What’s sprouting?

Unseasonably warm temperatures (it *is* still March, isn’t it?) have me in a definite springtime mood. Some friends speak of a new kind of SAD: not Seasonal Affective Disorder, the diagnosis of wintertime blues; rather Spring Affective Disorder, where the combination of nice weather and long daylight hours fill one’s mind with fun-filled nights and outdoor activities (this despite the early spring being one of the busiest times of the year work-wise).

I have to admit that the time change, which finally hit Europe this week, is a huge boon to post-workday activity, and my evening eating schedule has gone all wonky. Living on the top floor of a building with roof access, I spent many winter nights imagining how I would create there a summer sunshine paradise with my many plants and a reclining chair, where I would while away the hours of thesis research reading, lemonade in hand. The IKEA catalog arrived at just the right moments to keep the fantasy alive. You can see how that got me through the neverending madness that was January, right?

This week I took my first step towards building said oasis when a free shelving unit appeared on my university’s exchange bulletin board. And my plants are doing their part by sprouting from seeds I planted a couple weeks ago.

BBaron posted earlier this month about how far our food travels to land on our plates. Having grown up in a family with a passion for gardening and having survived three winters and springs in Russia, I have been socialized to spend part of one’s summer tending one’s own crop. Anyone who does it knows that you can’t beat the taste of a home-grown tomato. There is no better way to know where your food is coming from than planting, tending and picking it yourself. However, considering I only have planters at my disposal and that I have to carry all dirt used up five flights of stairs, my enterprise is limited. My dad starts his tomatoes in January to ensure an early harvest and already has tall plants. But then, when it’s just me, how many tomatoes do I really need?

I’m interested to know what everyone else is growing this year. My list is after the jump.

Shooting the Strip

I have been watching and enjoying song birds in the back yard for a long time, but just recently I’ve begun to observe the raptors that live in the urban wilderness near me. Members of at least two hawk categories frequent my neighborhood: Accipiter cooperii, the Cooper’s Hawk, and Buteo jamaicensis, the Red Tail or “chicken” hawk. Of the two, the Red Tail has been bolder and more noticeable. 

  

It’s easier to see the hawks in winter, when no leaves are on the trees. This winter I’ve often seen one perched on top of a utility pole or sitting up in my neighbor’s oak tree. A hawk will sit for a long time, moving only its head from side to side looking for prey. They appear to be unimpressed with the humans in the neighborhood, and I suppose this lack of fear is due the hawks’ own fierceness and the fact that we’re all living in the city where it’s unlikely that anyone will try to shoot or otherwise molest them. For some reason, the red tail hawks like to hunt in my driveway. This is an exciting and startling experience for me if I’m in the vicinity when it happens. At the end of the drive stands a large maple tree where squirrels, chipmunks, song birds and mourning doves (the “bag ladies,” as my mother calls them) hang out. The wildlife in that tree must seem like the hawk equivalent of the K&W cafeteria. 

The first time a hawk came zooming down the drive, homing in on a flock of bag ladies, I was sitting on my patio where I don’t think the bird could see me. It flew at what seemed like incredible speed in a straight line down the drive, scattered the doves, came up empty, made an amazing 90 degree turn at my back fence line and flew off into the trees next door. The next time this happened, I was standing under the maple tree and saw the bird coming straight at me. On this run, the hawk was luckier and snared a titmouse in mid-flight. (I now have an appreciation of the last image the hawk’s victim sees before it’s lights out for the victim.) I have come to think of this spectacle as the hawk “shooting the strip.” 

Once last summer, when the maple tree was completely leafed out, the hawk shot the strip and disappeared into the canopy right over my head. I heard the sounds of a brief and apparently fruitless struggle, then a single small grey feather drifted down at my feet, catching the rays of the late afternoon sun as it fell. The hawk is a clean and efficient killer. And Mother Nature is not that nice lady who used to be in margarine commercials on TV.

Cost of Energy and Energy Taxes

The price of fossil fuel based energy ($ per gallon of gasoline or Kw-hr of electricity) that we have to pay as individuals (or businesses) is basically the immediate cost to produce that energy.  There are a few cases where specific taxes are added on, such as the road tax on gasoline.  However, in general there is no attempt to include the “externality costs” the use of those fossil fuels imposes on society.  For example, burning coal to produce electricity commits us to increased health care costs associated with breathing polluted air, the costs of damage from acid rain, costs of water pollution and land recovery from coal mining, and the costs of climate disruption.  Very few economists would argue with the idea that these costs exist and that they are currently not reflected in the price of fuel.  In order for all of us to make rational decisions about energy use in our free market economy the total costs of the energy we use needs to be reflected in the price. 

The best way to have the price of energy include the external costs is to add taxes to the price of fuel to reflect the external costs.  The International Center for Technology Assessment has done a detailed analysis, entitled “The Real Price of Gasoline.”  The ICTA calculates several indirect costs, including oil industry tax breaks, oil supply protection costs, oil industry subsidies and health care costs of treating auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses.  The total of these indirect costs is is about $9 per gallon.  Add this to the roughly $2.50 current price of gas and you get a total price of $11.50 per gallon.  There is plenty of room to argue about what should go into the external costs and how they should be calculated, but this gives some idea of the amount of tax involved.  If this tax was generalized to a “carbon tax” that would be applied to all fossil fuels the amount of the tax would be around $3,000 per ton of carbon.  This is clearly a big tax and would raise an incredible amount of revenue.

 The tax revenue raised from the carbon tax would allow major reductions in other taxes.  For example, we could remove federal income tax on all income below some level, say $100,000 per year.  Or start a Manhattan Project type effort on non-fossil energy and transportation.  We could afford to develop a system of fast electric trains for intercity travel in the US (which would be good because air travel would be rather expensive). 

 The carbon tax would need to be put into effect incrementally to avoid a big economic shock.  We could start with the equivalent of $1 per gallon of gasoline and add another $1 every other year untill we get to the right level.  That would get us to where we need to be reasonably quickly without causing a big disruption.  After all, we have had changes of that magnitude in gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas during the last year and nothing really bad has happened to the economy.

There is some evidence that the carbon tax needs to be even higher to get fossil fuel use down to the level needed to deal with global climate change, but that is the subject of another post.

Spring forward

Under the new legislation passed by the United States Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, today is the first day of daylight savings! Rather than moving your clock forward one hour at 2am on the first Sunday in April, we will instead be moving them up at 2am on the second Sunday in March (that’s today!). The reason given for all of this is that it will allow the United States to reduce demand for electricity during the extra month by roughly 1%, which represents a great deal of energy in bulk terms, by having one less hour in the day during which we all have our lights on.

There is some controversy over this, however. Some people argue that there is no net gain in energy savings as the result of daylight savings, because given the way that most people’s schedules work these days, what it really means is we just run the lights for an hour in the morning, instead. At least one study performed on a real-life example of the nation of Australia extending daylight savings by two months to help facilitate the 2000 Sydney Olympics, showed that there were no actual gains in the observed level of electricity demand, even after adjusted for weather conditions and other factors, under the extended daylight savings program.

There is also the issue of what this change means for all of the computer systems which are programmed to use the old daylight savings time rules. People have been talking about a “mini Y2k”. I, for what it’s worth, don’t believe that anything is going to come crashing down around us as the result. All of the major computer systems that rely on time data have already been updated. There might be some minor problems, particularly among smaller companies with less extensive technology staff, but the lights will stay on, and the planes will stay airborne.

Then again, I’m posting this rather late, so maybe my computer’s clock has already foiled my attempts to be timely with this post.

Chilean Raspberries 2/$6

I stopped at my neighborhood grocery store last night on the way home from work (I think I may have a more mundane existence than most geeks on this buffet) and noticed as I went down the produce aisle a beautiful display containing tiny cartons of perfect raspberries. A sign next to the display said “Chilean Raspberries 2/$6.” What struck me was not the price of the berries, although it was pretty steep, but the idea that those raspberries had traveled halfway across the hemisphere to get here. In fact, as the crow flies, they traveled about 4700 miles. (The Internet is good for so many things, including looking up distances between two points.) How else would fresh raspberries be available in North Carolina in early March?

I thought piously to myself, “I would NEVER buy such fruit!  Too many food miles!” But then I examined the contents of my shopping cart and found the two items it contained were carrying a not-insignificant mileage burden themselves: organic baby spinach from California (about 3000 food miles); and grape tomatoes from Mexico (about 1500 food miles). I wasn’t so righteous about those items; I bought them and had them for dinner. But the experience did start me thinking…

It’s one thing to talk about eating locally, but another to contemplate that reality in the off-season. What would the produce aisle in my store look like if it contained only those fruits and vegetables that are available fresh locally today, right this minute? My guess is that we’d see sweet potatoes, collard and turnip greens, and maybe some turnips and cold storage apples. YUM.

I’ve seen estimates that anywhere between 10 and 25 percent of the fossil fuels burned in the US are consumed transporting food to and within the country. We in the developed world have come to expect a bounty of fresh out-of-season produce in our stores. So much that it’s trendy to discuss “food miles” and “eating locally” at dinner parties where liberals have congregated. And it sounds like such a good idea - in the summertime.