Business & Politics

The 2012 Farm Bill: How you’re affected

Story by Amanda Azzoli, contributing author for the PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com

As many of you may or may not know, every 5 years a variety of legislation, commonly referred to as the Farm Bill, expires and requires revision. Despite its misleading nickname, the Farm Bill is not just for farmers. This is a common, incorrect, assumption; one I intend to debunk throughout this article.

So, what is the 2012 Farm Bill?

The 2012 Farm Bill, formally named the “Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012,” covers 12 major areas that apply to our environment and livelihood. Each area covered in the bill has a specific goal, along with detailed programs to help achieve that goal. Below is a list of each area covered in the bill, along with its goal.

• Commodities Programs
  • Programs that strive to end direct payments, strengthen crop insurance, and encourage innovative risk management approaches for farmers
•  Conservation Programs
  • Programs that ensure a safe and abundant food supply, clean water, and a thriving wild life
• Trade Programs
  • Programs that focus on opening up new markets and reducing trade barriers
• Nutrition Programs
  • Programs that focus on responsible spending to ensure that those in need receive help
• Credit
  • Programs that work with the 2008 Farm Bill to assist beginning farmers and family farms
• Rural Development
  • Programs that help to rebuild communities and invest in the future to help rural communities thrive
• Research
  • Programs that continue critical research initiatives and create a new nonprofit foundation to support cutting-edge research
• Forestry
  • Programs that work to protect and improve our nations forests, which provide us with clean drinking water, critical wildlife habitat, and recreational outlets for our families
• Energy Programs
  • Programs encouraged to help create jobs, reduce our nations dependency on foreign oil, and explore new opportunities in bio-based manufacturing, advanced biofuels, and renewable energy
• Specialty Crop and Horticulture
  • Programs that support and recognize the diversity of American agriculture and the critical impact its sale has on the economy and as a job creator
• Crop Insurance
  • Programs that strengthen and improve coverage for all commodities and underserved crops
• Miscellaneous
  • Programs that include assisting socially disadvantaged farmers, assisting livestock producers, increasing workforce development
• http://www.ag.senate.gov/issues/farm-bill

Across these 12 areas, there are over 100 programs. Evidently, these programs apply to all of our citizens, not just farmers. In fact, it is estimated that only 20% of the above programs pertain to farmers.

 It is imperative that this assumption is debunked so citizens can become aware of the programs that directly affect them within this bill.

Opportunities and Risks

Another imperative reason for why we need to stay informed about the Farm Bill is because it has the power to create a great deal of opportunity and risk in our country.

In terms of opportunity, the Farm Bill has the power to “revitalize our economy by expanding opportunities to connect farmers and local consumers, removing barriers for beginning farmers, improving the productivity of our workforce by ensuring that all individuals have access to an affordable and healthy diet, and protecting the future quality of our natural resources” (fsepmichigan.org).

However, because of the deficits we face, as well as the current sequestration, certain programs that could be enhanced may be at risk for elimination, due to lack of funding. The termination of certain programs could have a serious effect on our nation. For example, cutting programs concerned with conservation, nutrition, or food aid could affect low-income consumers, our wildlife, as well as the abundance of food supply and clean water. Additionally, cutting programs concerned with energy could affect our environment, and thus, our future.

 Legislation that holds this much power over our lives requires and deserves our undivided attention…

As you can see, the Farm Bill is a fully loaded, complex, conglomerate of programs that affect our economy, environment, and overall quality of life, not just the lives of farmers and their farms. Because many people still assume the latter, it is important that we make an effort to inform those who hold this assumption. We owe it to ourselves, to our environment, and to our future to inform others and to stay aware and informed about the Farm Bill and its programs.

 

A Sustainable Fast Food Industry?

Story by Karmen Cheung, contributing author for the PeoplePlanetProfitBlog.com.  This year McDonald’s became the first fast food chain to make it onto the EPA’s Top 50 Green Power Purchasers list. Over the last ten years, McDonald’s and other leaders of the fast food industry have made efforts to improve their image through incorporating socially and environmentally responsible strategies into their business models. While fast food restaurants may never be 100% sustainable, there are many ways in which fast food companies can reduce their footprints. Small steps have already been made over the past several years but true impact is still far beyond our reach.  Some ideas that fast food industry leaders have started exploring include:

Powering restaurants with green energy

Increased investment in wind or solar energy could have immense impact on the renewable industries as well as lead to energy savings for fast food chains.

Thirty percent of McDonald’s electricity use at company-owned restaurants comes from wind power and the company is buying 306 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of Green-e certified renewable energy certificates (RECs) annually.

Chipotle announced in 2009 that they would be installing solar panels at approximately 75 of its restaurants. When complete the installations are expected to produce 500 kilowatts of electricity collectively, and make Chipotle the largest direct producer of solar energy in the restaurant industry. Solar panels located on rooftops would not only help restaurants generate enough electricity to power the restaurant in the summer months but would also provide shade to decrease energy demand.

Recycling used cooking oil

The simple recycling of cooking oil to power diesel vehicles will reduce US spending on foreign oil by billions of dollars. Shake Shack, a rapidly growing chain of burger, hot dog and milk shake restaurant, already recycles all of their cooking oil into biofuel. Across the country, other restaurants, including McDonald’s are also slowly starting to adopt this practice.

Reduce impacts of packaging

The amount of packaging used in fast food restaurants has a large impact on the timber, paper and paper packaging industries. According to Dogwood Alliance, Starbucks and McDonald’s have been leaders in promoting sustainable packaging policies. Starbucks has been slowly working towards its goal of providing only reusable or recyclable cups by 2015 and McDonald’s has reduce the paper in its napkins by 21 percent and cut out 84 tons of paper in 2010 by reducing the size of bun tray liners. In October of this year, KFC has also issued a new sustainable packaging policy after two years of pressure from Dogwood Alliance.

LEED certify buildings

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a voluntary, consensus-based, market-driven program that provides third party verification of green buildings. Participation in and international acceptance of LEED has grown rapidly over the past twenty years. Subways already has three LEED certified buildings and KFC opened up its first LEED certified restaurant in Indianapolis last year (this was also the first LEED certified retail building in the state). McDonald’s took the lead in green fast food restaurants recently with their participation in the LEED Volume program in which they pledged to build 25 LEED certified restaurants in the next three years.  Burger King has also laid an aggressive strategy to spend three billion dollars on remodeling more than half of its stores to become more energy efficient. The project, known as 20/20 stores are already being designed and rebuilt.

The initiatives mentioned in this article are not meant to be comprehensive in anyway but simply represents a small sampling of projects undertaken by fast food industry leaders.

The Third Industrial Revolution – Jeremy Rifkin

Source Forbes  http://www.forbes.com/sites/terrywaghorn/2011/12/12/jeremy-rifkins-third-industrial-revolution/

Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the best selling author of nineteen books spoke about his new book “The Third Industrial Revolution” – the possibility that a distributed energy revolution is possible because at some point “we all can create our own energy, store it, and then distribute it to each other because the third Industrial Revolution “is an economic game plan. We have the science and technology to do it, but it will mean nothing unless there is a change in will.” The first Industrial Revolution, Rifkin argues, “brought together print and literacy with coal steam and rail. The second combined the telegraph and telephone with the internal combustion engine and oil.”

The Third Industrial Revolutionwith Jeremy:

How did you come up with this idea?

My read on history is that the great economic revolutions occur when two phenomena come together. When we change energy regimes, it makes possible much more complex economic relations. When energy revolutions occur, however, they require communication revolutions that are agile enough to manage them. If you look at the 19th century, print technology became very cheap when we introduced steam power into printing. That decreased the cost and increased the speed, efficiency and availability of print material. At the same time we established public schools in Europe and America. We created a print literate workforce with the communication skills to organize a First Industrial Revolution driven by coal and steam power.

Then we did it again in the 20th century with the convergence of communication and energy: Centralized electricity—especially the telephone and then later radio and television—became the communication vehicles to manage a more dispersed Second Industrial Revolution, organized around the oil-powered internal combustion engine, suburban construction and the creation of a mass consumer society.

Energy historians only deal with energy, and communication historians only deal with communications, but in history you can’t really do one without the other. That’s the framework that led me to this kind of search, and the Third Industrial Revolution really came out of that narrative on how history evolves.

So, what exactly is the Third Industrial Revolution?

First of all, it’s based on a new convergence of communication and energy. The Internet has been a very powerful communication tool in the last 20 years. What’s so interesting about it is the way it scales. I grew up in the 20th century on centralized electricity communication that scales vertically. The Internet, by contrast, is a distributed and collaborative communication medium and scales laterally.

We are in the early stages of a convergence of Internet communication technology with a new form of energy that is by nature distributed and has to be managed collaboratively and scales laterally. We’re making a great transition to distributed renewable energy sources. And we distinguish those from the elite energies—coal, oil, gas, tar sands—that are only found in a few places and require significant military and geopolitical investments and massive finance capital, and that have to scale top down because they are so expensive. Those energies are clearly sunsetting as we enter the long endgame of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Distributed energies, by contrast, are found in some frequency or proportion in every inch of the world: the sun, the wind, the geothermal heat under the ground, biomass—garbage, agricultural and forest waste—small hydro, ocean tides and waves.

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