THINGS WE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT, BUT AREN’T
Local Clean and Renewable Energy Resolutions are Silent on Food, Cars and War
The average bite of food travels 1500 miles before it reaches our plates. Wouldn’t it be more carbon friendly to get more of our food locally?
Yes. But nobody is talking about this. Why?
Plus, most of our food is grown with nitrogen fertilizers, which require a carbon intensive manufacturing process that uses natural gas.
Nobody is talking about this, either. Why?
And then most of that nitrogen fertilizer results not in plant growth but in water pollution and nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO2.
None of this is necessary. And none of this is of our own choosing.
And it’s not of our choosing because our food system was not created by and for the consumer or the citizen. It was created by and for the big companies that profit from it.
And yet our local “clean and renewable energy” resolutions don’t address the food system at all. They should. But they don’t. They are completely silent about the nature or the design of our food system.
I have studied the local “clean and renewable energy” resolutions of DesMoines, Minneapolis, Durham and Louisville.
These local resolutions are lauded and applauded and cheered and congratulated and yet they say almost nothing about the food system, which is arguably the single most consequential sector of our economy.
Why?
I don’t know. You tell me.
I suspect it’s because these local resolutions are drafted and shepherded through city councils by people who can’t or won’t challenge big business.
These are the people who criticized Michael Moore’s consequential documentary Planet of the Humans, not because it misrepresented solar energy or because it was “eco-fascist (daring to mention population),” but because it exposed big name environmentalists as being in bed with Wall Street and promoting some of the most destructive and polluting “solutions” to climate change.
Planet of the Humans says, in essence, we don’t have a carbon problem. We have a problem with big money running the show, proposing “nonsolutions” instead of real solutions, with big name environmentalists (and Big Green organizations) on precisely the wrong side of almost every issue.
Meanwhile, the most sincere people in the world, my local Louisville friends who are promoting “clean and renewable energy” have bought the lies of these charlatans who want to sell us corporate products, without solving any real problems.
Most of our climate and environmental problems will not be solved with corporate products like solar panels and electric cars. In fact, most solutions to climate change, air quality, water quality, soil quality and food quality will be solved by depriving big corporations of their profits and allowing people to take back control of their public policy, and yes, their economy.
These big companies are the players that want us to focus on GDP and the stock market as the sole measures of economic health. They want us to focus on a mythical free market and ignore the logical and accounting errors that allow big business to shift their costs onto us.
If restaurant companies and grocery monopolies make money selling junk food while shifting onto us the cost of polluted air, polluted water and an increasingly unstable climate, that’s what they will do, not because they are bad people, but because if they don’t do it, they will be replaced by someone who will.
It’s a powerful system, with powerful players, and my friends in the environmental and climate movement rightly sense that they are grabbing a tiger by the tail by taking on these economic giants.
So they content themselves with half measures like solar energy and electric cars, which are just fine with Wall Street. Wall Street can make money selling solar panels and electric cars, while posing as the good guys vis-a-vis the fossil fuel corporations who play the bad guys in this drama.
But in secret, the fossil fuel companies love the solar panel companies and the electric car companies. It takes a great deal of fossil fuel to make these products, while we pretend to be making progress and reducing our “carbon footprint.”
What they don’t have is a plan for actually reducing our energy consumption. All this talk about clean and renewable energy is a huge distraction if it doesn’t result in actual reductions in energy consumption. What we’re asked to believe is that when we implement solar panels and electric cars we are marching inexorably towards a fossil free future driven by clean energy.
But these same people are deaf, blind and mute when it comes to the carbon and environmental impact of 1) war, 2) food and 3) our automobile-centric transportation system.
I have news. There is no such thing as “clean and renewable” war. There are no clean or renewable bombs. There are no clean or renewable sanctions for the US Empire to control the world.
There is no clean or renewable transportation system, if we continue to churn out 17 million new cars nationally and 65 million new cars worldwide. The manufacture of a car is a hugely polluting process, even if it's electric. Building new roads is hugely polluting and ecologically disruptive.
As for food, we COULD be building a clean and renewable food system, but it’s not the system we have. We COULD have a system that removes the local, state and federal subsidies and incentives from our toxic food system, but that’s not what we’re doing.
It’s very different from the system that we have. It’s good for everyone but the big companies. And nobody is talking about it.
What’s up with that?