This is a mock-up of what the proposed label would look like (Photo courtesy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
Back in 2007, Congress told the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration to come up with
new fuel efficiency labels on tires.
Mark Brush reports on when we might
see those labels in tire shops:
Transcript
Back in 2007, Congress told the
National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration to come up with
new fuel efficiency labels on tires.
Mark Brush reports on when we might
see those labels in tire shops:
It’s been 2 years, and the government is still working out how to get this labeling program going.
Right now, if you walk into a tire shop, it’s hard to compare tires on how fuel efficient they are. There’s no official standard yet.
But that should change soon. The new tire labeling program is expected to roll it out in the next few months.
Dan Zielinski is a spokesman for the Rubber Manufacturers Association. He says they support a labeling law because it’ll help competition.
It could give tire makers something to brag about.
“’It will be an incentive to say ‘my tire is better because,’ or, ‘my range of tires here are better because.’ It offers the consumers better performance on certain criteria. And I think that will drive the market even before the consumer demand does.”
A more fuel efficient tire will only get you a couple of miles per gallon more. But, put those tires on the 200 million cars and trucks driving the roads these days, and that could add up.
Congress is investigating whether investors are inflating the prices of food and gas for profit (Photo courtesy of the USDA)
The price of food is going up and some
members of Congress want to know why. The Senate
recently held hearings on whether investors in
the commodities market are artificially inflating
prices. Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
The price of food is going up and some
members of Congress want to know why. The Senate
recently held hearings on whether investors in
the commodities market are artificially inflating
prices. Mark Brush has more:
Big investors are moving money out of stocks and other investments and into
commodities.
In the last five years, the amount of money in commodities markets has
increased 20 fold. And there’s a theory that these investors are driving up food and gas
prices.
Timothy Wood says that’s not so. He’s the editor of ResourceInvestor.com.
Instead, he
says you’re paying more mostly because the dollar is worth a lot less these days. He also
says Congressional mandates to turn corn into fuel are driving up corn prices.
“When corn is so much a part of the American food chain, and the global food chain, it is
just a complete and utter farce that this has gone and been legislated.”
Wood says Congress should let the markets sort themselves out. But some members of
Congress wonder if big investors in commodities are getting rich at the expense of
families.
Corn production in Colorado.
(Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)
With grain prices hitting record highs, a lot
of farmers are removing land from the federal Conservation
Reserve Program. The CRP pays farmers to stop growing
crops on poor land and instead grow trees or grass cover.
That creates habitat for wildlife. The US Department of
Agriculture, which runs the program, says the CRP is still
in good shape. Katherine Glover reports some conservationists
disagree:
Transcript
With grain prices hitting record highs, a lot
of farmers are removing land from the federal Conservation
Reserve Program. The CRP pays farmers to stop growing
crops on poor land and instead grow trees or grass cover.
That creates habitat for wildlife. The US Department of
Agriculture, which runs the program, says the CRP is still
in good shape. Katherine Glover reports some conservationists
disagree:
When the Conservation Reserve Program started in 1985, David Schoenborn was among
the first on board.
He stopped farming some of his land and let natural cover grow. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture paid him. Usually land that wasn’t the best farmland or land that was prone
to erosion was set aside for the program.
Conservationists say CRP has been great for reducing soil erosion, improving water
quality and restoring wildlife habitat.
But this year, for the first time, Schoenborn is letting some of his CRP contracts expire.
“It’s not a bad program, but the payments have to be more to keep them in line with the
rest of the farming economy.”
Corn and other grain prices are at record highs. So a lot of farmers are taking land out of
CRP and plowing it up. The program lost more than two million acres last September.
It could have been much worse. Originally sixteen million acres were set to expire in ’07.
But, in 2006 the USDA offered landowners the option to renew their contracts. About 80
to 85 percent of the land was re-enrolled.
The USDA is focusing its conservation efforts towards environmentally sensitive lands
and critical wildlife habitat.
Perry Aasness is the state director for the USDA Farm Service Agency in Minnesota.
“We’re not enrolling whole fields of land anymore, but there are still conservation
programs which we call the continuous CRP and that primarily focuses on really
targeting buffer strips, waterways, and that sort of thing.”
The targeted programs pay more than the general CRP contracts, making them more
attractive to farmers. Schoenborn, for example, is reenrolling eligible lands in these
targeted programs.
Altogether, the various programs have about 34 million acres enrolled. This is slightly
above the average enrollment for the past ten years, but less than the 39 million acres
authorized by Congress. Aasness says the program is still in good shape.
“I think the overall percentage of land going into production from CRP is pretty
minimal.”
But conservationists have a different perspective. They want to see as much land as
possible enrolled in CRP.
Dave Nomsen is with the conservation group Pheasants Forever:
“Frankly I think the program is more in doubt than it ever has been. It’s great that
farmers are benefiting from record crop prices but it’s making it a real challenge to keep
conservation as part of that agricultural landscape.”
And political pressure is part of that challenge.
The American Bakers Association even asked the government to let CRP contracts expire
early so farmers can plant more grain. This would hopefully lower the price of flour.
But a huge reduction in CRP acres is unlikely. Both Republicans and Democrats support
CRP.
Dave Nomsen with Pheasants Forever says the problem is finding enough money to make
it worth it to farmers.
CRP payments do change over time depending on the market. But Nomsen says they
haven’t kept up.
“It’s been lagging behind by several years. We just don’t have the money to raise it up to
an equal basis, but if we can get those payments high enough the long-term nature of the
contracts, the many, many other benefits of the program will hopefully sell the program
for farmers and landowners.”
Farmer David Schoenborn says payments vary, but generally he gets between 75 and 90
dollars an acre. By planting corn, he thinks he could make at least $400 an acre. But he’d
stay in CRP if payments increased just 30 percent.
That’s not likely. So chances are that more farmers will be putting land that’s set aside
for wildlife back into crops.
The numbers of people who hunt, fish and watch wildlife went down again in 2006, according to a survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Tracy Samilton reports:
Transcript
The numbers of people who hunt, fish and watch wildlife went down again in 2006, according to a survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Tracy Samilton reports:
The number of people who fished in 2006 was down 12 percent from 5 years ago.
Hunting numbers were also down a little, about 4 percent:
Jerry Leonard is an economist with US Fish & Wildlife Service. He says since 1996,
fewer people have been passing down the tradition of hunting and fishing to their
children. He says that isn’t great news from an economic standpoint:
“The money that is spent on wildlife-related recreation is huge. In fact, over 120 billion
dollars. That’s approximately equivalent to 1 percent of the gross domestic product in the
United States.
Still, even though fewer people are involved in wildlife recreation, spending on the
activities is slightly up from 2001, mostly due to inflation and higher license fees being
charged by states.
Businesses are beginning to talk about climate change in different
terms. Instead of debating whether humans are causing it, there’s a
lot more talk about what climate change might mean to the business
climate. Lester Graham reports there are questions about what might
happen to affect business as global temperatures and weather patterns change:
Transcript
Businesses are beginning to talk about climate change in different
terms. Instead of debating whether humans are causing it, there’s a
lot more talk about what climate change might mean to the business
climate. Lester Graham reports there are questions about what might
happen to affect business as global temperatures and weather patterns change:
For the last couple of decades, the people who’ve been arguing that we
have to do something to reduce the greenhouse emissions causing global
warming avoided one subject:
“People did not want to talk about adaptation or coping with climate
change because that was seen as a cop-out.”
That’s Rosina Bierbaum. She was a science advisor during the Clinton
administration and is now the Dean of the School of Natural Resources
and Environment at the University of Michigan.
The fear was, if you could figure out a way to cope with global
warming, you wouldn’t do anything to reduce the emissions causing it.
But Bierbaum says with concensus among the majority of the scientists in
the world that global warming is happening and humans are contributing,
the point has been made. Time to move on:
“It’s only really been, I would say, in the last two years that the
science has become so clear, that the changes are occurring so fast.
And we’re seeing them already… that society is realizing we’ve got to
cope with those changes now and there are more in store for us.”
Actually, Bierbaum thinks we’re really kind of behind in thinking about
the consequences of global warming. It’s not just the polar ice caps
melting and the rising sea levels. There are a lot of everyday sort of
things that will likely change.
For instance, what kind of plants should you put in your home
landscaping? Will the tree you plant today survive in the changing
climate? How flexible is your business if the climate changes weather
patterns?
Thomas Karl is the Director of the National Climatic Data Center at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He says people have
to start thinking about things like that. And Karl says it’s not just
higher temperatures, but sudden dramatic changes, such as maybe no snow
in the Northern states for a couple of years at a time. Or dry spells
that could make rivers so low that barges can’t travel up and down
them:
“What really has important impacts are the extreme events. I think the
questions being asked along these lines are ‘How vulnerable am I to
these episodic conditions?’ and ‘What do we need to do to prepare
ourselves for the possibility that things may not change gradually, but
could be quite abrupt change?'”
Some of those extreme events are heavier storms. As hurricane Katrina
showed, that could affect a lot of things. For example, the oil
industry is looking at its refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. With more
and more intense hurricanes, could it be worth building
refineries somewhere else?
There’s a lot at risk.
Franklin Nutter is the President of the Reinsurance Association of
America: the insurers of the insurance companies. He says with more
forest fires in the West, and unpredictability in agriculture, and more
violent storm surges on the coasts… all due to climate change, it’s
going to cost:
“Someone has to pay for the repair and recovery. If the insurance
mechanism is going to be the intermediary that translates those costs
into people’s premiums, then the answer is insurance premiums are going
to have to match those.”
And that means we’re all going to pay higher insurance costs because
some people and businesses are going to ignore, or miscalculate, how
climate change is going to affect them:
“The Association of British Insurers did a study looking at just the
effect of climate change on insurability and held steady population
growth, property values, all of those things. And they concluded that
you could see insurance premiums rise by 60% by mid-century just as a
result of climate change.”
That means if nothing changed: no inflation, no currency change…
nothing except global warming, insurance rates go up 60% during the
next 30 to 40 years. You’re already seeing it.
Some climate change experts say we can slow the impacts of global
warming by reducing greenhouse emissions now. But we’re already
seeing change… and we will see more.
There will be winners in global climate change. Some growing seasons
will be extended. Some areas will get more precipitation. But there
will likely be a lot more losers as businesses and people either can’t
or won’t adjust to the changing climate of their region.
For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.
This is a mock-up of what the proposed label would look like (Photo courtesy of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
