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OBAMA ON FOOD POLICY.
In an interview with the Other Klein, Barack Obama brings up Michael Pollan's food policy article unbidden and begins sounding a lot like, well, an Ezra Klein blog post:
From a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.There's no doubt that macro policies like carbon pricing are huge here, but it's really good to hear Obama telegraph an understanding of the role systems play: The food production system, the transportation system, the construction industry. All these sectors operate under heavy, and frequently ad hoc, government regulations and mandates. And so we do have a food policy, and we do have a buildings policy, and we do have a transportation policy. It's just that the collection of laws and subsidies and regulations that make up those policies weren't built in any particularly coherent way, and certainly aren't fit for an age when there's a pressing national interest in reducing carbon consumption and childhood obesity. It's important that the president realizes both that the government already exists in those sectors and that its efforts need to be reformed, redirected, and rendered coherent.I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that's going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.
Anyway, Joe Klein has his full interview with obama over at the Swampland blog. People should give it a read.
COMMENTS (13)
Wow, what a breath of fresh air to hear a presidential candidate who actually reads and thinks about these sort of issues and actually has an active approach to the problem! It's hard to imagine it.
Posted by: Stefan | October 23, 2008 1:31 PM
I was so pleased when I saw that--I was just coming here to email you and tell you it was in there, but you of course were on top of it...
Posted by: Erika | October 23, 2008 1:42 PM
good interview.
Posted by: raft | October 23, 2008 2:05 PM
More than food policy, the energy policy comes right out of Tom Friedman's long-time recommendations:
1) Make green technology the new Apollo project, as a means of growing the economy.
2) Fix the price of gas at $4 per gallon, to make sure consumers know that cheap oil is gone.
3) Give a rebate to low and middle-income earners, to help them pay for the gas.
4) Direct the proceeds of the gas tax directly into R&D and subsidies for alternative energy development.
Posted by: Eric E. | October 23, 2008 2:42 PM
This interview is extremely bizarre. It's like Obama understands the complexity of issues and how they interact with each other. I don't know what to say.
Posted by: Kevin | October 23, 2008 2:50 PM
Unbelievable how this guy SO gets it. I recently read Pollen's "In Defense of Food" and Jeffrey Sachs' "Commonwealth", both of which I think lay out very well the interconnectivity b/t agricultural (and marine fishing) policies, poverty amplification/alleviation, planetary ecological issues, human health and global standards of living.
Obama's little riff in the Klein interview could've been the back cover copy for either book...pretty amazing.
Too bad I've already voted for Obama...I'd vote for him all over again!
Posted by: King Leo | October 23, 2008 2:52 PM
All this would mean a lot more if he'd oppose ethanol subsidies, no?
Posted by: John | October 23, 2008 3:26 PM
Argh! An intellectual! He must be...A TERRORIST! RUN!
Posted by: Adrock | October 23, 2008 5:09 PM
Pollan, not Pollen.
Otherwise, nice article.
Posted by: Michael Hughes | October 24, 2008 12:07 AM
If we start with food producing policy, we can move into CO2 sequestration and improved soil carbon resources policy. Many pesticides are not harmful of themselves, but move in the environment when overtaxed soils (with low carbon/organic matter contents) lose the ability to provide a natural environment to degrade the pesticides in-place. Without degradation, pesticides become pollutants of surface and ground water. We can do a lot of things much better--let's hope an Obama Dept of Food and Ag gets active with improving our environmental health!
Posted by: LiberalTarian | October 24, 2008 1:52 AM
Many pesticides are not harmful of themselves
I call bollocks. Go back and check how many carcinogen pesticides were approved for widespread use without any rigorous study of their effect on, e.g., human fertility. Chloride-containing compounds in particular. It's ridiculous.
Hightower was all over this in the 1990s and nothing has changed since.
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