Govt. Calculation for Value of Life Falls… Again

When considering regulations, the government assigns a value to individual human lives to weigh the costs (how much it will take to enforce a regulation) and benefits (the combined value of all the lives saved). The value of an individual is determined by the EPA, and it’s fallen steadily from around $8 million in 2001 to $6.9 million this year, reports MSNBC.

Pound360 personally feels like a million bucks. Usually does. So we were pretty thrilled to hear we were worth seven-times that! But that’s neither here-nor-there…

Talk about adding insult to injury. Thanks EPA. As if it weren’t bad enough that housing prices are crashing, the stock market is in free fall, gas prices are up and it costs more to buy a sack of groceries.

Could the falling value of an American have anything to do with the falling value of the dollar? Maybe it’s the president who’s been in office since 2000?

"Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules,” reports MSNBC.

The EPA gets their number from economists that “calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks.”

Cheney Ordered Climate Testimony Papers Slashed

Let's say you're second in command of the world's most powerful country -- or any country -- and you're given information that greenhouse gas is endangering the health of your citizens. What do you do? Here are some options:

A) Take action to cut greenhouse gasses

B) Ignore the info

C) Have the info manipulated so it doesn't say greenhouse gasses are deadly

Most well-adjusted, normal human beings would select A. But if you're the second most powerful person in the world, and your name is Dick Cheney, you pick C.

Pound360 would like to enact a new law. Anyone that voted for Bush/Cheney must pay double taxes over the next five years. The extra taxes would go towards discounting the taxes of everyone else in the country cleaning up the environment. Anyone that voted for Bush/Cheney twice should pay double taxes for 10 years.

Back to this business of manipulating climate testimony. Former EPA official Jason K. Burnett recently revealed Cheney's office "was deeply involved" in cutting half of Center for Disease Control and Prevention testimony last fall demonstrating climate change is harmful to people's health, reports ABC News.

According to the CDC, "manmade pollution is warming the Earth" and will both increase the spread of disease and cause injuries from severe weather.

Burnett (a "lifelong Democrat") was told by Cheney's Office to "remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change."

Government: 22% of Corn Goes to Ethanol

According to the US Department of Agriculture, 22 percent of corn is expected to be used for ethanol production driving up food prices 20 percent, reports MSNBC.

Of course, the ethanol industry is crying foul. They estimate ethanol production is only driving up food prices 4 percent. Both farmers and ethanol execs were in Washington this week trying to explain "the biofuel industry is not the culprit behind skyrocketing corn and wheat prices that have set off riots abroad and grocery sticker shock in America." They warn, "We cannot afford to jettison the promise of biofuels due to this manufactured hysteria over a fight between food versus fuel."

And they're right. We can't afford to jettison the promise of biofuels. But we should jettison the promise of converting food (corn, wheat) into fuel.

Pound360 has been grumbling about this for months. And others, including Republicans in Washington are starting to grumble with us. According to MSNBC, Arizona Republican Jeff Flake "called for a repeal of government incentives designed to boost ethanol production." Not only that, Flake took the first step towards really fixing the problem: he admitted we were simply wrong in the past. He called public policy support for ethanol "a classic case of the law of unintended consequences."

Globalized Food Market Saves Cash, Costs Pollution

Consumers around the world are used to having all kinds of food, at any time of the year for cheap. This is not natural. That does not mean it's bad. But that does mean it's probably not free.

Actually, regarding your pocket book, so far it pretty much is. "Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed," reports the NY Times in a recent article, "Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World."

About three percent of food industry carbon emissions come from transportation, reports the Times. The food industry transports food to keep produce bins stocked year-round and to take advantage of cheap labor. For example, the UK (and other countries for sure) import grapes from South Africa and squash from Italy in the winter. The UK also goes to places like Morocco and Egypt for tomatoes and salad greens instead of Spain since labor costs are lower.

These examples seem pretty reasonable. But there are others that are pretty bizarre. For example, cod from the coasts of Norway is shipped to China for filleting, then shipped back to Norway grocers for sale. In the fight against pollution and global warming, shouldn't we be cutting as many of these corners as possible?

One solution that wouldn't make much sense is rearranging the "longstanding trade agreements" mentioned earlier. Chances are, governments will never agree to a single, simple, across-the-board solution. They'll fight. They'll pound their chests. They'll simply get up and walk away from the table. Thus, you'll end up with what the NY Times refers to as "an uneven patchwork of fuel taxes" leaving "countries that kept the exemption a huge trade advantage."

Another solution that could (probably not) work is taking the decision to consumers. That's the idea behind a soon-to-be-launched "green" food labeling system at Tesco, the UK's largest grocery chain. The new labels will indicate how far food has traveled to make it to the store and how much carbon was emitted to create it.

Interestingly enough, not all supermarket items that are shipped long distances are worse for the environment than local stuff. For example, tropical flowers. The carbon footprint is smaller if you ship them from the tropics instead of growing them in "energy-hungry" greenhouses.

But that shouldn't make a consumer feel much better. Maybe tropical flowers outside of the tropics are simply a bad idea. When it comes to pollution, smaller isn't better when it's compared to zero.

America’s Misguided Cancer Crusade

It seems like each week the evening news is reporting a new link between some common product and cancer. For example, the pesticides on that apple you just ate, the cosmetics your mom uses or the cell phone you place next to your head every hour. That’s not to mention power lines, asbestos and other unnatural environmental dangers. Sure, these things can cause cancer, but a recent column at Slate explains America’s focus on this “worry candy” is distracting us from more notorious mass-murderers: natural carcinogens.

From Slate: “Somewhat insidiously, we're starting to believe that cancer mostly is prevented by informing individuals to change their consumption habits—not by proactive, broad-based public-health measures like widespread vaccination or agricultural reform.”

(By the way, Pound360 is as big a sucker for the worry candy as everybody else.)

Some of the most brutal killers are diseases that leave us vulnerable to cancer like human pilloma virus (HPV, which opens the door to cervical cancer), hepatitis B (can lead to liver cancer) and Helicobacter pylori (a major cause of stomach cancers). To prevent deaths, we should be vaccinating ourselves (in the case of HPV and hepatitis B) or working on developing a vaccine (for Helicobacter pylori).

Aflotoxin exposure is also a killer. This stuff comes from the mold that grows on peanuts, grains and milk when they’re stored for distribution. According to Slate, five billion people are at risk for aflotoxin exposure, but “regular food testing, could save thousands upon thousands of lives.”

President Obama Would Cut NASA Spending

Presidential candidate Barak Obama’s intends to slash spending for space exploration in order to support his education reform package reports the Space Review (via Slashdot). This does not help Obama’s chances of earning a Pound360 endorsement.

In fact, this really irritates us.

Obama’s plan is to pull funds from Project Constellation, the program aimed at “maintaining American presence in low Earth orbit, returning to the Moon for purposes of establishing an outpost, and laying the foundation to explore Mars,” according to Wikipedia.

Pound360 gets that education is important. But do you have to pull money from NASA? How about shaking a couch or two at the Pentagon and collecting the change? In the US we spend around $440 billion on defense each year. NASA by contrast has a meager annual budget of $17 billion.

Part of Obama’s problem with space spending is that “NASA has lost focus and is no longer associated with inspiration.” Okay, so the way you fire it up is draining the bank account? This is terribly confusing coming from a man that said, “I grew up on Star Trek… I believe in the final frontier.”

Another deeply disturbing issue with Obama is his support of ethanol. Pound360 has regularly discussed how getting fuel from food is a bad idea. It’s bad for pocket books (rising food prices, for example), bad for the environment (more fertilizer for our waterways, for example) and it simply won’t do much to curb demand for gasoline (if you used all the farmland in the United States to supply crops for ethanol, which is completely absurd, it would only serve around 30 percent of total gasoline demand).

(Another) Conservation Program Falls to Pieces Under Market Pressure

A government program that paid farmers not to farm land is falling to pieces, reports the NY Times. Since it's inception with the 1985 Farm Bill, the conservation program preserved acreage equal to the state of New York. But just last fall, farmers gave up "as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined."

Why would the government pay farmers not to farm? To keep food prices up, of course. Historically, we've had too much land on our hands. So by tightening the supply of land, the idea was to tighten the supply of food, and thus keep prices at a level where farmers could earn a decent living.

As a side benefit, to the delight of environmentalists and hunters (the program has boosted the nation's duck population by 2 million), pristine prairieland was preserved. In some areas, erosion was stopped dead in its tracks. The government didn't just preserve any land, it saved "the acres most at risk environmentally."

Again, acreage equal to the state of New York was saved. But now, as global food prices skyrocket, and the demand for biofuel mounts, it's suddenly more profitable to farm the land than what the government's paying ($51 per acre).

But don't curse the farmers. I'd probably do the same thing. It's not like the land is being tilled in exchange for yachts and mansions. Well, maybe not at the farm level. According to the NY Times, "a broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups" are pressuring farmers to withdraw from the conservation program.

Pound360 is simply not okay with that. Why should "snack food" interests have a say in whether or not wilderness gets wiped out?

We understand that this land belongs to farmers. We get how crazy it is to pay farmers not to farm. We realize how cold blooded it would be to simply seize the land.

But when are we going to draw the line?

Why can't we decide right now that the last acre of land we develop will not be the last acre of wilderness? Why not protect another acre of land someplace for every acre of land that farmers pull from the 1985 Farm Bill conservation program?

Quite frankly, Pound360 is bored with hearing stories about more wilderness being wiped out.

We're ready to start seeing stories about the surprising benefits of preserved land, 50 years "after we drew the line." We're ready to start reading stories about how, since we drew the line, amazing technological advancements have given us the ability to pull more from the land we've already developed. We're so ready to read stories about how, since we drew the line, incredible new conservation programs have shown we can live better on less. And we're also ready to read how one of these technological breakthroughs or programs led to a cure for the common cold, a phone that never needs to be charged or an iPod that holds a billion songs.

Seattle to Charge For Paper & Plastic Bags in 2009

Starting in 2009, Seattle is doing the only thing (Pound 360 believes) will make people conserve shopping bags: make them pay. This according to a feature at the NY Times. Sorry, I think the recent green trend -- all these Priuses you see popping up on the roads, for example -- is a fad. Didn't the exact same thing happen in the Seventies?

It's hip to conserve in 2008. But it won't be in 2010. And that's a problem because conservation is crucial to what Pound360 believes is the essential duty of each generation: to leave the Earth in better shape than it was when they got there.

But that's a tall order. Humans (including the staff here at Pound360… probably more so than average… you should see how fast a box of doughnuts disappears around here) are selfish. Indeed, self-interested primates are the ones, over millions of years of evolution, that were more likely to survive. It's not fair. But the chimp that shared its food with a neighbor was probably more likely to die in times of shortage than the one that horded its food and devoured it in private.

Again, it's not fair. I don't like it. But that's the hand we're dealt.

So how do you get people to conserve, to leave the world in better shape, when by nature, humans are selfish? One way is to hit them where it really stings: the pocket book. In that spirit, Seattle will charge shoppers a $.20 fee for each paper or plastic bag they take at a store in 2009.

That may not add up to much over the course of a year. What, 50 bucks or so per person? (Pound360 wants grocery stores to charge $5 per bag) But it's a start.

The City of Seattle estimates $10 million in new revenue from the program. One million of that will go to handing out reusable bags to every household.

Seattle's not the first city to force conservation of shopping bags with government action. San Francisco, for example, has banned plastic grocery bags. So has Annapolis, Maryland. But they don't enforce conservation of paper bags, which Seattle found can be "worse" for the environment (when you figure the costs of producing, shipping them), according to the Times.

Discover more: Find out how much oil we use to make plastic shopping bags each year. (It's measured in the hundreds-of-millions of gallons).

Ethanol to Blame for Surging Food Costs

Food prices are on the rise, corn ethanol mania is a big part of the problem reports MSNBC. Yes, the dollar is crashing on world markets and energy prices are skyrocketing (I just saw 4 dollar gas for the first time with my own eyes today), but feed (read corn, soybean) prices are to blame for as much as 70 percent of the rise in food costs, reports MSNBC.

Ethanol supporters in government (specifically those "from the ethanol-producing states) urge patience. We're in the "early stages" of converting organic material into fuel, notes Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. In the coming years, he explains, it won't be food that's turned into fuel but "corn stalks, switchgrass, woody pulp material, or other things.”

So what's the rush? Why not wait until our conversion technologies have caught up?

Raising particular concern at Pound360 are comments by Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. He told MSNBC the surge in food prices is a temporary problem that will be solved when farmers start bringing more land into production.

Never mind the fact, Sen. Nelson, that farming all that extra land means sending more fertilizer into the Gulf of Mexico, which will expand the growing "dead zone" there.

Never mind the fact, Sen. Nelson, that all the farmland in the United States of America, converted to growing fuel crops, couldn't serve a third of our oil demand.

Obama, Clinton Only Candiates With Space Plans

For us space nerds, the 2008 crop of presidential candidates are making it easy for us to make a decision. According to Popular Mechanic’s “Geek the Vote 08” website, the only candidates revealing space plans at the moment are Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Neither one of them has a Kennedy-esque man-on-the-moon-in-ten-years-or-your-money-back guarantee, but there are some positive signs here.

Both candidates acknowledge the atrophy of our space program has threatened the United States’ leadership in science, technology, national security and other areas (if we even are the leaders in all those areas anymore). Clinton and Obama both agree on the continuation of manned space flight, use of satellites to fight global warming and cranking up spending on space.

Where is the money going to come from? They don’t say. But so far, the Iraq war has cost us 488 billion dollars, or about 68-times the amount of money we spend on space each year (7 billion dollars). So by pulling troops out of Iraq, say half of them, it should free up a few billion.

One notable difference between the two Dem’s space plans is how hard Obama is working to tie space programs to national defense. He doesn’t advocate weapons orbiting the planet, or X-wings patrolling in lower Earth orbit, but he believes satellites are the best way to keep an eye on the bad guys (especially when it comes to the development of nuclear programs and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

European Governments Push Back on Biofuel

As the world slides blindly from one dirty energy economy (fossil fuel) to another (biofuel), governments in Europe are beginning to open their eyes and pull the breaks.

From the NY Times this week: “Governments in Europe and elsewhere have begun rolling back generous, across-the-board subsidies for biofuels, acknowledging that the environmental benefits of these fuels have often been overstated.”

“The biofuels craze was founded on the theory that plant-based fuels are carbon-neutral,” reports the Times. But that’s pretty much a fantasy. Yes, plants that turn into biofuel absorb carbon dioxide from the air. But that’s just part of the equation. Most people weren’t paying attention to the whole picture. The picture includes…

• You’ve got to burn fuel (put more pollution in the atmosphere) to make biofuel. Consider the machinery used to cultivate crops, refine the fuel, ship it to market.
• Biofuel crops need to be fertilized and fertilizer is not a healthy thing for the environment, especially the ecosystems of waterways and swampland.
• Rich, biodiverse land is, in some cases, wiped out to make room for biofuel crops.
• Since biofuel demand is outstripping the increase in supply of biofuel crops, unintended consequences like surging food prices are developing.

In the end, governments in Europe (and Canada) have found “there is increasing evidence that the total emissions and environmental damage from producing many ‘clean’ biofuels often outweigh their lower emissions when compared with fossil fuels,” reports the Times.

Of particular concern for long-term thinking governments is the very fuel stock we’re most excited about here in the United States: Corn. According to new Swiss and German regulations aimed at promoting sustainable biofuels, corn “will have trouble meeting the standard.”

The Swiss government, for example, is pushing for biofuels that reduce emissions from fuel by 40 percent. Corn hovers somewhere between 10 and 20 percent.

According to the Times, “Corn is a relatively inefficient crop for making biofuel, because it requires intensive processing and in most cases yields only a minor emissions benefit.”

Disgraceful: Health Care Spending Up, Quality Down

The United States ranks last in preventable deaths among 19 other industrialized nations. This according to a report at ScienceDaily. I think that means we shouldn’t be classified as an industrial nation anymore.

Previously we were ranked 15 above countries like Portugal and Ireland. Not any more.

Despite this miserable placement, American health care spending doubled to its highest level, greater than $2 trillion, in 2006, reports the NY Times. If you spend more, doesn’t that mean things should get better?

On the positive side, growth in health spending slowed to 5.7 percent (about double the rate of inflation). According to the NY Times report, “factors that drove up drug spending included the use of existing drugs for new purposes and the increased use of high-cost biotechnology products.”

Another positive note, deaths from preventable causes has fallen 4 percent in recent years. However, for other countries, the rate fell 16 percent, according to ScienceDaily.

Specific to health care, the U.S. is also in last place when it comes to “mortality amenable to health care.” Each year, about 109 out of 100,000 die in this country because of inadequate health care.

Move to Canada…

Last year, Pound360 blogged on how Canada has better health care than America despite the fact that they spend half as much per capita ($7,100 for Yanks versus $2,900 for Canadians).

Oddly enough, when NPR reported on the health care spending record, they barely mentioned how miserable our health care had become. And they waited until the very end to say it. Why?

Approval of New Drugs Plummets. Guess Why.

Last year, just 19 new drugs were approved by the FDA. That’s three less than the number approved in 2006 and the lowest number in 24 years (in 1983, only 13 new drugs were approved), reports Bloomberg.

What happened to the U.S. as a leader of innovation?

Drug companies blame the FDA for raising approval standards. The FDA of course denies the claim.

One industry watcher, Kenneth I. Kaitin, director of the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development in Boston, suggests drug companies are focusing on finding new uses for the drugs they already have instead of innovating. The problem with that, according to Kaitin: “If you're putting money into extending the lifecycle of a drug on the market, you're taking money away from a drug development program.''

But is coming up with new uses for drugs the only culprit here? According to a recent York University Study, ad spending is also killing innovation. “A new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development,” reports ScienceDaily.

In 2004, the last year for which data is available, drug companies spent $57.5 million on advertising. That’s $61 thousand for each physician.

“The study’s findings supports the position that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is marketing-driven and challenges the perception of a research-driven, life-saving, pharmaceutical industry.”

Oh well. These companies do have shareholders (which are a pathetically impatient bunch). So job one for them is immediately boosting earnings per share. If drug makers happen to get some research done and squeeze out a life-saver in the process, great. Look, we’re not saying that’s a perfect (or even a healthy) system, it’s just the system we have.

Canada beats US in Health Care

Here in the United States we pay $7,100 per capita for care in a private health system. Up in Canada, they spend $2,900 per capita for a public, universal health care system. And it's well know that health care costs continue to spiral in the US, and it's crippling businesses. But we're getting better health care in the States, right? Wrong.

According to research aggregating the findings of 38 health care studies, "health outcomes for patients in Canada are as good as or better than in the United States," reports the CBC (that's the Canadian Broadcasting Company for you Yankees). However, this study was conducted by US researchers.

I am as shocked as you are.

When comparing patients who had similar medical conditions, researchers found that, "Overall, Canada did better, and in fact we found a statistically significant five per cent mortality advantage to people with diagnoses in Canada compared to their counterparts in the United States."

US Ranks Below Austria, Hungary in Child Health

It's hard to believe -- well, not really -- but the U.S. ranks 20th among 21 "wealthy countries" when it comes to a child's "well-being." This according to a UNICEF report that was reported widely, including this USAToday article.

The only country to fair worse in the study, which looked at infant mortality, birth weight, immunization, and death among other factors, was the UK.

Rather than admit they had some work to do, and assure the country it would redouble its efforts to protect their most valuable resource, the British Department for Education and Skills tossed out excuses. "In many cases the data used is several years old," said a spokeswoman.

I did some digging and couldn't find any response from US leadership.