in vitro meat and the de-evolution of homo sapiens

Homo sapiens is Latin for wise or knowing man.  I would like to strike "sapiens" from our evolutionary title and replace it with "homo follis", which is Latin for windbag or foolish man.  Can I do that?

Normally, I love technology and am all for its advancement as long as there is an antidote should it prove to be physically or ethically harmful.  There is a line, however, over which technological advancement frequently crosses into the world of promulgating sheer gluttonous sloth.  The antedote in the case of modern animal farming is to change human behavior.  If we consume less meat, farmers aren't pressured to over-produce massive qunatities in order to stay economically competitive.  Less pressure to over-produce means less incentive to abuse farmed animals with antibiotics, hormones, extremely unhealthy food and other revolting living conditions.

But is the American populous ready to make that sacrifice for the sake of being humane?  You bet your ass we're not.  Instead, commercial science has discovered a much more attractive antidote to modern animal farming -- one that requires significantly less effort on the part of the consumer than reducing meat consumption.  For the last decade or so, scientists have been learning how to culture "meat" in a petri dish (Datar & Betti 2009; Edelman et al 2005).  We (the people) are so lazy and so addicted to meat that scientists and economists have fleshed out an analysis of the viability of in vitro meat culturing as a "replacement" for meat farming (In Vitro Meat Consortium 2008).

Is it less of a personal burden to adjust to the taste of stem cell meat than to eat less meat and/or eat more local/grassfed/humanely farmed meat?  The In Vitro Meat Consortium seems to think so, as does PETA:

"As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection." 

Really?  Because I'm pretty sure that teaching humanity survival through relying on technology to save us from having to make proactive changes in our behavior has negative ethical implications.  For instance, the backward evolution of our species. 

"Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture ", says Ian Christe in his article in Popular Mechanics on the subject.

Yes, Ian, you are absolutely correct.  However, HUMANELY FARMED ANIMALS WOULD ALSO BE THEORETICALLY FREE OF HORMONES, ANTIBIOTICS AND THE THREAT OF MAD COW DISEASE OR BIRD FLU.  Additionally, OMEGA-3 FATTY ACIDS AND VITAMINS ARE PRESENT IN FREE-ROAMING UNGULATES WHO ARE NOT PUMPED FULL OF GRAIN-BASED SLOP TO FATTEN THEM UP ALL YEAR ROUND.  And further, WHAT ABOUT ALL THE OTHER SUBSTANCES THAT ARE USED IN THE CULTURING OF THE MEAT; MUST WE ASSUME (like idiots) THEY WILL BE TOTALLY HARMLESS?

So, I must pose the final question: will humanity prefer the financial burden of commercial in vitro meat production, or the burden of changing their consumptive behavior in order to promote humane animal farming?  Unfortunately, I fear the former may win out. 

Lastly, a warm thank you to PETA for supporting the de-evolution of humanity (not that I'm surprised), as well as an alternative to industrially farmed meat that wont actually stop anyone who wants to taste real meat from doing so (tofu dogs have already made this attempt).

green sulphate umbrella

there is a problem with the climate change sector of energy policy with which i'm particularly irritated... which is that people are either concerned with greenhouse gas emissions, or chemical pollutants, and no one seems to be considering the implications of both. namely... that they complement one another, they are both causing severe problems and they need to be decreased together, not separately. and this segregation of focus is all well and good except for that it completely destroys the ability of policy makers to address the current climate crises in a comprehensive manner. in the particular instance of these two issues, if one is given more weight than the other, or one is addressed without the other, we could all die anyway via the acceleration of the geophysical phenomena that greenhouse and pollutant gases are currently holding at bay.

namely... "global warming" versus "global dimming." very brief summary before i rant: in the 60's, particle pollution began to noticeably reflect a great deal of the sun's rays which had a cooling effect on the globe. this effect continued as pollution continued, the phenomenon being explained by the increased particles polluting clouds giving water a greater surface area on which to collect, and water molecules take much longer to collect enough to outweigh the particle and cause it to fall in a raindrop. while the water takes longer to collect, it stays in the clouds, reflecting a substantial amount of sunlight and preventing it from reaching the earth's surface. so from the 60's to the 80's, global dimming has protected us against the full assault of global warming, which would have otherwise been roughly two-fold. so yes, while pollution has been the cause of something like 135,000 premature deaths a year, it has warded off the 1,000,000 that would have been caused by the effects of accelerated global warming. but then, in the 80's when Congress adopted the EPA's Clean Air Act, pollutants decreased in the clouds and global warming revealed itself more drastically. and voila, in the 00's, if we want to live, we have to address both, and here is my rant...

this whole business of chemtrailing a sulfur umbrella into the stratosphere, if i'm being honest, doesn't seem like such a bad idea. because the world is having so much trouble - fuck it, because the United States is having so much trouble - deciding whether or not we want to assume this problem is real much less address it, it's going to take a few years to get policy implemented effectively. in the meantime, sulfate has a half life of roughly ten years, so it is in actuality one of the more innocuous short-term plans. shoot up the sky with more crap that doesn't belong in it while we, down on the ground, figure out how to decrease both ghg and particle pollutants from the atmosphere in concert.

reducing ghg requires technological implementation. reducing soot requires tighter regulation. the latter is easily done, while the former seems to be... the cause of increased rate of aneurysm and heart attack in our political leaders... for whatever reason... likely because (like so many socioeconomic crises that are incorporated into its implications) ghg emission is an exceedingy comprehensive nexus.

my point being this: if you deal with ghg emissions alone, we'll experience global cooling complete with drought, famine, disease, loss of populations, loss of species and loss of existence. if you deal with particle pollutants alone, we'll experience accelerated global heating complete with drought, famine, disease, loss of populations, loss of species and loss of existence. ergo... work simultaneously on decreasing them both [and if you're one of those people who thinks increased snowfall in certain areas of the globe this year is a clear sign that global warming doesn't exist, i have some words for your denial]. yes yes, i understand it's going to be oh so very difficult an endeavor... after all, particle pollutants have a shorter half life than do ghg's, and there's math involved, and oh for fuck's sake get over it and alter your nation's productive and consumptive behaviour so that ghg production are decreased more exponentially and particle pollutants more linearly. and then, oh no!, how do we know how much of atmospheric ghg and particle pollutants are from us and how many are natural? what if we accidentally take too much out of the sky and as a result lose oxygen and gravitational pull? [i'm exercising restraint not to comment on the rapture at this point...] after all, there's no way to tell if any of this is actually our fault! so let's continue to mutate our livestock and crops and make sure we adequately feed our greedily unbalanced economic and consumptive habits [i also think that it should be the govt's responsibility to pay farmers for feeding their nation so that we can ween off of this terrible seething monster of supply and demand]... but as per norm, i digress...

if we are indeed going to continue to restrict funding for and forebearance of green technology, then put a sulphate umbrella over our shallow little heads for a few decades while we figure out how to get over ourselves. and no more of this carbon scrubbing shit that cleans primarily sulfur out of industrial burners - if we're going to scrub, scrub both carbon and sulfur; why trap the more benign gas and give the more-difficult-and-expensive-to-remove-from-the-atmosphere gas VIP entrance? clean coal is actually not a bad baby step... since it seems we are going to need some dirt in our clouds for a while longer before the environmental consequences of Bushee's regime wear off and green technology begins to be taken seriously.

nuclear energy

there's too much talk about the controversy of stashing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and not nearly enough talk about the reason that the government is leaning toward storage and accumulation as opposed to development of nuclear waste reprocessing. so i needed to mull over this one for a bit.

until 1976, there was a reprocessing plant in West Valley, New York, which extracted various elements of nuclear waste and recirculated them into reactors. plutonium as well as other actinide components (essentially, radioactive rare earth elements) were separated/burned off by nuclear fission and recycled as fuel to generate electricity. the reprocessing plant was closed by Pres. Ford, not because it was detrimental to the economy, but because of paranoia regarding nuclear weapons proliferation. but. during the time it was active, the nuclear fuel service plant (nfs) recovered 1926 kg of plutonium, shipping ~80% to the atomic energy commission (aec). the other remaining 20% was re-sold to industry for use in plutonium recycling [fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf]. as i understand it, nfs blended their recovered plutonium with other metal oxides, precluding its use in weapons production. which seems to me like it addresses the issue of safety at least adequately. so then why was Ford so bent on closing the reprocessing plant? recycling nuclear waste into its more-or-less innocuous components for recirculation seems like the better alternative to shoving the still-reactive mixture under Yucca, eh? this is where i become garbled...

1) how is nuclear waste less dangerous than blended plutonium? 2) what was Ford's other incentive? 3) and why does the Bush administration actually sound like they know what's going on here?

"the United States should also consider technologies... that are cleaner, more efficient, less waste intensive and more proliferation-resistant" [Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group, May 2001]

1) ok. well, nuclear waste is typically blended with cementitious material (20/80) supposedly shielding against radioactive awakening/travesty. there's also the mixed oxide fuel burning method, mixing plutonium with uranium to burn off the plutonium by nuclear fission. and the other is vitrification; the storage of actinide components in borosilicate glass logs and - you got it - burying them deep, deep underground [Bullen and McCormick 1998]. is this less dangerous though? not really. the difference is making a somewhat neutralizing mixture which you then stuff into the ground to accumulate and wait for something to possibly wake it up. or. making a somewhat neutralizing mixture which you then recycle, keeping new highly reactive mixtures from being created in the first place, lessening the threat to the earth's safe-keeping. i may just be a hippie (and i like to think i'm not...), but i'm quite partial to the latter. reusing what we've already procured as opposed to incessantly taking more and more. one of the arguments against nuclear waste reprocessing is that it only recaptures plutonium (which really isn't entirely true either, but for the sake of argument...). plutonium is ~1% of actinides in nuclear waste, the rest would still need to be stored in a repository. so why is it worth it to spend the extra money on reprocessing in the first place? because it makes use of what we already have, and prevents us from accumulating so many tons of nuclear waste (GNEP estimates 96,000 metric tons by 2050 when Yucca will only be able to hold 77,000). if we have to stash our garbage at Yucca, we might as well do our best to reuse what we've already got planned to put there instead of accumulating more. eh? here comes the notion of Yucca and nuclear energy being a transitional tool from coal to entirely clean renewable energy [see section post numbers].

2) Ford. it actually turns out that proliferation was his main concern. as it was through Carter until Reagan lifted the ban in '81. so where are we now? we're paranoid about the crashing state of the economy. fair enough. Yucca Mt is terrorist-resistant (as much as any place can be), and inexpensive. i don't think this gives it substantial theoretical leverage over reprocessing. an accident or infiltrative attack of Yucca would be just as expensive as a few decades of reprocessing. and what's more, burning off plutonium that otherwise has a 10,000 year half-life just seems the safer bet. but we're not talking safe, we're talking money (go figure...).

3) because i ordinarily default into staunch disagreement with Bush, and not being able to instantly do so leaves me monstrously befuddled.

which leads me to wonder... why now, especially because we are even considering nuclear energy as an alternative to coal, are we shying away from nuclear waste reprocessing? fine, i understand the economy is chaotic of late whose rescue has become a fiasco all its own. so stash some more waste at Yucca Mt for a few more years. but at least show some signs of interest in pursuing funding for development of efficient nuclear waste reprocessing. fighting climate change is all about baby steps. minor transitions that are concretely progressive in their direction away from dirty energy. endorse Yucca for a few more years while the economy climbs out of Bush's toilet... use that time to begin endorsing nuclear reprocessing plants that produce non-proliferative blended components... meanwhile, don't produce such massive amounts of fresh actinides, but use the recycled components... then relieve Yucca. but don't fucking fall backward.

i have a problem accepting the idea that the government's idea of combating climate chaos is to ignore the problems we've already created and begin, instead, by thinking about possibly addressing the issues regarding our current production on our future. which is also extremely important, but you cannot ignore the mess we've already made. especially in this particular case, where the mess is a perfectly transition-renewable energy fuel until we are able to invest in enough wind turbines and solar panels to take over. all part of the baby steps.

polar bears

interior secretary dirk kempthorne, you are a douchebag. i don't even care how little control you had over the decision; your so fervently speaking on its behalf is quite sufficient to deem you worthy of being sent to the corner stool to baste in shame.

dirk: arctic sea ice is essential to polar bear survival. sea ice has melted in recent decades. computer models say that it is likely to recede more in the near future. therefore, melting sea ice is linked to global climate change and is a threat to the polar bear species.

natalie: thank you sir, for that illuminating gesture of disclosure.

[note: there was a subtext to this in which he more or less said that computer models don't necessarily predict the future, they're just tools for analyzing possibilities so we shouldn't jump to the assumption that polar bears are endangered based on climate change models. well yeah, jackass, there is no medical cure that is 100% correct, there is no scientific analysis that is 100% fool-proof, there are no political policies that are so thorough in content and application that they outlast time. we still use these tools to make predictions because they are the best we can do without being omniscient. if we don't employ action to exercise what we do know, what is the point of knowing it? we might as well just sit around and wait to rot. but, i digress...]

environmentalists shouldn’t use this threatened species status to force govt action on climate change, our man so adamantly declared immediately following this announcement. to be fair, what he really said was, "we need to reduce avoidable losses of polar bears, but this should not open the door to use ESA [endangered species act] to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants and other sources." come on. are you serious? so then how, my gentle snowflake, do you propose we go about "avoiding the loss" if we're not using the loss to entice the govt to protect what we're losing?

there must be something i'm missing here...

essentially what he’s saying is, we’re going to say this animal is threatened, but we’re not taking responsibility for it, and we sure as hell aren’t going to change our behavior to protect it. doesn’t that seem a little retarded? i consider myself fairly informed as far as climate change activists go – meaning i actually know what i’m lobbying or campaigning for when i’m doing it, and have a personal crafted investment doing so – and still i seem to be missing the key constructive benefit of dirk’s caveat. and yes, we are on a first name basis because he is an ass hole.

someone clearly needs to explain to me the purpose of listing polar bears as threatened if the statement specifically prohibits using this categorization to impact the decisions of the energy industry. it just seems like that particular caveat nullifies the entire purpose of listing the animal in the first place.

stepping back a piece, the reason i got into this battle had nothing to do with saving the polar bears or penguins – they just happen to be the poster children of the environmental crisis. i got into this with the hope that dealing with this umbrella issue (being human-induced/exacerbated/whathaveyou climate change) would enable us to simultaneously ameliorate its effects on poverty stricken regions who are in such condition because climate change is dramatically increasing the agricultural devastation caused by their monsoon season... or forcing them to cross borders in illegal migration to escape deadly drought and heat wave. my concern is that most of the American public does not seem to understand that this issue goes beyond polar bears. which on the one hand pisses me off, but on the other i am very aware of the fact that if people are not already invested in the severity of the climate crisis, polar bears and penguins are needed to reel in their emotional speculation.

which brings me to summarizing why i’m pissed off at dirk (which i've more or less already stated): you cannot “avoid the loss of the polar bear species” unless you protect its habitat. you cannot protect its habitat unless you fight greenhouse gas and other environmentally unfriendly emissions. and you sure as fuck cannot fight emissions without approaching the govt about setting caps, limiting consumption, transitioning away from dirty energy and responding to the ESA.

so explain to me the purpose of declaring polar bears "threatened" if you are going to include a clause specifically preventing the world from protecting them.

organizers

i'm realizing something about myself as i step into a more active role in the CCN: i don't regard project proposals for community activism in the same way as project proposals for scientific research.

when i think of a scientific research project, i zoom in to methodology. have a target question, have several collaborative methods of addressing that question, request funding for each of those methods, follow through with the implementation of all of those methods. my tiny, unexposed world is completely turned by the alteration of this process in sustainable community organization.

the NICE project (previous entry). this is an institute that was proposed and initially funded before my involvement. an incredible project was developed by my CCN comrades (and gurus) to work with the Sunnyside Neighborhood Energy (SunNE) group to research the feasibility of implementing a geo/solar thermal energy district, whereby community heating and cooling is provided not through individual water heater and cooling systems, but by a community source. the feasibility report would be used to convince a few engineering companies to invest in the geothermal energy district.

initially, the objective of the NICE project was to provide several college students with paid internships to head research groups in four areas of primary focus in the feasibility report: economics, policy, engineering and sociology. a new development as of this evening's conference call has required the alteration of funding distribution such that interns will no longer be paid. interestingly, the focus of the NICE project's direction seems to have been shifted almost entirely from research and the feasibility report to providing volunteer students with training/engaging/organizing experience. now, i whole heartedly support the necessity of such a direction. that being said, i feel that the SSC's Sprog was designed specifically for that purpose (previous entry). the NICE had incorporated Sprog into it's agenda so that student interns could take a break from their research to participate in these trainings. now that funding shortages have seemed to cause a refocusing of the project objectives to a part of the project that is already being provided by another organization... this is where i get a little knocked off my rocker.

in scientific research, you expect things to go wrong and cause a divergence from the original plan due to failed methods or unexpected data from a technique which causes a redirection to correctly answer the target question. in fact, you plan for things to go wrong. troubleshooting is the key to a successful laboratory... which is something that they don't emphasize in college, which was one of my critiques of the program upon graduation but that's entirely tangential and irrelevant to my rant. it's really not a rant so much as a pondering. nevertheless. despite the arise of obstacles, you remain focused on the original question. my discomfort with the alteration of the NICE project objectives is that in refocusing on student training we lose the original objective of the community energy research itself. it may be because i am so enthusiastic about the benefit of this project that i am not willing to accept the transition. but i would like to think it is a rational concern that the NICE seems to be transforming into a program to simply fund the participation of students in Sprog.

what i would like to come out of the next week or so is the restructuring of the NICE agenda in a way that keeps the focus on the community energy research and the collaboration of SunNE (previous entry) with NICE, CCN and the Sunnyside Elementary School. i prefer to not give up on acquisition of additional funding for individual interns, and to maintain the unique focus of the NICE project. i'm not as familiar as i'd like to be with the stipulations of the initial funding grant, but i maintain that they cannot be so different from those of scientific research that changing the objective of the NICE wouldn't have a negative effect on our credibility with our sponsors.

i can't tell yet if i'm even cut out for this kind of position.

lng

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIpDwMusgGE

"thinking of things like 'the world' and 'the highway of life' are a little too absolute to be practical. it makes trying new things too insignificant"
-andy


"we’re piping liquefied natural gas through the soil, gaseous clouds of coal dust through the pipes of lungs and greenhouse fumes through arctic walls while hot air pipes through shards of clay drenched in drought, and exacerbated monsoon seasons make new pipelines through crops and homes and fashion environmental refugees.

"immigration lines pummel through desert through mountains because poverty does not recognize boundaries and when survival is hard we fall into lines to trick ourselves into thinking that we are leaving these volatile seasons behind, but don’t think that your cultural walk is distinct from the walk of industrial revolution whose footprint stamps over the pipelines of refugees seeking life beyond inhospitable domain because we are what’s gotten us here.

"climate chaos charges in waves but waves are crashed into lines and redirected back to the sea where this all begins and ends and I feel as though if we were more directly evolved from fish we would know this – that when streamlining pipelines get dirty and breakdown they are not suitable for rebuilding our home.

"we can’t break this by putting down any more pipelines. human lines are our green sanctuary and the invincible indispensable inexorable force against the chaos of fuel. we are cultivators and innovators tide breakers and bullion bulwarks rising higher and louder than the rising tides, against the pipelines. "


- ride your bike, wear slippers, flush selectively, talk to your senators.