Fat Michael by any other name

Is... Cavendish?

It is if you're a banana. A sick banana, that is.

My dad sent me an interesting Op-Ed from the New York Times, by Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World - which points out that the banana we eat today is not the banana my dad ate when he was a kid. Something rather all the more fascinating to me as my friend (and erstwhile roommate) had made this very same point to me not that long ago. What are the odds?

According to Koeppel, 100 years ago the popular banana was a varietal called the "Gros Michel," and it was, by all accounts, tastier, sturdier and larger than the one, the "Cavendish," that we consume today. And this is not the past as seen through those "good ol' days" lenses - this was the estimation of the banana cartel itself, when faced with the prospect of its dying mainstay.

Caught in a mess of its own making (go figure) as the Gros Michel succumbed to a blight (the Panama disease) that had started killing the bananas in the early 1900s, and that, by the 1960s, ultimately rendered the tastier and larger fruit nothing but a sweet memory, the banana industry needed to find a new variety that could withstand the blight. The hardier Cavendish, immune to the Panama disease, was the winning entry.

Well, lo and behold, what goes around comes around, and the Panama disease is back today, bigger and nastier than before, and the Cavendish this time is not immune. The efficiencies and economies of scale engineered way back when to secure the financial success of the banana republics are now backfiring.

Dependent as we are on a single variety of banana to provide us cheap bananas, sadly, when one gets sick, they all get sick. Yes, we have no bananas. Ruh roh.

Ignorance may really be bliss (or not)

Did you know that Dave Matthews' tour bus is a diesel and runs on recycled deep-fryer restaurant oil? I'm not sure what about that is more twisted - the thought that Dave Matthews fills up his gas tank with Mickey D's left-overs, or that we actually eat food fried in something that can power a rock band's tour bus.

Remember that scene in Sleeper, when Woody Allen asks for wheat germ and organic honey? And they gently tell him that it's steak and hot fudge that are good for you, that the other stuff will kill you? The biofuel thing is like that - just when you thought you had it all figured it out (petroleum bad, ethanol good) - wham, bam. Strike that, reverse it.

"Any biofuel that causes land clearing is likely to increase global warming," says ecologist Joseph Fargione of The Nature Conservancy, lead author of the second study. "It takes decades to centuries to repay the carbon debt that is created from clearing land." (read it and weep)

Because, evidently, it's not all about what happens when you burn the fuel...it's also about what happens when you make the fuel. Oh, right. That. Plus, it turns out some ethanol is more equal than others - soy may be better than corn. But still bad. And switchgrass (don't ask, I have no idea) better than both. Not sure if it's better and still bad, or better and good. But it seems to be better.

And, as usual, the politicians don't seem to be quite on the same page as the scientists (haven't we seen that movie before - just recently in fact, with Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal? It wasn't half bad, if I remember correctly, RT:46) - the EU recently made this announcement, and I must quote, because I couldn't paraphrase nearly as well:

Despite intense debate surrounding the growing global food crises, the European Union today defended expanding the use of biofuels in all 27 member countries...“You can’t change a political objective without risking a debate on all the other objectives,” meaning that changing biofuels targets could lead to questioning the entire climate change package.

You know what they say, "don't let the facts get in the way."

But wait, there's more...

None of these costly impacts get considered when politicians tout the alleged societal benefits of corn-based ethanol. Nor do proponents like to mention the huge amounts of petroleum needed to grow corn for ethanol. (Conventional fertilizers and pesticides are made from oil.)
By most calculations – including those of the new Swiss study – these energy inputs match or exceed the energy provided by ethanol made from corn. In other words, we are wasting public money and irreplaceable water and soil resources in pursuit of a false promise of energy independence. (there really is more)

Repeat after me: Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is bliss. Funny, no matter how many times I repeat it, I don't believe it anymore either. I guess I'll go figure out what on earth switchgrass is. And if it's better and still bad, or better and good. Check back - I'll share.

This is for the car Bill Maher drives

Alright, I actually have no idea what kind of car Bill Maher drives.

But he wrote a blisteringly funny and worrisome post on the fallacy of bio-fuel:

Scientists have been on the biofuel bandwagon; how did they get it so wrong? As Time puts it, "It was as if the science world assumed biofuels would be grown in parking lots. The deforestation in Indonesia shows that's not the case. It turns out the carbon lost when wilderness is razed overwhelms the gains from cleaner-burning fuels."
Just as bad, apparently some people in the world still use land to grow real food, and the 800 million people in the world with cars are taking food from the 800 million people in the world who are hungry and putting it in our gas tanks. I, for one, think that's rude. Going up to a poor Brazilian boy, snatching the hot dog out of his hand and shoving it in the nozzle of your Prius, that's wrong.

He points to a cover article in Time Magazine - The Clean Energy Scam:

...several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous...

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.'s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency.

Have I mentioned you can't win for losing? Now what?

This is to make up for the car I drive

I found this very cool map, cool and rather disheartening at the same time. It's the US' carbon footprint - plotted by actual emissions. Which you'd think wouldn't be such a big deal.

Well, it turns out that CO2 emissions across the States used to be "calculated" (and let's use that word loosely) based on population... which seems massively unfair. And, as it so happens, also plain wrong. The Northeast? So over-blamed in the game, and the Southeast not blamed enough... well, those days are oh-ver.

Never underestimate the power of the map. Hey, my brother-in-law is a cartographer, and I'm telling you, don't mess with the mapmakers.

I read about the map on Wired's Science Blog:

the NASA- and Department of Energy-funded scientists can detail emissions across all 9 million square kilometers that compose the United States. For a full explanation, check out the video that Purdue's Kevin Gurney put together, which features a number of other excellent CO2 visualizations. Andy Revkin, the New York Times' environment-beat writer, put a memorable headline on a post about the video, calling it, "Breath of a Nation."

Oh yeah, my car? Well, let's just say, that red dot over there? That would be me. I am part of the problem. I confess.

I was just wondering...

It was touch and go today... what I was going to write about, that is. Sorry to say it was slow going for me the last 24 hours...a lot of work and not too much outside world.

I could write about the Villanova coach whose technical foul started an 11-3 point run for the other team. I'm not even a basketball fan and I can tell you that's not cool. Or about the new REM single that's floating around the net from their new album - you can get it, of course, on the Slovakian fan site. Where else?

Then I read the story about the hypnotic hold-up artist, the mesmerizing supermarket robber. Sometimes you wonder why we even bother with fiction.

Italian police have issued video footage of a man who has been hypnotizing supermarket checkout staff and getting them to hand over the cash.
In every case, according to reports, the last thing staff remember is a man leaning over and saying 'Look into my eyes' before suddenly finding the till is empty.

To top it off, the robber "bears an uncanny resemblance to Rasputin and Saddam Hussein."

I wish I had something to add to that. But I don't.

You wish there wasn't a need

My mom sent this link to me a while ago... a "global display of terrorism and other suspicious events." It's a map from the United States Department of Transportation Federal Transit Administration. Definitely one of those things I really wish didn't have to exist. But it does. And here it is. Brought to us in living color - map or satellite or hybrid. What did we do before Google?

The map flickers with a disturbing array of reports, such as:

• "Strange odor from mail shuts down one of governor's offices"
• "Pipe bomb found under car in Dublin"
• "Turkish police foil ‘plot’ to bomb US companies"
• "Colombia hotel blast leaves 1 dead, 2 injured"
• "Venezuela dares U.S. to put it on terror list"
• "Tibetans try to storm Chinese embassy in India's national capital"

The map supposedly reloads itself every 310 seconds. Which I actually find a bit odd. 310 seconds? Three hundred and ten? I mean, 5 minutes would be 300 seconds... Doesn't it make you feel like there's some hidden meaning in that 310 somehow? What's with the extra 10 seconds? I'm just asking...