ignoring the experience of other nations in Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America, which have all massively boosted productivity through fertilizers and subsidies. And it required dismissing the cries of protest from Malawi's leaders and farmers. Sarewitz |
offers climate policy as a case study in the ways that an overdependence upon scientific rationality can lead experts and policy makers to places they probably don't want to go. Over the last two decades, the range of policy options considered to be "science-based" has narrowed dramatically. Even after the |
collapse of international efforts to establish legally binding limits on carbon emissions, many policy experts and climate advocates continue to maintain that pricing carbon and hence raising the cost of fossil energy is the only "science-based" response to global warming. Indeed, as the expert consensus on carbon pricing congealed, other |
policy responses were often characterized as unscientific, or even anti-science. "The main points from climate science," wrote Environmental Defense Fund economist Gernot Wagner recently, "are no longer up for debate: the planet is warming; humans are the cause of it; we need to limit emissions... carbon is a pollutant; we |
need make polluters pay, either through a cap or a price.... Once again, this one is not up for debate.... you can have very real economic debates around whether to tax or cap carbon.... But it's not up for debate whether 'carbon = pollutant' leads to the need to cap |
or price carbon. It does." It is a remarkable chain of reasoning. If you accept that the planet is warming, then you must support an emissions cap or a price on carbon. To question the latter is to deny the former. Their devotion to a particularly narrow scientific rationality led |
many liberals to imagine carbon pricing to be the pure policy expression of unadulterated science. But like ending fertilizer subsidies, raising the price of energy to combat climate change is perfectly rational only so long as the larger context is ignored. "If one were seeking a policy intervention that could |
simply and effectively erode economic and social equity worldwide," Sarewitz writes, "one could hardly do better than to increase the cost of energy.... This fact is so blindingly obvious that nearly every large developing country has treated the idea of a global agreement to raise energy prices as a joke |
of Swiftean character." There is, of course, an important role for scientific rationality. Morality unchecked by scientific rationality can descend into dogmatism. Historical awareness unchecked by scientific rationality results in a commitment to traditionalism for its own sake. But for scientific rationality to be moral, wise, and result in positive |
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