It's the Christmas season, a time full of hope, imagination, and celebration. As a species, we would sometimes rather hold onto an image of things as opposed to knowing the reality. I highly recommend that if you eat meat, consider where the meat comes from, how the farmer raises the animals, and how the manufacturers process the meat. The old adage, "you are what you eat" holds true. Whatever a pig, cow, chicken, lamb, etc. ingests and gets exposed to ends up in us. You owe it to yourself to know, even if the prospects are unpleasant.
In the belly of the beast
"You are a typical egg-laying chicken in America, and this is your life: You’re trapped in a cage with six to eight hens, each given less than a square foot of space to roost and sleep in. The cages rise five high and run thousands long in a warehouse without windows or skylights. You see and smell nothing from the moment of your birth but the shit coming down through the open slats of the battery cages above you. It coats your feathers and becomes a second skin; by the time you’re plucked from your cage for slaughter, your bones and wings breaking in the grasp of harried workers, you look less like a hen than an oil-spill duck, blackened by years of droppings."
As a good sign of a sea change on the part of big business, industry recognizes that people now value a stable and productive environment over a destructive one. This shift in economic focus paves the way for a clean energy future where we measure performance not just with output but total impact.
Big corporations are getting ready for carbon taxes even if we are not
"In a report released by the UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project, 29 companies — including the five biggest oil-producers, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP, and Shell (not that we’re keeping track) — report that they are using carbon pricing estimates to plan for hypothetical future regulation in the U.S. This generally means that an estimated carbon price is applied to a corporation’s big-investment projects — new drilling rigs, for example — which will likely be subject to some kind of emissions tax in ten or twenty years."
This sort of carbon pricing - much needed to reflect the indirect subsidy companies receive from not having to address the detrimental results of their pollution - will only exacerbate a growing issue: fuel-based energy has started to cost more than renewably-based energy.
Wind and solar costs challenge fossil fuels in the US
"Greentech Media recently quoted Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley’s Head of North American Equity Research for Power & Utilities and Clean Energy, speaking at the Columbia Energy Symposium in late November. 'Compare that to the variable cost of a gas plant at $30 per megawatt-hour. The all-in cost to justify the construction of a new gas plant would be above $60 per megawatt-hour.' So who would build gas?
Not as many people. Citigroup recently reported that some peaking gas plants were already being replaced by solar PV plants."
Meanwhile, we will have to do more than imagine a future filled with renewably-generated energy; we will have to figure out how to financially incentivize an economy without regular consumption. Currently, we price things that are a scarce resource, but with sun and wind readily available, there is no ongoing consumable to price. Once the installation costs are paid for, nothing remains. This poses a mind-blowing problem for business, but a happy one for consumers. We do not pay for air...what would the world look like if we only paid for the infrastructure of energy and not its ongoing generation?
What happens when the price of energy falls to zero?
"What we don’t know is how to structure the energy market so it provides the right incentives. If the marginal cost of solar and wind energy is close to zero (because there is no fuel cost), then the energy price in a 100 percent wind and solar market is going to be zero -- at least in the current market structure. But who would invest?
This is one of the major questions being put to regulators and policymakers around the world, but the country most in the firing line is Germany, one of the world’s most successful industrial nations."
Our economy follows a few basic principles. Among these are that those selling in the marketplace will always find the most efficient solution (lower costs) or drop out of the marketplace, and that those who purchase will always pay for something they value. The agriculture economy has responded to the former with GMO seeds and have created the largest version of Big Ag we have seen. Now, smaller farmers have seen how these products have started to falter, and rather than look to the next big product, they have moved to selling a better product to those willing to pay. Consumers have the ability to sway the marketplace if we have the capacity to match our priorities with our purchases.
Forsaking GMOs helps some farmers take in the cheddar
"Staring at a future of lower corn prices and higher inputs, Huegerich decided to experiment. Two years ago, he planted 320 acres of conventional corn and 1,700 with GMO corn. To his delight, the conventional fields yielded 15 to 30 more bushels per acre than the GMO fields, with a profit margin of up to $100 more per acre. And so in 2013, he upped the ante, ordering six varieties of conventional seeds for close to 750 acres and GMOs for his remaining acres."
Happy Friday!
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