If the Paris Climate Change Deal Is Serious, Let’s Make All Agriculture Organic
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The news from Paris is good: 196 nations have pledged to limit carbon emissions in the coming decades. But a pledge isn’t a reality. It’s just a promise.
If all these countries are serious about reducing carbon emissions, they should immediately institute programs to recycle organic waste through composting and return it to the soil, where it will greatly take carbon from the air and turn it into plant material and, by feeding it to the soil, sequester its carbon for thousands of years.
Scientists tell us that if the world’s agriculture fertilized soil with composted organic waste (the U.S. alone dumps close to a billion tons of organic waste into landfills yearly instead of composting it and returning it to the soil), the carbon emissions problem would be solved by that tactic alone.
So I’m suggesting that we keep our eye on what countries do to capture and recycle organic waste back into the soil. It will be a mark of how serious they really are about affecting climate change. Otherwise, kiss Miami (and a lot of other coastal places) goodbye.
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MONSANTO ON TRIAL FOR ECOCIDE
““Monsanto is able to ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products, and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, and by manipulating the press and media. Monsanto’s history reads like a text-book case of impunity, benefiting transnational corporations and their executives, whose activities contribute to climate and biosphere crises and threaten the safety of the planet.” –Andrew Leu, President of IFOAM.
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), IFOAM International Organics, Navdanya, Regeneration International (RI), and Millions Against Monsanto, joined by dozens of global food, farming and environmental justice groups have announced that they will put Monsanto on trial for crimes against nature and humanity, and ecocide, in The Hague, Netherlands, next year on World Food Day, October 16, 2016.
The announcement was made at a press conference held in conjunction with the COP21 United Nations Conference on Climate Change, November 30 – December 11, in Paris.
Speaking at the press conference, Ronnie Cummins, international director of the OCA (US) and Via Organica (Mexico), and member of the RI Steering Committee, said: “The time is long overdue for a global citizens’ tribunal to put Monsanto on trial for crimes against humanity and the environment. We are in Paris this month to address the most serious threat that humans have ever faced in our 100-200,000 year evolution—global warming and climate disruption. Why is there so much carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere and not enough carbon organic matter in the soil? Corporate agribusiness, industrial forestry, the garbage and sewage industry and agricultural biotechnology have literally killed the climate-stabilizing, carbon-sink capacity of the Earth’s living soil.”
Vandana Shiva, physicist, author, activist and founder of Navdanya, and member of the RI Steering Committee said: “Monsanto has pushed GMOs in order to collect royalties from poor farmers, trapping them in unpayable debt, and pushing them to suicide. Monsanto promotes an agro-industrial model that contributes at least 50 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Monsanto is also largely responsible for the depletion of soil and water resources, species extinction and declining biodiversity, and the displacement of millions of small farmers worldwide.”
Also speaking at the conference were Valerie Cabanes, lawyer and spokesperson for End Ecocide on Earth; Hans Rudolf Herren, president and CEO of the Millennium Institute, president and founder of Biovision, and member of the RI Steering Committee; Arnaud Apoteker, creator of the anti-GMO campaign in France, which became one of the priority campaigns of Greenpeace France, and author of “Fish in Our Strawberries: Our Manipulated Food;” and Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPESFood) and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Monsanto has developed a steady stream of highly toxic products which have permanently damaged the environment and caused illness or death for thousands of people. These products include:
• PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl), one of the 12 Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP) that affect human and animal fertility;
• 2,4,5 T (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid), a dioxin-containing component of the defoliant Agent Orange, which was used by the US Army during the Vietnam War and continues to cause birth defects and cancer;
• Lasso, an herbicide that is now banned in Europe;
• Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world, and the source of the greatest health and environmental scandal in modern history. This toxic herbicide, designated a probable human carcinogen by the World Health Organization, is used in combination with genetically modified (GMO) Roundup Ready seeds in large-scale monocultures, primarily to produce soybeans, maize and rapeseed for animal feed and biofuels.
Relying on the “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights” adopted by the UN in 2011, an international court of lawyers and judges will assess the potential criminal liability of Monsanto for damages inflicted on human health and the environment. The court will also rely on the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002, and it will consider whether to reform international criminal law to include crimes against the environment, or ecocide, as a prosecutable criminal offense. The International Criminal Court, established in 2002 in The Hague, has determined that prosecuting ecocide as a criminal offense is the only way to guarantee the rights of humans to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be protected.
MEANWHILE:
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According to Food Democracy Now: It’s hard to believe the levels of deception that Congress and our regulatory officials at the FDA will go to, but in the past several weeks the FDA has approved GMO salmon and denied a citizens’ petition by the Center for Food Safety submitted in March of 2012 that called for mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods.
If this weren’t bad enough, right now the Senate, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, are scrambling to pass the ultimate Monsanto Protection Act by sneaking a rider into a must-pass spending bill that would permanently deny states the right to pass GMO labeling laws and create a system that only allows for “voluntary” labeling of GMO foods.
Incredibly, even as we fight for mandatory GMO labeling and basic transparency in our food supply, the Obama administration has just approved another Monsanto GMO corn variety and given “preliminary” approval of yet another new GMO potato by J.R. Simplot. This is an outrage!
Even worse, rather than put four simple words, “Produced with genetic engineering,” on food packages sold in the United States, leading American food companies are intentionally trying to deceive us even further by mandating that GMOs be considered “natural” under U.S. law.
At the same time, Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Associations (GMA) are promoting an intentionally deceptive solution that would allow these companies to continue to hide GMOs using a meaningless technological solution known as QR codes, which function like bar codes, and would only allow people with smartphones to see if their foods contain GMOs.
Currently, both Congress and our federal regulatory agencies are allowing GMOs to be rubberstamped like new flavors of Chiclets. Today, in America, we have a regulatory system that functions like the Wild West, with the FDA, EPA and USDA approving virtually any new GMO crop (and now animals) based on cherry-picked corporate funded cigarette science that allows corporations like Monsanto to submit their own in-house studies, while denying the health and safety concerns of hundreds of independently funded research scientists.
What you need to understand is that there is a bipartisan selling out of American democracy and food safety to the highest bidder, and in this case, your basic right to know what’s in your food and how it’s produced are up for sale.
The good news is we’ve built a powerful citizen-led movement that has passed GMO labeling laws in Vermont, Connecticut and Maine and we need your help to defend these historic victories over Monsanto and the GMA’s corruption of our democratic institutions.
Tell your Senators and the President: “I support GMO labeling!” Every voice counts!
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_HR_1599_the_Ultimate_Monsanto_Protection_Act2/?t=8&akid=1730.101853.SEC44H
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HOW THE GOP TRIED TO UNDERMINE THE PARIS CLIMATE ACCORDS
If we don’t win the climate battle, you can kiss organics goodbye.
Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in The New Yorker: Don’t trust the United States. This was the message Republicans in Congress were trying to send the delegates at the international climate summit in Paris.
The logic, such as it is, of the claim is that merely by making it the House G.O.P. goes a long way toward proving its validity, Kolbert says.
Last week, at a news conference in Paris, President Barack Obama exhorted negotiators to keep in mind what is at stake at the summit. “This one trend—climate change—affects all trends,” Obama said. “This is an economic and security imperative that we have to tackle now.”
Even as he spoke, congressional Republicans were doing their best to undermine him. That same day, the House approved two resolutions aimed at blocking regulations to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. The first would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing rules aimed at cutting emissions from new power plants; the second would prevent the agency from enforcing rules targeted at existing power plants.
Together, these rules are known as the Clean Power Plan, and they were crucial to the Americans’ negotiating position in Paris. (The Clean Power Plan is central to the United States’ pledge, made in advance of the summit, to cut its emissions by twenty-six per cent.) The House votes, which followed Senate approval of similar resolutions back in November, were, at least according to some members, explicitly aimed at subverting the talks. Lawmakers want to “send a message to the climate conference in Paris that in America, there’s serious disagreement with the policies of this president,” Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, explained.
As a practical matter, the importance of the votes is probably minimal. Obama has already threatened to veto the resolutions if they reach his desk, and there isn’t enough support for them for an override. But the resolutions are not the only trick congressional Republicans have up their collective sleeves. President Obama has pledged three billion dollars to what’s known as the Green Climate Fund. The fund is intended to help developing countries cope with climate change and also to adopt clean-energy systems. In a just world, three billion dollars is far less than the U.S. should be contributing; Republicans are threatening to block even that contribution. Leaving the fund under-financed increases the chance that poorer countries will walk away from any proposed accord. (Thank goodness that trick didn’t work and nobody walked.)
That Republicans would try to undercut the Administration’s efforts to do something—anything—to reduce carbon emissions is no surprise. Willful ignorance about climate change has become a point of pride among elected officials in the G.O.P. Recently, the Associated Press asked a panel of eight scientists to assess the accuracy of Presidential candidates’ tweets on climate change using a scale of zero to a hundred. (The tweets were shown to the scientists without the candidates’ names, to guard against bias.) All nine of the Republican candidates graded got failing scores. Donald Trump, for instance, received a fifteen, while Ben Carson got a thirteen and Ted Cruz a six. “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, who served as one of the judges, wrote of Cruz’s statements. “That sort of ignorance would be dangerous in a doorman, let alone a president.”
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WHAT ABOUT THE NEW TECHNIQUE OF GENE SPLICING?
So where do we organic folks come down on science’s new ability to easily change the human DNA at will? In my last blog, I wrote about a development in genetic modification of genes that easily allows scientists to import and export genes from any creature’s DNA. Here are some considerations:
The first time a human being is born to a set of parents who have undergone this genetic engineering (because that’s what it is), we will have two kinds of human populations: natural and GMO. The GMOs will most likely be “superior” in some way, either because a gene that causes horrible, painful, disease will have been removed or altered, or because the person has been given a gene for nicer eyebrows, or faster synapses, or some other improvement to the race. And this means that the superior GMOs will eventually, when they become strong enough, want to eliminate the naturals the way Cro-Magnon man eliminated the Neanderthals.
Another way of saying this is that from that birth onward, evolution will have been taken out of nature’s hands and placed in the hands of lab scientists.
One of the basic tenets of organics is that nature knows best. Or do you believe that human beings are smarter than nature itself?
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GREENPEACE STINGS CORPORATE “SCIENTISTS”
A sting operation by the environmental group Greenpeace suggests that some researchers who dispute mainstream scientific conclusions on climate change are willing to conceal the sources of payment for their research, even when the money is purported to come from overseas corporations producing oil, gas and coal, writes John Schwartz in The New York Times.
Over a period of several months, two Greenpeace employees posed as representatives of energy companies and offered to pay prominent commentators on climate change to write papers that extolled the benefits of coal and carbon emissions. The Greenpeace workers also asked that the payments not be disclosed.
The commentators — a professor from Princeton University and one from Pennsylvania State University — agreed to the offers.
Disclosure of funding for scientific research has been a flash point in the fight over climate change, especially in the case of published scientific research. The effort by Greenpeace, which has a long record of using aggressive tactics to make environmental statements, was to “unravel the story” of industry ties to denial of climate change, said Lawrence Carter, one of the Greenpeace employees involved in the subterfuge.
“It shows a way that fossil fuel money can get into funding these climate skeptic campaign groups,” he added.
Frank Clemente, a professor emeritus of sociology at Penn State, agreed to write a paper on coal on behalf of a coal mining firm that he was told was based in Indonesia. William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton, agreed to write a paper at the request of an unnamed oil and gas company in the Middle East.
Both men acknowledged, in response to requests for comments, that the exchanged emails about the arrangements, which Greenpeace released on Tuesday, were genuine. But both denied having done anything improper.
Dr. Clemente formerly served as director of an environmental policy center at Penn State. He said in an email response to questions: “I fully stand behind every single statement I made in the emails apparently pirated by Greenpeace. I am very proud of my research and believe that clean coal technologies are the pathway to reliable and affordable electricity, reduction of global energy poverty, and a cleaner environment.”
In an email message responding to a request for comment, Dr. Happer said, “I don’t think I have anything to be embarrassed about.”
When asked whether he agreed that there should be full disclosure of foreign and industry influence on science, Dr. Happer said, “Yes, I believe in full disclosure.”
But, he added, “I don’t think that full disclosure was the point of the Greenpeace article at all. The aim was simply to smear their enemies.”
Dr. Happer testified recently at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, whose chairman is Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and a presidential candidate who disagrees with the scientific consensus on climate change.
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