Gut check

From Ezra’s column:

The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in bacon has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this issue. The National Resources Defense Council has a long page of suggestions for how you, too, can “fight global warming.” As you’d expect, “Drive Less” is in bold letters. There’s also an endorsement for “high-mileage cars such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.” They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word “meat” is nowhere to be found.

That’s not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn’t poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. “The Sierra Club isn’t opposed to eating meat,” was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. “So that’s sort of the long and short of it.” And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock.

The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you’d otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn’t require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn’t mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It’s healthful. And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that “you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch.” Given that PB&J is delicious, it’s not the world’s most onerous commitment.

Wine without the snobbery

Hosted by John Cleese. It’s a pretty fun look at wines for the novice:

The (de)merits of the Agricultural Committees

Ezra Klein has a smart post on Ag-Committees and why they’re overkill. I don’t know a whole lot about these committees, but I’m pretty convinced the subsidees we’ve been sending to Big Corn and Co. are a bad thing for our economy, public health and energy policy. This will be an interesting conversation to follow, to say the least.

Labeling food to make us skinnier

Ezra Klein at his new WaPo post talks about the MEAL Act:

Image used under a CC license from Flickr user Marshall Astor.

Hence: Menu labeling. The key insight here is that small changes in behavior can have large impacts on outcomes. A Health Impact Assessment (pdf) prepared for the city of Los Angeles estimated that if calorie labeling convinced a mere 10 percent of large-chain patrons to order meals that were merely 100 calories lighter, then menu labeling “would avert 38.9% of the 6.75 million pound average annual weight gain in the county population aged 5 years and older.” Get 20 percent to reduce their meals by 75 calories? You’ve knocked out 58.3 percent of the projected 6.75 million pounds. That’s huge.