When Food is Fuel

Posted by on

Keith Bradsher wrote in yesterday’s New York Times about what happens when we start using food for fuel:

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

“The urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia and the Pacific.

A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.

Further reading:

Oil Prices and the Dollar

Posted by on

Rich Sweeney had a post last week that answered a question I’ve had: What does the runup in oil prices look if you’re not so US-centric as to view it in dollars? Obviously dollars is the currency I have to use to buy my barrels of oil, but I was curious how much of the dramatic increase in recent months was really just an indirect measure of the falling dollar. Here’s Rich’s graphic, which context suggests is from the Wall Street Journal:

oil price in dollars, euros and gold

Water in the Desert: Harry Reid Edition

Posted by on

Water in Las VegasPeter Waldman has a story in Portfolio exploring the role of the federal government in general and Harry Reid in particular in the growth of Las Vegas:

In a city running out of water, massive housing projects rise in clouds of dust on the outer reaches of the Las Vegas Valley like stucco ramparts built by some demented desert king. Just over the hills to the east, Lake Mead, which is on the Colorado River, the area’s main water source, is literally drying up. Runaway population growth and a historic drought have rendered the nation’s largest reservoir a virtual drainage ditch, down to a skeletal 48 percent of capacity. Yet construction in Las Vegas continues unabated. The city’s latest megaproject is a master-planned “sustainable community” of 16,000 homes—anchored by a high-rise “neighborhood” casino—to be built about 15 miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip, at the gateway to beloved Mount Charleston, part of the region’s only national forest.

(via Aquafornia)

Things I Have Seen

Posted by on



Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.
I’m working on a piece for the newspaper about riding a bike. At the risk of giving too much away, I’ll say simply that it’s about going to places and seeing things. Such as these things, seen today:

  • ice: It’s been dry for a couple of weeks, but the concrete flood control channels still have water in them, the result of our city’s leaky plumbing. It’s also been cold, so the trickle in the channel is frozen. Ice is fascinating to a warm climate boy like me.
  • engineered ecosystems I: A failed experiment – the corn field on the west side of the Rio Grande near the north end of town. Failed because the birds, for whom it was grown, were nowhere to be seen.
  • engineered ecosystems II: A success – half a hundred sandhill cranes on the east side of the river, munching corn also grown for them.
  • engineered ecosystems III: Another success – half a hundred fishermen and women and kids fishing at the artificial ponds at what we here in Albuquerque call “Tingley Beach.” It has no beach to speak of, and Clyde Tingley is long dead. It was cold. No one was out much on the riverside trail, which is heavily used on any Saturday even 10 degrees warmer than today. But those fisherpeople. Build ’em a pond, stock it with fish and they’re there.


Back to the Blog, Back to the Bike

Posted by on

I woke up Sunday morning for the first time in year without thinking about what work I needed to do that day on the book. The manuscript sits in a stack on the shelf next to me. (They want it printed on paper in addition to being burned onto a CD! How quaint!)

I took a week off work to finish, but since it’s done, I’m just being lazy. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying working on the book, but I didn’t realize how quietly stressful it had become to spend every non-work hour of my life either working on my book or being subconsciously aware that I wasn’t working on my book.

Yesterday afternoon Lissa and my sister, Lisa, (no, those aren’t misspellings, and yes, it’s a bit confusing) went shoe-shopping with me. I had lunch today with friends. Tomorrow Lissa and I and my parents are going down to the Bosque del Apache. Tonight Nora and I are going to Ta Lin. I need chocolate. Thursday morning I’m going cycling with a friend I’ve barely ridden with in months. At no point in all of this do I have to worry about getting back and writing another 500 words before bedtime.

I’m in the middle of two books that have absolutely nothing to do with climate, drought, water or the West: Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class (I know, all the cool kids read this one five years ago) and John Leland’s Hip: The History (favorite line, a quote from James Russell Lowell: “Whitman is a rowdy, a New York tough, a loafer, a frequenter of low places, a friend of cab drivers!” Hip I’m not.). Nice to be able to curl up guilt free with a book, or lie prone on the couch and watch relatively inconsequential election returns from – what, Michigan’s Republican primary? Sweet. What’s up with that Mitt guy’s hair?

Fleck Feels Ready to Make His Mark

Posted by on

soccer ballFrom the Guardian:

‘He is doing tremendously well and long may it continue. He’s in at the deep end, but he’s not out his depth. Some days he’s doing everything, scoring goals, playing passes and it’s great to see. It’s good experience for him right now being about the first team.’

HT Dave

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Soda Straw Edition

Posted by on

Raptor telescopeI’ve always been fascinated by astronomy’s variable sky community – the folks who look for things that change.

Most traditional astronomy involves parking a big telescope on a single object and watching it for a while. But the variable sky – things that change on time scales ranging from minutes to hours to days – is another world entirely, rich with unexplored possibility.

My latest effort in this area was a little riff over the weekend on the RAPTOR telescope at Los Alamos:

Looking for things that change is a simple concept. To understand our world, our brains do it all the time— tracking our field of vision, looking for things that are different from what they were a moment ago.


Something that moves might be prey— a rabbit we could eat. Or it might be a lion hoping to eat us. Either way, it pays to notice things in our field of view that change.

But astronomy has long been primarily about the study of the constant, eternally quiet sky. Most things don’t change most of the time. As a result, mammoth telescopes point for hours on end at tiny patches of sky, slowly tracking faint objects as they pass overhead, creating one or a handful of images of what is essentially an unchanging sky.

That is fine for studying a single object. But imagine hunting for rabbits or trying to avoid lions by looking at a single spot in the forest through a soda straw. You’d probably starve, unless you were eaten by a lion first.