Starting the week with a bang... Or maybe a whimper...

Louisiana's coast is feeling the sea-level rise.

While state officials continue to argue over restoration projects to save the state’s sinking, crumbling coast, top researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that Louisiana is in line for the highest rate of sea-level rise “on the planet.” * Indeed, the water is rising so fast that some coastal restoration projects could be obsolete before they are completed, the officials said.
NOAA’s Tim Osborne, an 18-year veteran of Louisiana coastal surveys, and Steve Gill, senior scientist at the agency’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, spelled out the grim reality in interviews with The Lens. When new data on the rate of coastal subsidence is married with updated projections of sea-level rise, the southeast corner of Louisiana looks likely to be under at least 4.3 feet of gulf water by the end of the century.

The Republicans are getting upset that the Democrats are standing back and letting them fall on their faces. Josh Marshall says it best:

Official Washington is accustomed to having a Democratic safety net — not cash transfers for those who fall through the cracks of the market economy — but that Democrats will come in and solve crises created by GOP government by crisis.

Cheney is afraid of being tried as a war criminal.

No chemicals, no GMO grain, India has record crop:

What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind

And farmers are demanding control over the seeds:

Vandana Shiva: 'Seeds must be in the hands of farmers',Biodiversity campaigner accuses corporate giants of trying to take over the world's seed supply through genetic engineering,

I have here in my hand... McCarthyism style innuendo doesn't quite work the way it did before YouTube and the internets....

What? There are people who won't eat genetically modified vegetables?

A Bayer AG (BAYN) unit agreed to a $750 million settlement resolving claims with about 11,000 U.S. farmers who said a strain of the company’s genetically modified rice tainted crops and ruined their export value.

The settlement, announced yesterday, ends scores of lawsuits filed against the Bayer CropScience unit of the Leverkusen, Germany-based company by farmers in Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi.

The U.S. Agriculture Department said in August 2006 that trace amounts of the company’s experimental LibertyLink strain were found in U.S. long-grain rice. Within four days, declining rice futures cost U.S. growers about $150 million, according to a complaint filed by the farmers. News of the contamination caused futures prices to fall about 14 percent.

“From the outset of this litigation, we made it clear to Bayer that the company needed to step up and take responsibility for damaging American rice farmers with its unapproved rice seeds,” Adam Levitt, a plaintiffs’ lawyer, said yesterday in a statement. “This excellent settlement goes a long way toward achieving that goal.”

Bayer confirmed the settlement in its own press statement minutes later.

“Although Bayer CropScience believes it acted responsibly in the handling of its biotech rice, the company considers it important to resolve the litigation so that it can move forward focused on its fundamental mission of providing innovative solutions to modern agriculture,” Greg Coffey, a spokesman for the company, said in the statement.

h/t to Mike Goldman in Facebook.

Creating more of what they are trying to kill

Kinda like our fight against terrorism...

Monsanto:

American farmers’ broad use of the weedkiller glyphosphate — particularly Roundup, which was originally made by Monsanto — has led to the rapid growth in recent years of herbicide-resistant weeds. To fight them, farmers are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.

It took you guys long enough to figure out something

A lot of us knew from the beginning. You don't force impoverished farmers to dump a lucrative crop like opium poppies unless you offer something as good in return.

TRIESTE, Italy – The U.S. is shifting its strategy against Afghanistan's drug trade, phasing out funding for opium eradication while boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan said Saturday.

The aim of the new policy: to deprive the Taliban of the tens of millions of dollars in drug revenues that are fueling its insurgency.

The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication — for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country — was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.

"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.

"It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication," he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.

Eradication efforts were seen as inefficient because too little was being destroyed at too high a cost, U.N. drug chief Antonio Maria Costa told the AP.

The old policy was also deeply unpopular among powerless small-scale farmers, who often were targeted in the eradication efforts.

Meanwhile, back at the farm...

Another impact of global warming, bad government planning, and corporate heartlessness:

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine

"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."

Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

Yeah.... just why DO we have lawns in California?

Especially when front yards themselves are usually for show, rarely used, and high maintenance. OrangeClouds at Calitics, a really good site for California politics:

Over at Change.org Natasha Chart asks if a recovery is even possible on a planet headed for environmental collapse? That's an answer I wish I knew. Natasha's been covering the water story regularly with a post about Colorado's fights between Big Oil and Big Water, a post about agribusiness and water use, and a post I highly recommend reading (even though it scares the shit out of me) called "We don't have to choose a dustbowl"

My own environmentalist hippie foodie answers to the water problem begin as follows:

1. Why is it still legal to have lawns in California? Seriously. Somebody should outlaw watering your lawn. If we weren't in such a budget crisis I'd add that the city should provide native drought resistant plants to residents who want to make their yard beautiful and able to survive without water.
2. California growers need to go organic ASAP. It's not a fix that will help them this year, and it will reduce their productivity in the next few years but in the long run, it will make all of their crops more drought resistant because the soil will store more water.
3. We've gotta do something about animal agriculture. It uses a TON of water. If factory farms are something we have to have, then they shouldn't be located in California. Period.
4. We need to expand fruit, nut, and vegetable (so-called "specialty crop") production in the other 49 states to plan for decreased production in California and to reduce energy needs for shipping food across the country. Right now there are actually laws preventing farmers who grow commodities to switching over to grow specialty crops instead. You can't even buy land from a farmer who used to grow commodities there and grow specialty crops on that land! The USDA is dabbling in changing that policy but only in a very small pilot program.

These things are expensive - either for the farmers or for the state that mandates it and compensates the farmers (or offers financial incentives to make it happen without mandating it). But we bailed out the banks even after they screwed up and got us into this mess. Why can't we bail out our farmers? After all, we need to eat.

I've noticed several houseowners in our tract ripping out their grass and planting native groundcover through a heavy mulch. I've even noticed a few houses in town that have very realistic-looking fake grass. You need to get right up on top of it to see it's plastic. But as water becomes more important, and the wars between farmer and suburbia, state and state, nation and nation become more pronounced and anxious, could we please address the feckless and heedless building of the Southern California sprawl right up into the mountains?


Click to get a larger view.

Where the hell are we going to get the water for these new homes? The gasoline to run food to the stores and to support the lengthy commutes these bedroom communities assume? Where will the garbage go? We are literally running out of space in the 'valley' and are flowing up and over the mountains into the deserts where the need for air conditioning becomes a life or death issue and the commutes for everything and everyone is hours longer. Meanwhile the death rot of neglect in the inner cities leaves empty warehouses and hard used apartment buildings and no services. Why can't we rebuild in these areas?

And lastly, when, not if, gasoline goes to 5, 8, 10 dollars a gallon, Southern California sprawl is going to die unless we get the HSR (high speed rail) in place.

Robert in Monterey at Calitics:

One of my lingering concerns about the Obama Administration has been that they might be tempted to claim victory with the $8 billion in HSR funding added to the stimulus and not follow up on that money, which as we know merely pays for some initial costs. But Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood made clear last week that in fact, the $8 billion in HSR stimulus really is intended as a signal to America that Obama is truly serious about building HSR:

LaHood said that for Obama building high-speed rail networks is, "if not his No. 1 priority, certainly at the top of his list. What the president is saying with the $8 billion is this is the start to help begin high-speed rail projects." He added that the administration "is committed to finding the dollars to not only get them started but to finishing them in at least five parts of the country," although he declined to elaborate on where these projects might ultimately be built.

And don't worry about the right-wing freakout over the Vegas HSR project - California is in better position than any other HSR project in America to use that stimulus funding. We can begin construction in late 2010 or early 2011; no other project is anywhere close to that point.

Plant those gardens and turn your fricking hose off!