Big News for Food Safety

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser weighed in on the FDA Food Safety Modernization Bill, calling it the "best opportunity in a generation to improve the safety of the American food supply," in a New York Times Op-Ed published yesterday. "This legislation is by no means perfect. But it promises to achieve several important food safety objectives, greatly benefiting consumers without harming small farmers or local food producers."

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill tonight. Here are some basic objectives of the bill:

• The bill would, for the first time, give the F.D.A. (who oversee 80% of American food) the authority to test widely for dangerous pathogens and to recall contaminated food.
• The FDA would gain resources and authority to prevent food safety problems, rather than respond to them after people have become ill.
• The bill would also require large-scale, high-risk food-production plants get more frequent inspections.
• For the first time, imported foods would be subject to the same standards as those made in the United States.
• Small farms are exempt from the bill and may continue to be regulated under state and local laws. 
• Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma is annoying.

Back to the serious stuff

Commercial Whaling. Ugh. What can we say?

Back in 1975, Greenpeace started the world's first-ever Save the Whales campaign that eventually led to the International Whaling Commission's decision to ban commercial whaling (1986 to be exact). Apparently President Obama's delegation to the IWC has decided to back a plan that would legitimize commercial whaling for the first time since that ban was passed more than 20 years ago.

The Greenpeace Activist Network is right on top of the issue and headed to Washington next week but they still need your support. Please take a few moments to sign this petition to keep whales safe and out of politics!!

South Lawn Garden

With the Obama family (and yet-to-be-chosen pup) moving into 1600 Penn in a few short weeks, I suppose it is about time I join the camp that is lobbying for an organic, sustainable, inspirational, victory garden on the South Lawn.

In case you haven't heard about the "first family garden," the Washington Post published a great article earlier this week. Check it out here.

I just signed a petition on Eat The View and (of course) encourage you to do the same.

Obama appointments

President-elect Barack Obama just named his picks for the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture. Senator Ken Salazar and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack respectively. Brian Knowlton and Jeff Zeleny of the NY Times report:

As governor, Mr. Vilsack was a strong proponent of ethanol and wind energy, traveling the world in search of new markets and opportunities for American products.

Mr. Obama particularly praised Mr. Vilsack’s advocacy of biotech and his work to foster “an agricultural economy of the future that not only grows the food we eat but the energy we use.”

Mr. Salazar, a former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and state attorney general, has also been a proponent of renewable energy sources.

A farmer and rancher with deep roots in Colorado, he is known as a staunch conservationist and an opponent of developing oil shale on public lands. But some environmentalists are unhappy that Mr. Salazar has worked to allow more offshore oil exploration.

GW's environmental legacy

The Economist's Green.view wrote an interesting post about George W. Bush's environmental legacy and what he could do in his remaining time in office to "shake off his oilman’s legacy of environmental indifference, and acquire, rather surprisingly, a green halo." From the article:

Last year, Mr Bush established the world’s largest marine protected area—Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, in north-western Hawaii. The monument became the largest single conservation area in American history, home to some 7,000 species, including the monk seal, spinner dolphins and the green sea turtle. It was a big step, but now the question is whether he can pull off the same trick on an even grander scale, by fully protecting two vast areas of the Pacific Ocean from fishing and mineral exploitation.

Read the entire post here.

Green Collar Jobs to Revive the Economy?

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President-elect Barack Obama and his energy advisers have been making the case that a multibillion-dollar government investment in everything from wind turbines to a "smart" electrical grid is just what's needed to help revive the economy. The lure is millions of government-subsidized "green jobs."

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama argued that spending $150 billion over the next decade to boost energy efficiency would help create five million jobs. The jobs would include insulation installers, to make houses more energy-efficient, wind-turbine builders, to displace coal-fired electricity, and construction workers, to build greener buildings and upgrade the electrical grid.

Read the entire article here.

And on a similar note, I've been looking for a reason to post a link to Dayo Olopade's piece in The New Republic about the division of liberals along class lines due to the environmental movement. A few excerpts from Olopade's piece:

Class distinctions were bred into the green movement from the beginning, as elite families like the Roosevelts and Rockefellers backed early conservation efforts that generally privileged aesthetics over economics. The Sierra Club itself was at first a social organization that arranged outdoor adventures for its leisured members. In 1962, Rachel Carson (who grew up along the Allegheny River just north of Pittsburgh) published Silent Spring to expose the role of chemicals and industrial pollutants in the production cycle, promoting the defense-of-nature model that animates groups like the National Wildlife Federation, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club to this day. But, although Silent Spring talks extensively about factories, the seminal text makes virtually no mention of the people working inside them.

Labor groups in industries like logging or car manufacturing have spent years fighting the conservation agenda and blaming green victories like the Endangered Species Act for draining jobs in construction and development. By 1997, the AFL-CIO saw fit to campaign against U.S. adoption of the Kyoto Protocols, which it regarded as an economic albatross, and, in 2002, the Teamsters sided with conservative Republicans to push for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course, both groups have consistently endorsed and campaigned for Democrats throughout this period, and there have been occasional moments of synergy, as when greens and blues teamed up to push the Clean Air and the Occupational Health and Safety acts in the 1970s. But "it was easier to do that when the economy was booming," says Les Leopold, a labor historian and co-founder of the Public Health Institute. Since the rust belt began to tighten in the '80s, the character of the relationship has overwhelmingly been one of mutual mistrust and rivalry, with the greens viewed as hostile to the problems everyday people face.

Now green-collar jobs are providing an obvious incentive for compromise. The idea is to bring about the greening of the United States while restocking the beleaguered labor movement with good positions--in both traditional fields (such as building the storkish steel turbines that now dot Pennsylvanian hills) and new ones (like energy audits, efficiency retrofitting, and biofuel production).

Orson Scott Card addresses daily newspapers

I truly do try to avoid getting too deep into politics on the blog but with the election so near, it is hard to keep myself from sharing something like this. Science Fiction and Political writer, Orson Scott Card, writes an open letter addressed to the local daily newspapers criticising their coverage of the current financial crisis. Basically, he pins the financial crisis on the Democrats and points out how scandalous certain occurrences would be considered had they involved McCain. What makes the piece even more important, at least to me, is that Card is a Democrat and newspaper columnist himself. Absolutely a must read.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights? By Orson Scott Card