Author: vonzapfenau

[Cross-posted at my Zepblog]

When my daddy was a little boy, his mama used to tell him to finish up his meals, “because there are people starving in China.” His response was, “Can we just send it to them, then?”

Now that I’m a parent myself, I see a lot of unfinished meals at the family table. Which is why I got a twinge of First World guilt when I saw this UN report that says roughly one-third of the global food supply is wasted. And guess where most of that waste comes from?

Consumers in rich nations waste a combined 222 million tons a year, according to the report. That’s almost as much as all the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report puts much of the blame on retailers in rich nations that throw out food simply because it looks unappealing, and the food industry’s ‘all-you-can-eat’ marketing tactics, which encourage consumers to buy more than they need.

“Perhaps one of the most important reasons for food waste at the consumption level in rich countries is that people simply can afford to waste food,” the report states.

Poking around a bit more, I found this report that pegs food waste in the US at 27%, and then estimates the wasted energy embedded in all that food production. It amounts to around 2% of all energy consumed in the US annually, or – am I reading this correctly? – 2 quadrillion BTU a year.

At a minimum, this points out the need for more extensive municipal composting programs. As far as my father’s question about sending food to where it’s needed, that’s where it gets complicated. Matthew Yglesias has blogged about this from time to time, and points out in this post that

The same primary crop yield can either support a lot of vegetarians or else it can support a lot of cows and the cows can feed a small number of meat-eaters. And by the same token, meat-eaters feeding themselves off pork or chicken consume much less grain than meat-eaters feeding themselves off cows. The point is that even if we have no increase in crop yields whatsoever, global agriculture is still producing plenty of calories to keep 10 billion people alive and well-nourished. The reason people starve and are malnourished is the distribution of those calories, not their existence, and that will continue to be the case in the future.

Speaking of feeding the world, NPR’s Marketplace looked at the subject of sustainable agriculture a few days ago, which provoked a torrent of responses. The original story sampled a type of contrarian, hard-headed “realism” that argues the world just can’t afford sustainability. The “Wonk Room” over at ThinkProgress skewered that type of argument when it popped up at WiReD magazine recently. As they pointed out, you can only make such claims when you fail to factor in the carbon footprint embedded into agribusiness production:

oil exploration and refining, coupled with the carbon footprints involved in the manufacture of the fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides demanded by conventional agriculture… the transportation of these components of factory farming from manufacture to feedlot…the manufacture and transportation of hormones and antibiotics… the carbon footprint involved in the cleanups from the toxic runoffs from feedlots; the carbon footprints of cropdusters. You get the picture.

Of course, this just brings up the larger point that, food politics aside, this country wastes a huge amount of energy.

66% of the energy produced for electricity is lost, 10% of that in transmission.
71% of the energy produced for transportation is wasted.
20% of the energy produced to run American industry is lost, and
20% of the energy that we use in our commercial and residential buildings is wasted.

The ludicrous nature of the “debate” we have over climate change, is, again, only possible, if you studiously turn away from all the savings we have lying around in the form of potential conservation and efficiency improvements. Far from imposing burdensome costs on industry, this would pump money back into the economy even while saving your grandchildren’s climate. Win-win. Who could argue against it? Don’t answer that.

This larger energy question is something that Amory Lovins has been talking about for years – for instance in 1989, 1993 and 2009. If you want to help him talk sense to the slow learners in the elite countries, his work is more vital than ever.

As the authors of the UN report noted, we waste all this energy… because we can. But how much longer can we afford to do so? To ask the question is to answer it.

PS: If you want some good news about combatting Third World malnutrition, there’s always the Peanut Butter Project.

PPS: If the above doesn’t have enough links for you, this ThinkProgress page from 2008 has enough blue pixels to keep you busy through your next couple meals.

[Cross-posted at my ZepBlog]

What was Osama bin Laden doing in Sarajevo in November, 1994? Apparently, the same thing as the United States: supporting the Alija Izetbegović-led faction of the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. By this time, Bosnia was mired in carnage and Izetbegović needed all the help he could get.

But this is the same Izetbegović who rejected a peace plan in early 1992. That is, he rejected it, but only after signing it, along with his Serbian and Croatian counterparts. The Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan was negotiated and agreed to by all sides in the conflict before the Bosnian War broke out. And as Indian General Satish Nambiar reflected:

It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia [in 1995] was not fundamentally different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign.

Arguably, the Bosnian Muslims would have gotten a much better deal without the subsequent three years of bloodshed. But  Izetbegović withdrew his signature a few weeks later, after meeting with the US ambassador. According to the New Republic, “Although Warren Zimmermann, the American representative at the talks, now denies it, most reliable reports suggest that Izetbegovic acted with U.S. approval.” Of course, Izzy was already on the record as stating “I would sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina.” And sacrifice it he did.

Which brings us to this blog post by Carl Savich at the Serbianna website. He writes:

Ossama Bin Laden played a key role in the 1992-1995 Bosnian civil war. Alija Izetbegovic not only issued him a Bosnian passport through the Bosnian Embassy in Vienna in 1993, but met with him at least on one occasion in Sarajevo in November, 1994. Bin Laden came to Bosnia at least two times. Bin Laden organized the recruitment of Arab-Afghan mujadeheen “volunteers” for Bosnia. He also used Islamic front organizations and charities to funnel money to the Bosnian Muslim regime and army.

I had heard this before, and I’d also heard it denied (though not convincingly). But this is a timely reminder. Serbian sites, like others tied to a nationalist cause, should be taken skeptically, and Savich, ignoring the blogger’s credo, offers no links (which is why I’ve done some googling and hypertexting for you). But he does offer an eyewitness account from a German journalist who encountered bin Laden outside Izetbegović’s office. He also quotes from Richard Clarke’s memoirs to the effect that bin Laden was able to use his mujahedin  network in Bosnia to set up useful banking and networking links in Europe.

The History Commons website offers an extensive (if contentious) timeline of al-Qaeda activity in the Balkans. All of this occurred in the murky years in between bin Laden’s obvious utility to the West as a proxy against Soviet power in Afghanistan, and his obvious hostility to the West, declared openly after the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. It’s no surprise that US foreign policy cuts deals with all sorts of nasty characters in pursuit of our “interests.” But this episode is notable as much for what it tells us about Izetbegović as about Osama.

What’s instructive is how US policy placed its bets on Izzy, even though another Bosnian leader, Fikret Abdić, preferred a negotiated settlement. By the time of the Lisbon conference, the last chance to prevent war in Bosnia, Izetbegović’s term as president had already expired. And ironically, another candidate had received more votes for president in the first place…Fikret Abdić. Abdić was no angel himself, but history might have taken a different turn if he had been at the table in Lisbon.

This anticipates our later stance in Kosovo, where we rejected the popular leader Ibrahim Rugova, who preferred a peaceful solution, and instead backed the thuggish Hashim Thaçi and his KLA goons, who helped make Kosovo a much bigger mess before, during and after the war.

And that brings us to US policy in Libya, and the factions we’ve chosen to back there. What’s unsettling about this is that Rugova, like the people of Tunisia and Egypt, had taken to heart the lessons of Gandhi and King: that peaceful resistance works just as well as violent conflict, but more importantly, leads to more desirable outcomes. What’s even more unsettling is that US policymakers may be well aware of this, and chose a different path nonetheless.

(Cross-posted at my ZepBlog).

Procrastination afflicts everyone one way or another – after all, I meant to write this essay last month. Still, when I stalled on a college term paper because of perfect Frisbee weather, that warn’t nobody’s business but my own.  But given the latest iteration of the perennial Crisis in the Middle East, it becomes obvious that Uncle Sam has a few overdue homework assignments of his own.

It’s not like nobody could have predicted this; somebody usually does. But for better or worse, our Founders blessed us with a system that defaults to the status quo, absent a two-by-four upside the head. So duck, America, because here it comes again.

Now, maybe if America hadn’;t been at the beach working on its tan, America might have been ready for the pop quiz. Maybe America could have cracked open the Energy Policy textbook, or copied some Foreign Policy notes off that nerd in the next row, or stopped texting during the Econ lecture. But America must have the same professor I had in college, the one who arched an eyebrow as he noted that “when you wait until the last minute to do something, you have a lot more energy to devote to the task.”

So we hit our collective snooze alarm about thirty years ago. Had a couple of wake-up calls from the Middle East already; oil price spikes, popular revolts against US-backed autocrats. That annoying President Carter suggested turning down the thermostat, wearing sweaters around the house. He put solar panels on the White House roof, and outlined an energy policy designed to wean us off of dependence on fossil fuels and foreign suppliers.
And America’s response to that was to go to a toga party with the cool kids. President Reagan took the solar panels down and rolled the dice on backing as many autocrats as we could pack into the minivan. After twelve years of the Reagan/Bush Administrations, our dependence on foreign oil rose from 40.5% to 47.2%. Today it stands at 66.2%.

By the time another Democrat sat in the White House, the world was already grappling with the reality of global warming. The first President Bush had responded to the Rio Summit by declaring “the American way of life is not negotiable! The Clinton/Gore response was to try to pass a carbon tax, which was shot down by members of their own party. And so we hit the snooze alarm again.

The second President Bush just doubled down on the reality denial, inspiring the popular bumper sticker “War is Not an Energy Policy.” And he ended up his term with gas prices at historic highs. By the time another Democrat sat in the White House, he was able to put some serious money into clean energy and alternative transportation. But he utterly failed to pass global warming legislation, in the face of determined opposition from buggy whip manufacturers. Even with extreme weather patterns, pressure on food supplies, and disappearing snowpacks, it’s anybody’s guess how long we’ll continue to put this off.

If we’d followed the advice of Jimmy Carter (or that other 1980 candidate, Barry Commoner), maybe we’d be better prepared for the oil shocks to come as new regimes take power in the Middle East. But it takes quite an effort to turn a supertanker around, and the fact is, we invested trillions of dollars in a war machine that helped to insure access to the resources we wanted. After all, it was also Jimmy Carter who promised the world that we’d go to war if necessary to maintain our oil habit in the Middle East.

The Cold War manifesto NSC-68 promised that we’d devise “a pattern of relationships“; to maintain our position of disparity in the world, dispensing with sentimentality and “unreal objectives” like human rights and democratization. To that end, we overthrew nascent democracies in Iran and Syria, and sponsored coups and assassinations throughout the Middle East. Our pattern of relationships has come back to bite us on the ass more than once, but we never seem to be able to learn our lessons.

To virtually no one’s surprise, the pattern continued long after the Cold War that provided its rationale. As another backstage memo spelled it out, “in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.” Aside from sentimental concerns like human rights, the main problem with this strategy is that it can’t last forever. And there doesn’t seem to have been much planning for what to do when we can no longer maintain our position of disparity.

Given the national decision to embrace ever-deeper oil dependency, it was inevitable that we’d have to keep plugging the holes in the levees holding back popular discontent in the Middle East. Bush the Lesser’s incoherent foreign policy only makes sense in this context. Instead of using our leverage with the dictators who depended on us for billions of dollars of support, we decided to spend hundreds of billions removing one dictator from Iraq. We supported free elections, except when we didn’t like the outcomes. We couldn’t let the Syrians receive our ambassador, but they could receive prisoners to torture on our behalf. And we got sentimental over Saddam’s human rights violations, but decided Qadaffy was somebody we could do business with.

At this point, Uncle Sam has been propping up dictators for so long, it’s become reflexive. We knew the day of reckoning would come for Mubarak someday, just as it will for the Saudi royal family. And the longer we put off dealing with it, the harder these transitions are going to be. When you provide the boots that stand on people’s necks, they’re going to be able to read that “Made in USA” imprint for a long time to come.

And just as our foreign entanglements arise from our shortsighted energy policies, our economic woes are tangled up with both failures, in a Gordian knot of procrastination. We’ve been engaged in military Keynesianism for so long, the political pain from trimming a few billion off the Pentagon budget is excruciating. The idea of voluntarily decommissioning our empire – as the British, French, and Russians managed to do – is so far off the table, it’s out in the yard. Remaining the “predominant outside power” in the global oilpatch is a huge indirect subsidy to the fossil fuel industry, which in turn helped to inflate that suburban sprawl bubble which just popped so painfully in our faces.

One dysfunction leads to another, like the crack addict’s kids showing up in school too scattered and fearful to learn anything. We’ve restrained innovation in the energy and transportation sectors for so long, our global competitors are leaving us in the dust. We’ve bailed out our financial sector so many times, they’re both too big to fail and too top-heavy not to. We’ve let our health insurance middlemen grow so immense, they have veto power over any plan to reform them.

In fact, that’s our problem across the board. People have been raising alarms about our growing wealth inequality for a couple of decades now. But the problem with the wealth gap isn’t just that most people don’t have enough cash to get the economy moving again – bad as that is.

It’s that we’ve empowered our oligarchs so thoroughly that they stand in the way of any meaningful reforms. Bloated defense contractors bilking the taxpayers, petroleum giants poisoning our seas and walking away, Wall Street fatcats converting our bailout money into their bonus checks, Big Pharma making the cure to our health care ills as painful as the disease – they’re all buggy whip manufacturers. But they’re all too powerful to topple. Kind of like Hosni Mubarak was.

So, good morning, America. Professor Eisenhower told you not to let the military-industrial complex accumulate unwarranted power. Professor Carter asked you to figure out how to stop importing oil and start working on clean energy. Professor Clinton advised you to use your surplus to save Social Security and pay down your debts. Hate to tell you this, but your assignments are all coming due, and just pulling an all-nighter or two may not be enough to save your grade. You need to – hey, are you listening to me? He’s nodded off again. No sleeping in my classroom, mister!