Carbon Credits, A Pipedream?

Sec. Vilsack may be overpromising (I know, he's a politician so that's totally surprising) when he says farmers can replace direct payments with payments for carbon credits. That's the message of this Marcia Zarley Taylor post at DTN:

The number one challenge facing pro-carbon trading farm groups at the moment is proving that agriculture's contribution to carbon reduction can be real, "additional" and permanent, others Ag Carbon Market Group members say.

Here are two GAO products which are relevant

FSA Interfacing With IRS

According to Sec. Vilsack, FSA will now require producers to sign a waiver form to permit IRS to provide income data to FSA to check compliance with adjusted gross income requirements. (It's a followup to a GAO audit.) See the press release here.

Note: the public doesn't want bureaucratic red tape, but it wants payments made to eligible people and it wants IRS data kept private. How does a bureaucracy square the circle: a form.

So Much for Conservative Scare Tactics

I remember the great Panama Canal fight in the 1970's--a hot issue which Reagan rode to the nomination by demagoguery. Then in the 1990's when, under the treaty's terms, we were to hand the Canal over to the Panamian government, some conservatives got all outraged that Hutchinson-Whampoa, a Hong Kong firm, would operate a terminal at one end or the other. Well, almost 20 years on and the sky has not fallen. Indeed, the Illinois Corn Growers seems to be using Panamian management as a stick to beat the US with:

"[the ICG spokesman said]says that while improvements are still pending on U.S. locks and dams, Panama is improving their canal to grow traffic through that waterway.

"And the reason they are doing this, and they are spending billions of dollars, is because they want to bring Capesize vessels, which are the largest ocean going vessels out there, through the Panama Canal," said Lambert.

My Face

Finally got around to updating my profile, and including my official passport photo shot. I may be self-centered, but I'm not fond of my looks as a senior citizen. Fortunately, I don't have to look at the picture as I write a post.

One Cell to Rule Them All

The NYTimes has an article on the cellphone (i.e., Iphone) as a universal remote.

On its blog, there's a suggestion to convert cellphones into the SecurID device. As it says: "For those of you who don’t work for security-conscious corporations, a SecurID is a little LED display that goes in your wallet or on your keychain, that flashes a different six digit number every minute or so. You need to enter that number, along with a user name and password, to get into some computer systems."

Dr. Shiva Is Wrong

At Blog for Rural America, Steph Larson reports on the organic farming conference. Including this nugget:

To a packed audience, Dr. Shiva remembered the roots of industrial agriculture, which was born out of a need to find different uses for the chemicals of war [emphasis added]. Now seeds are patented and controlled by only a few multi-national corporations, while producers are driven further into debt and suffer from hunger. As agriculture becomes more consolidated and fewer people control our food supply, Dr. Shiva asserted that the very health of our democracy is at risk.

The bolded phrase is ridiculous nonsense, though a meme popular among the left food community. (Dr. Pollan repeated a version of it in "Omnivore...". )

The reference presumably is to the Haber-Bosch process, which was developed before WWI in order to avoid the need to import nitrates from Chile. The nitrates were particularly important in European agriculture. Now gunpowder originally was made of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpeter (or "nitre" or potassium nitrate). And Germany's access to Chilean nitrate during WWI was cut off by the British blockade, so the Haber-Bosch process was used to make nitrate for explosives. "The Alchemy of Air" is a fast-moving narrative of the developments in this area.

Sentence of the Day:

From Dana Milbank, Post, describing a press breakfast on GM's prospects:

As Wagoner [GM CEO]described the company's gloomy economic forecast, the moderator, Dave Cook, [of the now on-line only Christian Science Monitor] was sympathetic: "We're from the newspaper business. We understand."

Email and Health Care Costs [Revised]

The NYTimes bits blog covers a study of Kaiser Permanente:

The study, focusing on the experience of Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii when it implemented electronic health records, secure e-mail and a Web portal, found that patient visits declined 26 percent from 2004 to 2007.

Makes sense to me. Matter of fact, Kaiser has the same setup in the DC area and I've used email to avoid office calls. I think it works well for those who are averse to doctors (me) anyway but who also have a bit of hypochondria (me again) and who are into researching on the Internet (me). An ache triggers the research, but email allows me to scratch the itch without wasting the good doctor's face time.

This effect may be just as important as the other pluses: "The long-awaited transition from paper to electronic records is considered essential if doctors and hospitals are to improve coordination of care, manage patients with chronic disease, lessen the wide variation in how medicine is practiced and monitor quality." from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

[Had a comment on the original post I wanted to get rid of --hence the revision. But I'm taking advantage of it to add a comment on the Wash Post op-ed questioning health IT. While the arguments have weight, IMO one could make the same arguments against many of the advances over the last 100 years. There's always trade-offs and a learning curve. But basically I believe in progress.]

Republican Star Believes in Nationalizing Industry, Not Banks

That was my reaction when I saw this from brownfield (the piece mentions Bobby Jindal as involved in the negotiations):

Poultry processor Pilgrim’s Pride has rejected the latest offer from the State of Louisiana and Foster Farms for the plant in Farmerville, Louisiana. As part of Chapter 11 restructuring, Pilgrim’s Pride announced in February it is going to idle the plant which employs 1,300 people. The State of Louisiana offered to go 50-50 with California-based Foster Farms to buy the plant for $40 million. Pilgrim’s Pride rejected that offer saying it was not enough.

Most Amusing Sentence (for a Cynic of Goo-Gooism)

From a Farmgate piece:

"Recently an agricultural policy analyst for the Congressional Research Service also looked at the ACRE program in an effort to explain to Members of Congress what they had done in creating it."