Preface. Here’s more than half of a New York Times article about China deforesting Russia. Yikes! Peak oil had better come soon before we denude the earth.
From the Altai
Mountains to the Pacific Coast, logging is ravaging Russia’s vast
forests, leaving behind swathes of scarred earth studded with dying
stumps.
The culprit, to many Russians, is clear: China. Chinese demand is also stripping forests elsewhere — from Peru to Papua New Guinea, Mozambique to Myanmar.
Since
China began restricting commercial logging in its own natural forests
two decades ago, it has increasingly turned to Russia, importing huge
amounts of wood in 2017 to satisfy the voracious appetite of its
construction companies and furniture manufacturers.
“In
Siberia, people understand they need the forests to survive,” said
Eugene Simonov, an environmentalist who has studied the impact of
commercial logging in Russia’s Far East. “And they know their forests
are now being stolen.”
Russia has been a witting collaborator, too, selling Chinese companies logging rights at low cost and, critics say, turning a blind eye to logging beyond what is legally allowed.
In the Solomon Islands, the current pace of logging by Chinese companies could exhaust
the country’s once pristine rain forests by 2036, according to Global
Witness, an environmental group. In Indonesia, activists warn that illegal logging linked to a company with Chinese partners threatens one of the last strongholds for orangutans on the island of Borneo.
Environmentalists
say China has simply shifted the harm of unbridled logging from home to
abroad, even as it reaps the economic benefits. Some warn that the
scale of logging today could deplete what unspoiled forests remain,
contributing to global warming.
At the same time, China is protecting its own woodlands.
Two decades ago, concerns about denuded mountains, polluted rivers and devastating floods along the Yangtze River made worse by damaged watersheds prompted the Communist government to begin restricting commercial logging in the nation’s forests.
The country’s demand for wood did not diminish, however. Nor did the world’s demand for plywood and furniture, the main wood products that China makes and exports.
It
is one thing for Chinese demand to overwhelm small, poor nations
desperate for cash, but it is another for it to drain the resources of a
far larger country, one that regards itself as a superpower and a
strategic partner to China.
The trade
has instead underscored Russia’s overreliance on natural resources and
provoked a popular backlash that strains the otherwise warm relations
between the countries’ two leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Protests
have erupted in many cities. Members in Russia’s upper house of
parliament have assailed officials for ignoring the environmental damage
in Siberia and the Far East. Residents and environmentalists complain
that logging is spoiling Russian watersheds and destroying the habitats
of the endangered Siberian tiger and Amur leopard.
China’s stunning economic transformation over the last four decades has driven its demand. It is now the world’s largest importer of wood. The US is second. It is also the largest exporter — turning much of the wood it imports into products headed to Home Depots and Ikeas around the world.
More than 500 companies operate in Russia now, often with Russian partners, according to a report by Vita Spivak, a scholar on China for the Carnegie Moscow Center. Russia once delivered almost no wood to China; it now accounts for more than 20 percent of China’s imports by value.
Russia sells such logging concessions at prices that vary by region and type of wood, but on average, they cost roughly $2 a hectare, or 80 cents an acre, per year, according to Mr. Shmatkov of the World Wildlife Fund. That is far below the cost in other countries.
Government corruption, criminality and the lack of economic development in Siberia and the Far East have made the crisis worse.
Also, in many rural areas of the Russian Far East and Siberia, there are few other ways to make money, or to make a living, than stripping natural resources of the vast surrounding forests. Logging without contracts is also common, while arsonists are suspected of having set fires to forests, because scorched trees can be legally culled and sold.
Preface. Everyone talks about oil spills, but what about the dirty mining that will have a huge polluting footprint on the earth of mercury, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals. The Pebble mine is canceled for now, but if the authoritarians get back in power, it could be permitted again, and destroy the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. Gold mining is destroying fish and river ecology in 173 rivers in 49 countries (see Voosen 2023 below).
Renewables aren’t cleaner and greener than fossils, and require a hell of a lot of fossils to mine the ore, deliver it to a crusher, blast furnace, and fabrication. More like creating Hell on Earth.
Voosen P (2023) llegal mining has muddied tropical rivers worldwide. Silt overload and mercury pollution endanger river ecosystems—and the people who depend on them. Science
Year after year, its waters erode and sluice rock away from mountains, liberating precious metals and whisking them to lowlands, where they are deposited among sediments in riverbeds and floodplains. No need to move mountains; the mountain moves to you.
But the process also draws human miners, especially in the tropics, where homespun operations to extract gold and other riches from river sediments are poisoning waters and drowning aquatic life in sediment. The destruction wrought in places such as Peru, Ghana, and Sumatra has captured headlines.
Gold mining is now the world’s top source of mercury pollution, emitting more than coal-fired power stations.
But the true global extent of the crisis has been obscured by verdant forest canopies, venal companies, and indifferent governments. Miners who once used shovels and pans are now wielding backhoes and dredgers supplied by shady mining concerns, from China and elsewhere.
Now, a comprehensive satellite survey spanning 4 decades shows river mining has surged over the past 20 years and today affects 173 large rivers in 49 countries. Almost 7% of all large tropical river stretches are now cloudy with mining debris.
miners use small-scale techniques not unlike those in 19th century gold rushes. They dredge sediments from the beds and banks of the Amazon tributaries, then add mercury, a cheap and toxic liquid metal, to the watery slurry. It selectively binds to several precious metals, including gold, creating heavier nuggets that fall out of the slurry. After the nuggets are collected, the sediment “tailings” are dumped back into the river.
Researchers have typically focused on the dangers of the mercury, which is burned off as a vapor. It settles in the surrounding ecosystem and can poison the miners themselves. But Dethier was shocked to see how muddy the mining had made the rivers. Some was due to oil palm plantations, but mining was by far the dominant cause.
Sediment clouds the water, interfering with fish spawning since they can’t see or breathe well. It also pollutes drinking water as far as 1000 kilometers downstream.
Bruggers J (2022) ‘Out of control’: Sinking coal industry swamps Kentucky with ‘zombie’ mine violations. Inside Climate News.
As the coal industry collapses in Kentucky, companies have racked up a rising number of violations at surface mines with little enforcement since 2013, no doubt also lax in West Virginia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania due to pressures on the industry and regulators. Zombie mines are those idled for years without any reclamation work. In Kentucky there are over 810 noncompliant surface mining operations. And with so many companies bankrupt, remediation won’t happen until another mine operator takes over. Nor is the state of Kentucky doing enough to negotiate with companies holding bonds meant to cover the cost of reclamation in mining companies that have gone bankrupt. Though even if insurance companies forked over the money it wouldn’t be enough. The bonds are worth about $888 million while costs to clean the sites up will cost up to $2.4 billion.
For more than a decade, indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine, blocked under the Obama administration but inching forward under the Trump administration, has been billed by proponents as necessary to meet the growing demand for copper, which is used in wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels. Similar stories are playing out in Norway, where the Sámi community is fighting a copper mine, and in Papua New Guinea, where a company has been mining the seabed for gold and copper.
Weighing those trade-offs — between supporting mining in environmentally sensitive areas and sourcing metals needed to power renewables — is likely to become more common if countries continue generating more renewable energy. That’s according to a report out Wednesday from researchers at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. The report, commissioned by the environmental organization Earthworks, finds that demand for metals such as copper, lithium and cobalt would skyrocket if countries around the world try to get their electric grids and transportation systems fully powered by renewable energy by 2050. Consequently, a rush to meet that demand could lead to more mining in countries with lax environmental and safety regulations and weak protections for workers.
The list of metals used in the production of renewable energy is long. It includes the well-known — copper, silver and aluminum — as well as rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium, used to make magnets for wind turbines. Mining for these metals is currently concentrated in just a handful of countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Chile, and India, among them.
Take cobalt. Each electric vehicle needs between five to ten kilograms of the bluish-white metal for its lithium-ion batteries. The authors consider cobalt a “metal of most concern for supply risks,” because nearly 60 percent of its production takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a dismal record of child labor and human rights abuses. Should the world’s transportation and electricity sectors ever switch to running entirely on renewables, demand for the metal would soar to more than four times the amount available in reserves, according to the researchers.
Taiebat, M., et al. 2019. Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound. Applied Energy247: 297
The benefits of self-driving cars will likely induce vehicle owners to drive more, and those extra miles could partially or completely offset the potential energy-saving benefits that automation may provide, according to a new University of Michigan study.
Greater fuel efficiency induces some people to travel extra miles, and those added miles can partially offset fuel savings. It’s a behavioral change known as the rebound effect. In addition, the ability to use in-vehicle time productively in a self-driving car — people can work, sleep, watch a movie, read a book — will likely induce even more travel.
Taken together, those two sources of added mileage could partially or completely offset the energy savings provided by autonomous vehicles. In fact, the added miles could even result in a net increase in energy consumption, a phenomenon known as backfire.
Traditionally, time spent driving has been viewed as a cost to the driver. But the ability to pursue other activities in an autonomous vehicle is expected to lower this “perceived travel time cost” considerably, which will likely spur additional travel.
The U-M researchers estimated that the induced travel resulting from a 38% reduction in perceived travel time cost would completely eliminate the fuel savings associated with self-driving cars.
“Backfire — a net rise in energy consumption — is a distinct possibility.
Mervis, J. December 15, 2017. Not so fast. We can’t even agree on what autonomous, much less how they will affect our lives. Science.
Joan Walker, a transportation engineer at UC Berkeley, designed a clever experiment. Using an automated vehicle (AV) is like having your own chauffeur. So she gave 13 car owners in the San Francisco Bay area the use of a chauffeur-driven car for up to 60 hours over 1 week, and then tracked their travel habits. There were 4 millennials, 4 families, and 5 retirees.
The driver was free. The study looked at how they drove their own cars for a week, and how that changed when they had a driver.
They could send the car on ghost trips (errands), such as picking up their children from school, and they didn’t have to worry about driving or parking.
The results suggest that a world with AVs will have more traffic:
the 13 subjects logged 76% more miles
22% were ghost errand trips
There was a 94% increase in the number of trips over 20 miles and an 80% increase after 6 PM, with retirees increasing the most.
During the chauffeur week, there was no biking, mass transit, or use of ride services like Uber and Lyft.
Three-fourths of the supposedly car-shunning millennials clocked more miles. In contrast to conventional wisdom that older people would be slower to embrace the new technology, Walker says, “The retirees were really excited about AVs. They see their declining mobility and they are like, ‘I want this to be available now.’”
Due to the small sample size she will repeat this experiment on a larger scale next summer.
Preface. Vertical farms sound even more impossible than rooftop farms, which at least can use free sunshine. And they use massive amounts of energy to heat, cool, ventilate, light, and so on, not a good direction to go given energy decline beginning in the near future.
Elon Musk hates Paul “the Population Bomb” Erlich who dares to challenge endless growth forever and wants us to all vote Republican (Elon Musk Reveals the Person He Despises). He has an equally stupid brother (and fellow grifter?) who started vertical farms in 2016 that are now failing Square Roots, a tech farming startup that was cofounded by Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal, shut down the majority of its remaining locations
Peters A (2023) The vertical farming bubble is finally popping Climate change might make growing produce indoors a necessity. But despite taking in more than a billion dollars in venture capital investment, most companies in the industry seem to be withering, unable to turn a profit on lettuce. Fastcompany. This article lists several large companies with many facilities going under or laying off most staff. As of December 2022, $1.7 billion has been invested in indoor growers, more than any other part of agricultural tech. Nearly 20 years after the first vertical farm opened, we need to ask: Is it even possible to compete with the economics of outdoor farming? And how did investors think that they could find Silicon Valley-style returns in . . . lettuce? Then a long list of how expensive they are, such as “a small, 10,000-square-foot farm might have a lighting bill over $100,000 or even $200,000 a year”.
putting a few solar panels on the roof can’t cover the total amount of electricity needed. “In a typical cold climate, you would need about five acres of solar panels to grow one acre of lettuce,” says Kale Harbick, a USDA researcher who studies controlled-environment agriculture. A hypothetical skyscraper filled with lettuce would require solar panels covering an area the size of Manhattan.
Many startups tout that they’ve built their own complex technology to operate the farms, including software that uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to monitor the plants and tweak lights, temperature, humidity, and other factors to optimize growth to lower costs. Their custom robotic systems can plant seeds, move trays of plants, and harvest crops. But when companies each build their own technology, expenses balloon. But they do this because Silicon Valley investors won’t invest in a farm, but they’ll invest in a tech company.
And much more, read the longish article
Reynolds M (2022) Vertical Farming Has Found Its Fatal Flaw. Europe’s energy crisis is forcing companies to switch strategies or close down. The industry’s future hangs in the balance. Wired. the industry is extremely vulnerable to increases in electricity prices, which uses a lot of electricity, about 25% of operational costs, but prices have risen 58% so electricity now eats up about 40% of the costs. Vertical farms are expensive to build compared with conventional outdoor farms. AppHarvest—a US-based firm that builds high-tech greenhouses—has struggled to find enough cash to fund its ongoing operations despite going public in 2021. In its latest quarterly report the company said there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue into the future. Most vertical farms grow herbs, shoots, and other leafy salad vegetables. Leafy greens are the industry’s go-to produce because they grow quickly under LEDs and have a short shelf life and premium price point. But with inflation high, consumers might prefer to forgo expensive vertically farmed herbs for something a little more budget-friendly. That’s particularly true for European vertical farms.
Nor has the technology transformed agriculture in the way early proponents promised. For a long time the industry has touted itself as a more sustainable way to grow vegetables, but all the energy needed to light up those LED bulbs means that vegetables grown on vertical farms can end up having higher CO2 emissionsthan those grown in open fields and trucked hundreds of miles to their final destination. In a world where all electricity is generated by renewables, those emissions would be much lower, but that’s not the world we’re living in.
I have a vegetable garden, and after pressing seeds into the soil, with almost no effort I can come back and harvest whatever I planted six weeks later. All of this bounty came from free soil, free sunshine, and free rain, though we do use drip irrigation half the year.
Your proposal of a vertical farm is a laudable goal for increasing food security, helping to feed the 3 billion more people expected by 2050, and reducing the energy and emissions caused by the production and transportation of food long distances.
From what I could find in commercial real estate listings, that’ll set you back about $10 million dollars.
Or you can lease space for $22 to $40 per square foot, at $22 to $40,000 a month for 10,000 square feet in New York city, or better yet lease in the Bronx or Queens where prices are lower (Goodman 2019).
New York City has 193,689 acres, but just a few are indoors or in shipping containers. At best New York could support 1,864 acres of such farms, nearly all of them rooftop (Goodman 2019). But 162,000 to 232,000 acres required to provide residents the 40,760,000,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables they consume every year.
So you found a place. The first thing you’ve got to do is buy lots of lights. Outdoors, all the leaves of a plant need to be directly illuminated by the sun to activate photosynthesis. But indoors, even in a glass-walled room, there’s not enough light. So you’ll need huge amounts of artificial lighting to match what the sun delivers, about 100 times the lighting seen in a typical office building (SA 2019).
And you’ll need a lot of electricity to light all these bulbs. Crops like potatoes or tomatoes need about 1,200 kilowatt hours of electricity for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) of edible fruit produced. If half of America’s vegetable crops were to be grown in vertical farms, just the lighting alone would require over half of all the electricity generated in the U.S. (Cox 2016).
Mills (2012) used the low estimates of how much Cannabis is grown indoors in the U.S. and deduced this consumes about 1% of U.S. electricity (3% of California’s electricity) at a cost of $6 billion a year. That’s equal to the energy used by about 2 million homes. But then they can afford to do so, marijuana commands a price of about $210 to $320 (Statista.com 2018) per ounce whereas fresh vegetables are just pennies per ounce.
You’ll need to pump water up to all the floors. I can’t say how much energy or what it will cost, but water is heavy. The state of California uses a tremendous amount of energy to move water around — 19% of California’s electricity, 30% of its natural gas, and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel every year, and this demand is growing (Klein 2005).
Although you won’t need pesticides, your crops are still vulnerable to pests and diseases such as black mold (FT 2020)
And that’s just the start, you’ll need haul acres of dirt and fertilizer to every floor, buy shelving to put the plants on, purchase nutrient monitoring systems, machinery to harvest plants, heating and cooling systems, ventilation, shading, dehumidifiers, fans, computers, robotics perhaps, and vans to truck your produce to markets.
There’s only a limited range of crops that can be grown. It only makes sense to grow leafy greens or herbs since most of the plant can be eaten. Other crops have too many inedible leaves, stems, and roots.
You’re not exactly going to be feeding the neighborhood either. A cup of butterhead lettuce weights 55 grams (2 ounces) and contains 7.2 calories, so customers will need to eat 280 cups of greens weighing 15,400 grams (34 pounds) to get their daily required 2,000 calories (SelfND 2018).
If you don’t find any of this daunting and go ahead with the project, congratulations, you’ll be the only vertical skyscraper farm in the U.S. and the rest of the world, except for Japan (Takada 2018). It will be interesting to see if Japanese, and a new vertical farm being built in Dubai, enterprises can compete with farms on the ground in cities or near them, and nearby massive greenhouse operations that can use natural sunshine.
FT. 2020. Vertical farming: hope or hype? Financial Times.
Goodman, W., et al. 2019. Will the Urban Agricultural Revolution Be Vertical and Soilless? A Case Study of Controlled Environment Agriculture in New York City. Land Use Policy 82.
Klein, G., et al. 2005. California’s water-energy relationship. California Energy Commission.
Preface. Just a few of the many articles in the media on antibiotic resistance, which like climate change, will make matters worse for whoever survives Peak Oil. And it won’t be just bacterial resistance, fungi are now growing resistant to drugs as well, probably because of excessive use of fungicides in agriculture.
My summary: Lately there has been an explosion of resistant fungi such as Candida auris, which preys on people with weakened immune systems. It is spreading around the world — to Venezuela, Spain, Britain, India, Pakistan, South Africa and recently New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
C. auris is tenacious because it is impervious to major anti-fungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections. C. auris infections are resistant to at least one drug, and 30% are resistant to two or more drugs. Nearly half of patients who contract C. auris die within 90 days.
In the U.S. 2 million people get resistant infections every year, and 162,000 die from them.
Some scientists cite evidence that heavy use of fungicides on crops is contributing to the surge in drug-resistant fungi infecting humans.
You may never have heard of Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, or the Enterobacteriaceae—but these three killers top a new list, drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, of bacteria for which new drugs are desperately needed. Unveiled today, the list contains 12 bacteria and bacterial families, with the top three making up the category “critical”.
WHO hopes that pharmaceutical companies will give these bugs priority in developing antibiotics, but these drugs are not an attractive investment because they’re only taken a short time and usage restricted. Far more profitable are the drugs for chronic diseases.
Doctors, researchers, and health officials have been sounding the alarm for years about the rise of antibiotic resistance. The list took into account the level of resistance each class of pathogen has already acquired, how deadly it can be, how widespread, and the burden it causes to health systems.
The top three are all gram-negative bacteria that are resistant to multiple drugs. They aren’t widespread yet, but they do cause severe, frequently deadly infections in hospitals, especially in people who are already immune compromised—including transplant recipients, chemotherapy patients, and elderly people. These bacteria can cause deadly infections if they take up residence in the respiratory system or bloodstream. The most dangerous strains have recently acquired resistance to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems, the only group that still killed them effectively.
Nine more pathogens round out the agency’s dirty dozen: Six are listed as high priority, including drug-resistant strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhea, and food-borne agents like Salmonella and Campylobacter. Bacteria in this category cause infections that are less deadly than those caused by the three critical-level bugs, but they are much more widespread. Three “medium” priority organisms all are susceptible to some drugs, but are increasingly becoming resistant.
A food poisoning bug found in three-quarters of British supermarket chicken is showing drastically increased resistance to antibiotics, which may mean it will become harder for doctors to treat. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) tested campylobacter bacteria found in poultry. It said resistance to certain antibiotics, including a commonly used drug to treat the bug, ciprofloxacin, had more than doubled in some strains. It also found a big increase in resistance to the antibiotic nalidixic acid, with more than half of two common strains, C.jejuni and C.Coli, found to be resistant to the drug. Both antibiotics are classed as “critically important,” which means a drug is the only option or one of very few alternatives for treating human illnesses. Across the 283 samples tested by the FSA, 5% had developed resistance to multiple drugs. The FSA noted that 900 million chickens are produced in the UK every year, which means millions could be carrying multi-resistant-bacteria. According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), campylobacter is responsible for half a million infections, 100 deaths and 80,000 GP consultations every year, costing a total of £900 million (US$1.17 billion).
Important antibiotics for which resistance has developed: Penicillin, The golden age of antibiotics appears to be coming to an end. Now, common ailments are regaining the power to kill.
More than 100 antibiotic compounds have been introduced since penicillin, and many important ones have developed resistance, such as: Tetracycline, Erythromycin, Methicillin, Gentamicin, Vancomycin, Imipenem, ceftazidime, Levofloxacin, Linezolid, Daptomycin, Ceftaroline.
Researchers haven’t identified a new class of antibiotic medication since 1987.
But almost as soon as they were given to patients, scientists began finding evidence that disease-causing bacteria were developing resistance to these new wonder drugs.
Bacteria meet, mate, compete and evolve inside living bodies. When an antibiotic is added to the mix, only the strongest survive. Yet only 30% of Americans believe that antibiotic resistance is a significant problem for public health.
Humans have accelerated this natural process by indiscriminately prescribing antibiotics and by routinely feeding the drugs to livestock, scientists say. Multiply the number of humans and animals taking these drugs, and you multiply the opportunities for antibiotic-resistant strains to emerge.
Each year, more than 2 million people in the U.S. are infected with a bacterium that has become resistant to one or more antibiotic medication designed to kill it, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 23,000 people die as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant infections, and many more die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection, the agency says.
The problem goes beyond treating infections. As bacterial resistance grows, Lesho said, “we’re all at risk of losing our access” to medical miracles we’ve come to take for granted: elective surgeries, joint replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapies. These treatments give bacteria an opportunity to hitch a ride on a catheter or an unwashed hand and invade an already vulnerable patient.
Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is growing. Existing drugs for TB cure only about half of those treated for MDR-TB. Only one new drug has been introduced in 40 years, despite global efforts.
MRSA – or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – has been joined by a staph that resists another last-resort drug, vancomycin. Livestock reared using antibiotics can develop MRSA infections. Such strains can spread among humans, as shown by recent human cases in Denmark even though it has banned antibiotic growth-promoters in livestock.
CRE – or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae – is a group of gut bacteria that resists carbapenems – antibiotics of last resort. One set of CRE genes was first seen in India in 2009 and has since been found around the world. The bacteria can cause urinary tract infections, and the resistant strain is making this widespread ailment untreatable.
Amos, G. C. A. Amos, et al. May 5, 2014. Waste water effluent contributes to the dissemination of CTX-M-15 in the natural environment, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy2014; 69: 1785 – 1791.
Wastewater treatment plants could be unwittingly helping to spread antibiotic resistance, say scientists. Their research suggests that processing human, farm and industrial waste all together in one place might be making it easier for bacteria to become resistant to a wide range of even the most clinically-effective antibiotics. With so many different types of bacteria coming together in sewage plants we could be giving them a perfect opportunity to swap genes that confer resistance, helping them live. This means antibiotic-resistant bacteria may be evolving much faster than they would in isolation.
The research, published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, shows that there are now reservoirs of highly resistant gut bacteria in the environment, threatening human and animal health.
We urgently need to find new ways to process waste more effectively so we don’t inadvertently contribute to the problem of drug-resistant bacteria.
Earlier studies have suggested that farmingand waste processing methods contribute to reservoirs of resistant bacteria in the environment. But, until now, very few studies had looked at whether or not wastewater effluent contributes to the problem.
‘We’re on the brink of Armageddon and this is just contributing to it. Antibiotics could just stop working and we could all be colonized by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.’ Professor Elizabeth Wellington of the University of Warwick.
Gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted infection also known as “the clap”, is making a comeback – and this time it may be incurable. New strains have emerged that resist the last few antibiotics that still worked against the disease. In a rare public alert last week, the World Health Organization warned that highly resistant cases of gonorrhoea have now been detected in Japan, Europe and Australia. It is calling for a worldwide effort to track the superbug – and to develop new gonorrhoea drugs and vaccines.
That’s a slim hope. Between the limited profits to be made from drugs that cure infections and the previous success of antibiotics against gonorrhoea, there has been little investment in the disease. “There are no new therapeutic drugs in development,” says Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan of the WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research.
Yet epidemiological models show that the current official policies for managing gonorrhoea are virtually guaranteed to lead to a rebound in cases, and to antibiotic resistance.
Neisseria gonorrhoeae, also known as Gonococcus, infect an estimated 106 million people a year worldwide. The infection causes painful urination in men and can be symptomless in women, but left untreated it may cause painful pelvic inflammation and potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. It can cause blindness in babies, and makes it easier to contract HIV.
N. gonorrhoeae is now resistant to penicillin, and the subsequent families of antibiotics used to treat it. Now only a couple of third-generation cephalosporin antibiotics are left. But resistance to these has been creeping up, and last year N. gonorrhoeae resistant enough to be dubbed a “superbug” was reported in Japan. Worse, the models show that relying on one drug until resistance builds up, then switching to another – precisely what health agencies have done – causes resistance fastest.
But people who change partners such as sex workers and promiscuous communities of men who have sex with men, are likely to pass on the infection. Targeting such groups for treatment caused gonorrhoea infection rates to drop steeply in industrialized countries since the 1970s – but now they are climbing again.
Preface. After reading this post, or better yet the original 44-page document, you’ll understand why the Green New Deal isn’t working out despite being crazy expensive.
The goal of Energiewende was to make Germany independent of fossil fuels. But it hasn’t worked out. The 29,000 wind turbines and 1.6 million PV systems provide only 3.1% of Germany’s energy needs and have cost well over 100 billion Euros so far and likely another 450 billion Euros over the next two decades. And much more than that when you add in the extra cost of maintaining fossil generation systems to back up the lack of wind and sunshine from microseconds to weeks.
Because of rebuildable’s wind and solar extremely low energy density and need for a great deal of space, forests are being cut down, pits dug, and filled with hundreds of tons of reinforced concrete for wind turbines to stand on, 5 acres per turbine. With the forest no longer protecting the soil, it is now vulnerable to wind and rain erosion.
Because wind and solar farms get a guaranteed price for 20 years, they have
no need to innovate, do research, or please customers, who paid them 176
billion euros for electricity with a market value of just 5 billion euros from
2000-2016. This is money that taxpayers could have used to build bridges,
energy efficient buildings, or renovate schools, which would create even more
jobs than the wind and solar industry claims so they can tout themselves as
good for society, perhaps they aren’t so great when you look at other ways and
jobs that could have been created with all the subsidies (Vernunftkraft 2018).
Germany’s electricity rates have skyrocketed to the highest levels in the EU because of the Energiewende debacle.
Other news about
Energiewende:
Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems (Energiewende program), and will miss its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and the share of renewable energy in transport.
At the same time, policy makers had burdened the nation with enormous costs. The audit further concluded that the program is a monumental bureaucratic nightmare.
When it’s windy and bright, the grid is so flooded with power that prices in the wholesale market sometimes drop below zero.
Transport consumes 30 percent and mining & manufacturing 29% of Germany’s power, but for each, only 4 percent of its energy comes from renewables. Households use 26% of power, but only 13% of it comes from renewables, and Trade, commerce and services 15% but just 7% renewables.
Germany’s carbon emissions have stagnated at roughly their 2009 level. The country remains Europe’s largest producer and burner of coal, which generates more than one-third of Germany’s power supply. Moreover, emissions in the transportation sector have shot up by 20 percent since 1995 and are rising with no end in sight
The Energiewende has the goal of making Germany independent of fossil fuels in the long term. Coal, oil and gas were to be phased out, allowing drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. However, these goals have not even begun to be achieved.
The idea of meeting our country’s energy needs with wind power and solar energy has proven to be an illusion. At present, around 29,000 wind turbines and 1.6 million photovoltaic systems together account for just 3.1 % of our energy requirements. There were hardly any successes in the heating/cooling and transport sectors.
Well over a hundred billion euros have been spent on the expansion of solar and wind energy over the same period. The financial obligations undertaken in the process will continue to burden taxpayers for another two decades and will end up costing German consumers a total sum of around 550 billion euros.
To compensate for the lack of reliability of wind and sun and to be able to actually replace conventional power generation, gigantic amounts of electricity storage would be required. The replacement of controllable power generation with a fluctuating power supply is impossible without storage and unaffordable with it.
A reliable supply of electricity around the clock is
taken for granted by citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. But only
those who have taken a closer look will appreciate the importance of a reliable
power supply for our highly complex, high-tech society. It is not just about
comfort and convenience. It is not only a matter of maintaining an essential
input for important manufacturing processes; it is about nothing less than the
functioning of civilized community life.
A fundamental characteristic of electrical current must
be taken into account when answering this question: it must be produced, to the
millisecond, at the moment of consumption, giving an exact balance between
power supply and demand. Stable power grids are based on this principle.
At the end of September 2017, more than 27,000 wind
turbines with a rated output of 53,374 MW were installed in Germany. Nominal
power is defined as the highest power that can be provided permanently under
optimum operating conditions (strong to stormy wind conditions). In Figure 2,
the dark blue areas represent the delivered power from the German wind turbine
fleet during September 2017. A total of 6,380 GWh (1 GWh = 1 million kWh) was
sent to the grid, corresponding to just 16.6 % of what was theoretically
possible.
For approximately half of September 2017, the power
delivered by the wind fleet was less than 10 % of the nominal capacity. Values
above 50 % were reached only 5.3 % of the time, in essence only on 8 and 13–15
September.
Electricity consumption in September 2017 was 39,000 GWh.
Wind turbines delivered for 6400 GWh of this and PV systems another 3100 GWh.
The minimum power input by all of the PV and wind energy systems was below 0.6
GW, representing less than 1% of the installed capacity of 96 GW.
Since wind and
solar are often absent, conventional power plants are needed to ensure grid
stability at all times – often over long periods. Consumers pay for the costs of maintaining two
parallel generation systems.
There is no
discernable smoothing effect from the size and geographical spread of the wind
fleet: the argument that the wind is always blowing somewhere is not true. Even
a Europe-wide wind power expansion in conjunction with a perfectly developed
electricity grid would not solve the problem of the fluctuating wind energy
generation. It is quite possible for there to be no wind anywhere in Europe.
Anyone who studies
the feed-in characteristics of electricity generation from wind power and PV
systems thoroughly must realize that sun and wind usually supply either far too
little or far too much – and that one cannot rely on anything but chance.
Despite the increased capacity and the increasing peaks,
the guaranteed output of all 27,000 wind turbines and the 400 million m² of PV
systems remains close to zero because of their weather-dependency. This is a
particular problem in the winter months, when electricity consumption is high.
Even the ‘dumping’
of electricity abroad to reduce the surplus energy will become increasingly
difficult, since neighboring countries are closing themselves off with
electricity barriers in order to protect their own grids.
There is no sunshine at night and electricity cannot be
stored in bags
The wind energy statistics reveal the absurdity of
wanting to tackle the problem of intermittency through construction of
additional power lines and extensive wind power expansion.
So even with a European electricity grid based on wind
turbines, a 100 % replacement system would always have to be available to
ensure the security of electricity supply.
With PV systems,
the lack any smoothing of electricity over the diurnal and seasonal cycles is
even more evident. It is obvious that the generation peaks in Germany occur at
the same time as the peaks in the other European countries. This is due to
the size of the low pressure areas, which results in a positive correlation of
wind power generation levels across the continent: if too much electricity is
produced in Germany, most of our neighbors will be over-producing too. This
calls into question the sense of network expansion a priori.
German energy
consumption is particularly high in the winter months, especially during
inversion weather conditions, when PV systems barely supply any electricity due
to clouds and wind turbines are usually at a standstill. The weather-dependency
of electricity generation would thus have direct and fatal effects on the
transport sector. It would not be possible to heat electrically either. In
other words, renewable energy can’t keep transportation or heating going.
Climate protection: a bad joke with deadly undertones
No discussion
about the construction of wind turbines and no energy policy document of the
last federal government can avoid the suggestion that the Energiewende might
help avert the dangers of climate change.This is why the last German government continually described the EEG as
a central instrument of climate protection. The thesis – often presented in a
shrill, moralizing tone – is that the expansion of ‘renewable energies’ is a
human obligation in view of the impending global warming apocalypse.
Particularly perfidious forms of this thesis even suggest that not expanding
wind power plants in Germany would mean that we would soon be dealing with
‘billions of climate refugees’.
At least one
hectare of forest is cleared per wind turbine and is thus permanently
destroyed. Afforestation elsewhere cannot make up for this, since old trees are
in every respect much more valuable than new plantations. The negative effects
of global warming predicted for Germany are more frequent floods and droughts,
but forest is the best form of protection against soil erosion, cleaning soil
and storing water.
Whether it is
forest destruction, cultivation of maize for biogas plants, the destruction of
habitats or the direct killing of birds and bats – the massive expansion of
‘renewable energies’ has appalling consequences, the result of their low energy
density and the resulting requirement for vast areas of land.
Besides
intermittency, the core problem of wind and solar energy is that it is
generated in a very diffuse form. Anyone who has ridden a bike against the
wind will understand: a headwind of 3m/s makes clothes flutter a little, but
hardly makes it difficult to pedal. Water, on the other hand, flowing towards
us at the same speed, will wash us away. This is because the power of water is
comparatively concentrated, while the power of the wind is much more diffuse.
In the case of hydropower, ‘collecting from the surface’ is done by a wide
system of ditches, brooks, rivers and streams. If you want to ‘capture’ the
power of the wind, you have to do the tedious work of concentrating the energy
yourself – requiring a multitude of collection stations and power lines to
connect them. Instead of ditches, streams, and rivers wind power required
200-m-high industrial installations, pylons and wires. Inevitably, natural
areas become industrialized and opportunities for retreat in nature are gradually
destroyed.
A few years ago, a
wind turbine invasion of the many forests that have been managed for decades in
accordance with the principle of sustainability was still unimaginable. But
huge pits are now being dug and filled with thousands of tons of reinforced
concrete, with considerable effects on the ecosystem. The effects on wildlife,
soils and water as well as on the aesthetics and natural harmony of hilltop
landscapes are catastrophic.
The direct cost
drivers of electricity prices are the feed-in tariffs set out in the
legislation: operators of wind farms, PV and biomass plants will receive a
guaranteed price per kilowatt hour, fixed for 20 years after commissioning.
This is set at a level that is many times higher than the market price. The
difference is passed on to (almost) all consumers via the electricity price. In
addition, producers are guaranteed to be able to sell electricity into the grid
at that price, regardless of whether there is a need for it or not.
In the period
2000–2016, 176 billion euros were paid by electricity consumers to renewables
companies, for electricity with a market value of just 5 billion euros.
What else could have been done with this money? This is known in economic terms as the
‘opportunity cost’. For example, the St
Gotthard tunnel opened in 2016 at a cost of 3.4 billion euros; the Hamburg Elbe
Philharmonic Hall cost 0.8 billion euros. The refurbishment needs of all German
schools are estimated to total just 34 billion euros.
The fact that
electricity from wind and sun is randomly produced puts the power supply system
under considerable and increasing stress. The task of transmission system
operators to maintain a constant 50Hz alternating voltage becomes more
difficult with each additional weather-dependent and privileged feeding system.
In order to cope with increasing volatility, the generation output must be
repeatedly intervened in order to protect line sections from overload.
If a bottleneck threatens at a certain point in the grid,
power plants on this side of the bottleneck are instructed to reduce their
feed-in, while plants beyond the bottleneck must increase their output. The
need for re-dispatching will continue to
increase. Together with the expansion of
wind power, the costs of these re-dispatching measures rose continuously. By 2015, grid operators had to spend a
billion euros to protect the power grid from the blackout. Since this billion
did not ‘fall from the sky’, the unreliability of EEG electricity is reflected
in higher electricity prices.
But that’s not all: In
order to protect themselves from unwanted erratic electricity inflows and to
prevent their grids from being endangered, our neighbors in the Czech Republic
and Poland were forced to install phase shifters, i.e. to erect ‘electrical
current barriers’. The costs of these self-defense measures are also borne by
German consumers.
The ‘energy revolution’ is often referred to as a modernization
and innovation program. Germany will become a global leader in technology
development, is the slogan. In green-inspired literature, ‘wind and solar’
should be celebrated as the ‘winners’. However, the real world is only
partially impressed by this case: those technologies that prove to be economic
will win, not those that bureaucrats and officials favor. Long-term economic
gains can only be made through competition. However, with renewables, the
competitive mechanism is switched off: prices and quantities are determined in
a political process, the outcome of which is ultimately determined by the
producers of renewable energy themselves.
If post-war governments had adopted the same approach for
the automobile industry, it might have demanded that by the year 2000 every
German must have a car. The Volkswagen Beetle – at the time, one of the most
technically advanced cars in the world – would have been declared an industry
standard and a purchase price that would deliver `cars for all’ would have been
determined in a biennial consultation process between government and
manufacturers. As a result, we would still have vehicles of the technical
standard of the VW Beetle, innovation would be irrelevant, and the German
industry would never have achieved its position of global leadership.
The plight of the German photovoltaic industry, which
rapidly lost international market share and had to cope with many insolvencies,
is an example of this. The availability of easy money – subsidies – was the
main rea son for the sector’s loss of competitiveness. It is a harbinger of what can be expected in
other artificially nurtured segments of the renewables sector.
Subsidies, however, take away their incentive to
innovate. German PV companies invested only 2–3 % of their sales in research
and development. In the highly competitive automobile industry, the equivalent
figure is 6%; in the pharmaceutical industry it is even higher, at around 9 %.
Subsidies make businesses sluggish.
Green jobs? On
large posters and in advertisements in autumn 2015, the Energiewende
congratulated itself for the creation of ‘230,000 sustainable jobs’. This myth
of a ‘job creating’ energy transition is regularly disseminated. Of course, the
energy transition is shifting purchasing power from traditional consumer and
capital goods industries to industries that produce wind turbines, solar panels
and other equipment. This shift generates gross jobs in the those sectors:
wind turbines, solar parks and biogas plants must be built. The components have
to be produced, delivered and assembled; the finished systems have to be
maintained. The investments require financing and credit agreements. This
creates employment in banks and law firms. Subsidies must be regulated and
monitored, which leads to even employment in the bureaucracy and, once again,
lawyers’ offices.
It should also be
noted that were the money not spent on ‘renewable energies’, investments could
have been made in other areas that would also have created employment. If, for
example, the 178 billion euros mentioned above had been used to renovate
schools, the order books of countless businesses would have remained full for
many years to come.
If one wants to focus not only on short-term economic
effects, but also on long-term growth, one has to ask not only about the scope,
but also about the type of investments made. Otherwise you run the risk of
losing to ‘Broken Window’ fallacy. According to this, a large stone would have
to be thrown through the nearest window as powerfully as possible as an
immediate measure of economic policy. This would ultimately give the glazier a
large order and thus income, of which he would spend a portion on the
confectioner, for example, and thus generate income again. An income that he in
turn would spend partly on the butcher, resulting in a virtuous circle that
would ultimately benefit everyone and increase national wealth…
Anyone who
produces electricity will be remunerated at a guaranteed rate far above the
market price for a period of 20 years. EEG beneficiaries do not need to worry
about the needs of customers, the offerings of competitors, technical progress
or other such ‘banalities’. The search for profitable locations is made
easier for wind power producers insofar as the fixed prices per kWh are in
essence higher at ‘bad’ locations than at ‘good’ ones. This principle – of incentivizing
the use of bad locations – can intuitively be recognized as foolish, but was
nevertheless adopted in the tendering procedures of the 2017 revision of the
EEG. This absurdity was justified with a claim the fact that an expansion of
the area covered in windfarms would lead to a reduction in the volatility of the
electricity supplied – a fundamentally wrong idea
Tax consultant
Daldorf, analyzed over 1600 annual financial statements of wind energy projects
between 2005 and 2013. They found that the vast majority of wind farms in
Germany operate at a loss. With many local wind farms, investors are lucky
to get their original investment back at all. Daldorf gives the following
reasons for the poor performance of windfarms:
poor wind assessments or no one-year wind
measurements on site
erroneous wind indexes as a basis for planning
overly low margins of error in wind forecasts
underestimates of plant downtime for maintenance
and repairs
’planning optimism’ of the project promoters as
a strategy for maximizing profits
The operators and investors bear the full risk. Before
they can make a profit, the following costs must be covered from the sales
achieved:
lease costs
insurance premiums, fees
maintenance costs
repairs, reserves for dismantling costs
management costs
administrative and other costs
interest-costs
taxes
The cubic
relationship between wind force and power generation is decisive for the
frequent red numbers: a doubling or halving of the wind speed changes the
generation by a factor of eight. The smallest deviations from the expected
wind input are reflected in sharp deviations in power generation and thus in
revenues. Measurements on wind masts are the most accurate method, but even
here the typical error range is 2–8 %. The uncertainty of measurement alone
causes an uncertainty of the expected yield of up to 16 %. Measurements with
optical methods (LIDAR) or even wind assessments are even less accurate. Anyone
who evaluates such measurements will find that the operation of wind farms
entails considerable economic risks. These risks apply in particular to wind
assessments, whose error rate is in the order of 20 %.
The profit is
almost solely determined by the annual electricity yield. No matter how clever
the marketing may be, it cannot influence profitability, which depends on the
whims of the weather.
Investment in wind turbines on the basis of wind
assessments is close to gambling. Anyone who does so is responsible for their
own downfall. However, anyone who lives in a community whose elected
representatives fall for the promises of windfarm promoters is virtually forced
to the roulette table.
The cardinal problems – weather-dependence and low energy density – are unsolved or unsolvable.
My note: there are even more reasons in this document than I have listed above for why Energiewende is a failure. And also see:
Preface. France is one of the few nations trying to use fewer pesticides. This is the direction we must go to prepare for the end of the fossil age, since pesticides are made out of finite petroleum. Also, we are running out of new pesticides since like antibiotics, pests develop resistance on average after only 5 years.
Gunstone et al (2021) found that pesticide contamination of soil harm ed 70.5% of the the biologically diverse organisms they studied that perform many important functions such as nutrient cycling, soil structure maintenance, carbon transformation, and the regulation of pests and diseases. This is a great article if you want to learn more about soil and the creatures dwelling in it and how pesticides harm them.
Sadly, even organic farms that were converted from conventional farms still have pesticides 20 or more years later, though far less than conventional farms. This study found that the fewer the pesticides, the healthier the soil ecosystem, which does the same job as pesticides in protecting crops without poisoning soil, air, and water (Riedo et al 2021).
Declining fossils will help end some spraying. In the U.S. House of Representatives hearing on April 14, 2011 titled “Small Business Committee Document Number 112–011”, Richter Aviation testified that high fuel prices increase food prices and limit the ability of aircraft to spray crops and forests with pesticides. This is how 18% of pesticides are applied in the U.S. Especially if the ground is wet or rolling. U.S. House of representatives. April 14, 2011. Drilling for a solution: finding ways to curtail the crushing effect of high gas prices on small business.
Pesticide contamination of the soil can cause environmental harm. Pesticides are often applied directly to soil as drenches and granules and increasingly in the form of seed coatings, making it important to understand how pesticides impact soil ecosystems containing an abundance of biologically diverse organisms that perform many important functions such as nutrient cycling, soil structure maintenance, carbon transformation, and the regulation of pests and diseases. Many terrestrial invertebrates have declined in recent decades due to habitat loss and agrichemical pollution.
Here, we review nearly 400 studies on the effects of pesticides on non-target invertebrates that have egg, larval, or immature development in the soil. This review encompasses 275 unique species, taxa or combined taxa of soil organisms and 284 different pesticide active ingredients or unique mixtures of active ingredients. We identified and extracted relevant data in relation to the following endpoints: mortality, abundance, biomass, behavior, reproduction, biochemical biomarkers, growth, richness and diversity, and structural changes. This resulted in an analysis of over 2,800 separate “tested parameters,” measured as a change in a specific endpoint following exposure of a specific organism to a specific pesticide. We found that 70.5% of tested parameters showed negative effects, whereas 1.4% and 28.1% of tested parameters showed positive or no significant effects from pesticide exposure, respectively.
The EPA, which is responsible for pesticide oversignt acknowledges taht 50 to 100% of pesticides end up on the soil, yet to test the harm done they use only one test species — bees — that aren’t even in the soil, but above ground, who may never touch the soil in their lifetime.
Soils are one of the most complex ecosystems on the Earth with almost a quarter of the planet’s biodiversity.
Stokstad, E. 2018. A new leaf. A decade ago France launched an ambitious effort to cut pesticide use by half. It failed. Now the country is trying again. Science 362: 144-147.
Months earlier, Fremont had planted this vetch and clover along with the rapeseed. The two legumes had grown rapidly, preventing weeds from crowding out the emerging rapeseed and guarding it from hungry beetles and weevils. As a result, Fremont had cut by half the herbicide and insecticide he sprayed. The technique of mixing plant species in a single field had worked “perfectly,” he said.
This innovative approach is just one of many practices, now spreading across France, that could help farmers achieve an elusive national goal. In 2008, the French government announced a dramatic shift in agricultural policy, calling for pesticide use to be slashed in half. And it wanted to hit that target in just a decade. No other country with as large and diverse an agricultural system had tried anything so ambitious. The goal “was very revolutionary,” says Henriette Christensen of the Pesticide Action Network in Brussels, especially because France is the second largest consumer of pesticides in Europe.
Since then, the French government has spent nearly half a billion euros on implementing the plan, called Ecophyto. It created a network of thousands of farms that test methods of reducing chemical use, improved national surveillance of pests and plant diseases, and funded research on technologies and techniques that reduce pesticide use. It has imposed taxes on farm chemicals in a bid to decrease sales, and even banned numerous pesticides, infuriating many farmers.
The effort has helped quench demand on some farms. Overall, however, Ecophyto has failed miserably. Instead of declining, national pesticide use has increased by 12%, largely mirroring a rise in farm production. “We lost 10 years since 2008,” says François Veillerette of Générations Futures, an environmental advocacy organization in Paris. “We can’t afford to waste 10 more.”
Officials are now finalizing a revised plan dubbed Ecophyto 2+ to boost research, add demonstration farms, increase taxes on pesticides, and prohibit more compounds. President Emmanuel Macron has even urged a ban of glyphosate, the world’s best-selling weed killer and an important tool for many farmers.
Details of the revised plan, including funding levels, are still being decided. But some observers are already skeptical. Farmers fear burdensome rules and increased costs that will put them at a competitive disadvantage. Environmental organizations worry France will again fall short. “There are good ideas,” says Carmen Etcheverry, formerly of France Nature Environnement in Paris. “But we don’t know how they will be implemented.”
There is also optimism. Despite Ecophyto’s failure, it showed farmers have powerful options, such as mixing crops, planting new varieties, and tapping data analysis systems that help identify the best times to spray. With the right incentives and support, those tools might make a bigger difference this time around. And the fact that France isn’t backing away from its ambitious goal inspires many observers. “You feel,” says Robert Finger, an agricultural economist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, “that something vivid is going on.”
After WWII synthetic herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides greatly boosted French farmers’ harvests and profits. But the chemicals contaminated groundwater, lakes, and streams, and they harmed farm workers and wildlife. Consumers became wary, and by the 1970s public opposition to pesticides was growing.
During the 2000s, pesticide sales fell as farmers applied them with increasing efficiency and sometimes switched to more effective compounds that required smaller doses. But the ambition to do much better crystalized in 2007, when then–French President Nicolas Sarkozy convened a conference to set a 5-year environmental agenda. Ecophyto was the result, negotiated between environmentalists, farm unions, pesticide-makers, and others. It included a major political concession; the 50% cut would be reached “if possible,” which meant that much of the plan was voluntary.
Still, Ecophyto served as a catalyst. Research funds were targeted at evaluating smarter ways to use pesticides. Approaches were tested on some 3000 farms that joined a demonstration network. Officials recruited observers around the country to scout for pests and plant diseases and provide weekly reports; the surveillance helps farmers decide when spraying might be a waste of resources. On average, farms in the demonstration network decreased their pesticide use by 18%, and most did it without sacrificing profits.
But France’s overall use of chemical pest control went up. Many factors contributed. Taxes on chemicals, for example, weren’t high enough to influence buying decisions. It was difficult to persuade some farmers to adopt new practices or technologies that might add to their costs or decrease yields. Ecophyto’s funding—about €70 million a year since 2016—was too low and “out of all proportion to the challenge,” France’s inspector general concluded late last year. And market forces, such as high prices for cereals, may have created an incentive to spray more chemicals to protect unusually lucrative harvests.
Yet veterans of Ecophyto aren’t discouraged. On many farms, analysts say, it appears that existing technologies and practices alone could cut chemical use by at least 20%.
The 450 hectare vineyards at Ducourt Estate in Ladaux, France, produce about 3 million bottles of wine each year. In a long garage, massive four-wheeled tractor-sprayers stand 3 meters tall. Each carries a 2200-liter tank for fungicide. Their articulated arms, studded with nozzles, can spray chemicals on four rows of grapes in one pass, killing mildew and other plant pathogens.
Winemakers are France’s biggest users of fungicides, although most are based on sulfur and copper, rather than more toxic synthetic molecules. Still, the sight of Ducourt’s yellow beasts trundling through the vineyards can unnerve estate neighbors worried about farm chemicals, says Jeremy Ducourt, who helps manage the family owned business. The machines are actually “a big part of the solution,” he says. That’s because they helped the estate reduce its use of fungicides by about 30%, thanks to nozzles that put more fungicide on the plant and less on the ground. The most advanced sprayers even collect and reuse any lingering mist.
Similar high-efficiency sprayers are available for other crops, and just replacing older models with newer machines could make a dent in France’s chemical use. But upgrades don’t come cheap. The Ducourt Estate’s sprayers, which double as harvesters, cost about €320,000. Add the fact that only 3% of the nation’s 200,000 sprayers are replaced each year, and it could take decades to fully upgrade the fleet.
The Ducourt family has also cut fungicide by using decision support software. The program draws on timely weather, surveillance, and other information, such as the size of leaves, to advise when to spray. The tool can reduce fungicide use by about 20% in vineyards, and cereal growers have seen similar results. But such tools haven’t yet spread to all farms. Potato farmers, who also spray copious fungicides, now use the tools on about half of their fields, but aim to increase that share to 90% within 5 years.
When it comes to insects, it’s much more difficult for software to predict outbreaks in fields. So, farmers must diligently scout their fields so that they can apply insecticides before pests multiply out of control. Ecophyto 2+ aims to boost a non-insecticide approach called biocontrol. In this long-standing approach, farmers confuse pests with pheromones, for example, or seek to reduce populations by introducing the pest’s natural predators. Advocates highlight the strategy’s success in France’s ample fields of maize. There, a tiny introduced parasitic wasp called Trichogramma brassicae has become a key weapon against the corn rootworm, a major pest. The wasps lay their eggs inside the eggs of the rootworms, shrinking populations just as effectively as insecticides when conditions are optimal.
The wasps are not a panacea. Although the costs are roughly comparable to insecticides, more labor is required to hang the cardboard cartons holding the wasps on maize plants. And insecticides remain more popular in southern France, where maize farmers face multiple pests the wasps don’t attack. (In other nations, maize farmers control pests with less insecticide by planting genetically modified plants, but engineered crops are not allowed in France.) Despite such limitations, the wasps are now used on 23% of maize hectares where rootworms pose a threat.
The mixed crop technique used by Fremont in his fields of rapeseed demonstrates another use of biology, in this case to control weeds. It’s the kind of ancient technique that used to be commonplace. In August, one or more fast-growing legumes are planted between the rows of rapeseed. There’s enough space that the legumes don’t steal too much water or light, but they keep down weeds and, as a bonus, release nitrogen, a fertilizer. They also seem to minimize insect attacks, although this benefit hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated. By the time frost kills the legumes, the rapeseed has grown thick enough that few weeds can challenge it.
Such mixed cropping “is becoming very popular,” says Marie-Hélène Jeuffroy, an agronomist with the French National Agricultural Research Institute (INRA) in Versailles. Nationwide, 3% to 5% of France’s rapeseed hectares are now co-planted with legumes. That share could grow to 30% by 2030 under a pledge made in July by the French federation of oilseed producers.
One French seed company—Jouffray Drillaud, based in Cisse—sees enough potential in crop mixtures that 2 years ago it stopped selling herbicides, which generated 20% of its revenue. “When you have more diversity, you have more resilience,” says Vincent Béguier, R&D director of the firm, which now focuses its weed control on mixed cropping and other nonchemical approaches. “Simplicity is the worst thing for agriculture.”
So far, rapeseed growers appear to be reaping the biggest benefits in weed control from mixed cropping. But scientists are searching for other possibilities. Jeuffroy and other participants in ReMIX, a new €5 million research collaboration among 13 European countries, are studying how to optimize mixtures, measure benefits, and remove obstacles to mixed cropping.
France’s Ministry of Agriculture is moving to encourage greener approaches by requiring pesticide retailers to inform farmers about 36 alternatives to spraying. Instead of only touting insecticides to kill pests, for example, a dealer might recommend a crop mixture, or traps baited with sexual pheromones to confuse male insects, interfering with reproduction. The goal is to reduce the number of pesticide doses they sell by 20% by 2021. Dealers that miss the goal could face penalties.
To reach Ecophyto’s goal of a 50% cut, however, many farmers will need to make more use of another practice—crop rotation. Alternating what’s planted in a field, ideally over 5 or 6 years, is among the most effective ways to fight weeds, soil-borne pests and diseases. Switching between peas, wheat, and sugar beets, for example, can prevent pathogens from building up in the soil year after year, while swapping in a pasture grass hinders annual weeds.
Although simple in concept, it can be hard to increase the diversity of crops in rotation. That’s because the whole system is locked: Farmers in many regions have specialized in certain crops—such as wheat or potatoes—and rely on finely tuned methods to produce high yields. There is often no nearby market for additional crops, because storage and processing facilities also tend to specialize in dominant crops—as do researchers, advisers, and policymakers. “Everything has been organized around major crops with high use of inputs,” says Antoine Messéan, an agronomist with INRA. “It’s difficult to get out of this self-reinforcing mechanism.”
Crop diversification is not a top priority in the new version of the Ecophyto plan, but the Ministry of Agriculture has asked INRA for advice on how to encourage it. In a related effort, France hopes to double the amount of organic farming, which does not allow synthetic pesticides, to 15% of hectares by 2022. In May, the Ministry of Agriculture announced it will spend €1.1 billion to support organic expansion.
The government also faces growing pressure from environmentalists to ban more farm chemicals. The approach is controversial, and farmers complain that greener alternatives aren’t always available. After an insecticide called dimethoate was banned in France in 2016, for instance, cherry growers had no effective way to fight an invasive fruit fly. Meanwhile, the insecticide remains legal in Spain and Italy, he notes, putting French cherry growers at a disadvantage.
In other cases, banning one chemical can cause the use of others to spike, undermining reduction efforts. French wheat growers, for example, relied on neonicotinoids, which are coated on seeds, to protect the plants against aphids and leaf hoppers. Now that they are banned, some growers might increase applications of other insecticides. And there are other kinds of trade-offs. Some specialists fear banning the weed killer glyphosate could increase erosion or greenhouse gas emissions, if farmers start to till the soil to remove weeds. More research on such trade-offs is “urgently needed,” Finger says.
In the meantime, it will be crucial to enlist France’s farmer-owned cooperatives in making Ecophyto 2+ a success, observers say. French farming is dominated by a handful of these enormous agri-businesses. They buy and trade harvests, and most sell their members seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. “You cannot reduce pesticides if you don’t convince cooperatives that they should change their business model,” Messéan says. A few have made strides in this direction, such as Terrena, the €5 billion cooperative headquartered near Ancenis that encouraged Fremont to adopt crop mixtures.
Although the majority of French farmers largely ignored or resisted Ecophyto, they are now showing signs of support. In July, more than 40 farmer organizations issued a “Contract for Solutions” that included pledges to reach specific reduction goals. The pledges represent a turning point, says Thirouin, as farm groups are no longer focused just on fighting pesticide bans. “The idea was to step aside from this defensive position and be proactive,” he says. Tridon also sees it as a positive step. “We are really seeing a shift in mindset.”
It’s not only farmers who will have to adjust if France is to meet its ambitious goals. Reducing the cost of food production to the environment and public health will likely increase the cost to consumers and taxpayers. “Everything is possible,” says Eugénia Pommaret, director of the Union of Plant Protection Industries, a pesticide trade group in Paris. “It’s just a question of costs.”
The key to change will be collaboration among all the players in the food system, adds Florence Leprince, an agronomist at Arvalis, a technical institute for arable crops in Montardon, France. “Solutions exist, but they are far from covering all the needs,” she says. “It’s more about increasing the commitment of everyone to change the way of producing.”
References
Riedo J, Wettstein FE, et al (2021) Widespread Occurrence of Pesticides in Organically Managed Agricultural Soils—the Ghost of a Conventional Agricultural Past? Environmental Science & Technology. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c06405
Preface. In case you’d forgotten– given all the talk about climate change — we’re still in an ice age that’s been going on for 2.6 million years. Lucky for us, we’ve been in one of the few warm periods for the past 12,000 years.
Scientists have been debating what triggers ice ages for many decades. The most popular theory is that an ice age is caused by the Milankovitch cycles, in which predictable changes in the Earth’s tilt and orbit combine to affect which areas on Earth get more or less solar radiation. Based on previous cycles, we are due for an ice age now, and perhaps were even heading that direction the past 6,000 years, since summers have been getting colder for that long.
But once we started burning fossil fuels, we emitted enough greenhouse gases to stave off the next ice age for a while. But not forever, especially since fossil fuels are on the cusp of depleting (we’re at or near both peak oil and peak coal production globally). And once they do start to decline, we’ll emit less CO2, and the oceans and land will eventually absorb most of it within centuries, setting the stage for the return of an ice age.
This is a new theory that may or may not be true, but since it was published in the world’s top scientific magazine, Science, it deserves attention.
“A hothouse Earth appears to be the planet’s default state, prevailing for three-fourths of the past 500 million years. An Indonesia-style collision (lifting mountain ranges up) may push the global climate into a glacial period, but only for a while. Mountains erode and continents drift. And the planet warms again.”
And if a hothouse earth ever returns, it won’t be from burning coal, oil, and natural gas, they’ll be long gone. Thank goodness we didn’t burn them during the usual hothouse default state, when even more damage might have been done.
Voosen, P. 2019. Tropical uplift may set Earth’s thermostat. Science 363: 13.
Hate the cold? Blame Indonesia. It may sound odd, given the contributions to
global warming from the country’s 270 million people, rampant deforestation,
and frequent carbon dioxide (CO2)-belching volcanic eruptions. But over much longer times, Indonesia is
sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Many mountains in Indonesia
and neighboring Papua New Guinea consist of ancient volcanic rocks from the
ocean floor that were caught in a colossal tectonic collision between a chain
of island volcanoes and a continent, and thrust high. Lashed by tropical rains,
these rocks hungrily react with CO2 and sequester it in minerals.
That is why, with only 2% of the world’s land area, Indonesia accounts for 10%
of its long-term CO2 absorption. Its mountains could explain why ice
sheets have persisted, waxing and waning, for several million years (although
they are now threatened by global warming).
Now, researchers have extended
that theory, finding that such tropical mountain-building collisions coincide
with nearly all of the half-dozen or so significant glacial periods in the past
500 million years. “These types of environments, through time, are what
sets the global climate,” said Francis Macdonald, a geologist at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, when he presented the work last month at a
meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. If Earth’s climate has a master switch, he
suggests, the rise of mountains like Indonesia’s could be it.
Most geologists agree that long-term changes in the planet’s
temperature are governed by shifts in CO2, and that plate tectonics
somehow drives those shifts as it remakes the planet’s surface. But for several decades, researchers have
debated exactly what turns the CO2 knob. Many have focused on the
volcanoes that rise where plates dive beneath one another. By spewing carbon
from Earth’s interior, they could turn up the thermostat. Others have
emphasized rock weathering, which depends on mountain building driven by plate
tectonics. When the mountains contain seafloor rocks rich in calcium and
magnesium, they react with CO2 dissolved in rainwater to form
limestone, which is eventually buried on the ocean floor. Both processes
matter; “the issue is which one is changing the most,” says Cin-Ty Lee, a
volcanologist at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Having the right rocks to
drive the CO2-chewing reaction is not sufficient. Climate matters,
too.The Siberian Traps, a region
that saw devastating volcanic eruptions 252 million years ago, are rich in such
rocks but absorb little, says Dennis Kent, a geologist at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “It’s
too damn cold,” he says.
Saudi Arabia has the heat and the
rocks but lacks another ingredient. “It’s hotter than Hades but it doesn’t
rain.” Indonesia’s location in the rainy tropics is just right. “That is
probably what’s keeping us centered in an ice age,” Kent adds.
Macdonald and his collaborators have found other times when tectonics
and climate conspired to open an Indonesia-size CO2 drain. They
found that glacial conditions 90 million and 50 million years ago lined up
neatly with the collisions of a chain of island volcanoes in the now-vanished
Neo-Tethys Ocean with the African and Asian continents. A similar collision
some 460 million years ago formed the Appalachians, but it was thought to have
taken place in the subtropics, where a drier climate does not favor weathering.
By reanalyzing ancient magnetic fields in rocks formed in the collision,
Macdonald’s team found the mountains actually rose deep in the tropics. And
their uplift matched a 2-million-year-long glaciation. “They’re developing a
pretty compelling story that this was a climate driver in Earth’s past,” says
Lee Kump, a paleoclimatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University
Park.
But those cases could be exceptions. So the team compiled a database
of every tectonic “suture”—the linear features left by tectonic
collisions—known to contain ophiolites, those bits of volcanic sea floor, over
the past half-billion years. Based on magnetism in each suture’s rocks and a
model of continental drift, they mapped their ancient latitudes to see which
formed in the topics, and when.
The team compared the results to records of past glaciations and
found a strong correlation. They also looked for declines in volcanism, which
might have cooled the climate. But their influence was much weaker, Macdonald
said.
Preface. This is a book review of Robert O’Harrow’s 2016 book “The Quartermaster.Montgomery C. Meigs. Lincolns general, master builder of the Union army”.
I can’t believe I never heard of him, but he is as much responsible for the North winning the Civil war as any general or President Lincoln. As chief quartermaster he kept the military clothed, fed, and sheltered despite a million difficulties that had to be overcome, including corruption, lack of horses, wagons, and other equipment.
My main motive in reading this was to find out what fighting wars in the future will be like without fossil fuels. Also, I worked in transportation, so the logistics of trying to supply so many hundreds of thousands of soldiers and horses across many thousands of miles is interesting as well.
I became interested in the behind-the-scenes providers of fighting wars recently when I read that the list of goods Philip Paul, comte de Ségur (1780–1873) was expected to provide to Napoleon to invade Russia. Paul was one of Napoleon’s generals and perhaps the most famous chronicler of the disastrous Russian invasion. Here was just the Prussian contribution: 22,046 tons of rye, 264 tons of rice, two million bottles of beer, 44,092 tons of wheat, 71,650 tons of straw, 38,581 tons of hay, six million bushels of oats, 44,000 oxen, 15,000 horses, 300,600 wagons with harness and drivers, each carrying a load of 1700 pounds; and finally, hospitals provided with everything necessary for 20,000 sick.
Makes you wonder how anyone can afford to fight a war!
By the time of the Civil war, far fewer wagons and horses were needed. The North won by moving most of the goods on railroads and ships, which are far faster and can carry the equivalent weight of thousands of horses pulling wagons. No matter how often the rebels blew up railroad tracks and bridges, a huge crew of men with spare rails, ties, and the lumber to build bridges put it all back together again.
At this time, locomotives and ships burned wood in their
steam engines, but only a few years later they switched to coal. They had
to. Most of the forests East of the
Mississippi were gone, even though there were only 30 million people. The forests were cut down not only to power
steam engines, but for cooking, heating, and building homes and other wood
products.
One of the problems that had to be overcome were the
corrupt contractors, who sold sand in
place of sugar, lame horses as wagon ready, and rusty muskets that the army had
previously rejected as worthless. One
product embodied the fraud and corruption accompanying the army’s mobilization:
shoddy, a fabric made of cuttings and other waste retrieved from the floors of
clothing makers. Combined with glue, pounded and rolled, it had the appearance
of sturdy cloth. Its lack of integrity became apparent only in the field, under
a hot sun and exposed to drenching showers. It literally fell off the backs of
soldiers.
The Quartermasters duties included: supplying horses to haul artillery, cavalry, and wagon trains, as well
as the forage to feed them. It built barracks and hospitals. It furnished
uniforms, socks, shoes, needles, thread, pots, canteens, and other goods to the
men. The department’s men also constructed and repaired roads, bridges,
railroads, and military telegraph lines. They chartered ships and steamers,
providing the coal to fuel them and the docks and wharves to unload them.
The army consumed 600,000
tons or more of supplies every day, nearly all of which had to be shipped in at
great expense. Every horse needed to eat 14 pounds of hay and 12 pounds of corn,
barley, and oats, while each soldier required just 3 pounds of food.
After a battle quartermaster
men were asked to collect huge amounts of materiel left behind by both armies,
including muskets, ammunition, cartridge boxes, knapsacks, clothing, and more.
But collecting
the gear was hard — people came in swarms to plunder the battlegrounds. Some
took guns, bayonets, and other equipment by the wagonload.
Robert O’Harrow. 2016.The Quartermaster. Montgomery C. Meigs. Lincolns general, master
builder of the Union army. Simon & Schuster.
The army quickly faced shortages. The new force needed a
logistical machine that could feed and clothe and arm and move an unprecedented
number of men for an unknown amount of time. To create that system, Meigs had
to engage in what one historian has called the “art of defining and extending
the possible” to provide “three big M’s of warfare—materiel, movement, and
maintenance.
Meigs was occupied by the most basic questions. What clothing did the army have? What about
boots, blankets, and tents? How would he acquire the horses and wagons needed
to carry the food, guns, and ammunition? How to reconcile the need for speedy
decisions against the obligation to prevent fraud and contracting abuses?
Meigs had to find
horses, mules, and oxen. He sent telegrams around the country to order what the
army needed, only to discover that defectors had absconded with most of the
army’s stock of animals.
Meigs discovered that he had been too optimistic about
his ability to muster animals to support the offensive. He had ordered 6,000 horses and mules, but they could not get to
Washington. Railcars filled with supplies jammed the depots in Washington. The
quartermaster also discovered an acute shortage of wagons. Some 9,000 soldiers
heading to the Shenandoah Valley could not go beyond Hagerstown, Maryland,
because the army did not have enough wagons to move their supplies from a train
depot into the mountains.
Soldiers carried three days’ worth of rations in their
haversacks. Many of them demonstrated their lack of discipline, eating
provisions with abandon and thus leaving themselves nothing for after the
fighting.
Contractors came from everywhere in the spring and summer
of 1861, angling to sell an unprepared army everything the soldiers needed. There were contractors for bread,
contractors for clothing, contractors for shoes. They provided horses, mules,
forage, rail transport, steamers, coal, and construction equipment. They
supplied the bullets for killing, surgical equipment to cut off mangled limbs,
and ambulance wagons to take the wounded and corpses away. The men of the
fast-growing army needed it all, and they needed it now, making the government
an easy mark for chiselers.
They sold sand in
place of sugar, lame horses as wagon ready, and rusty muskets that the army had
previously rejected as worthless. One
product embodied the fraud and corruption accompanying the army’s mobilization:
shoddy, a fabric made of cuttings and other waste retrieved from the floors of
clothing makers. Combined with glue, pounded and rolled, it had the appearance
of sturdy cloth. Its lack of integrity became apparent only in the field, under
a hot sun and exposed to drenching showers. It literally fell off the backs of
soldiers.
Government
employees enabled the profiteering. Horse inspectors in Washington endorsed the
purchase of lame animals in exchange for cash bribes.
In St. Louis, a fountain of corruption sprang forth from
the army’s new Western Department headquarters. In some ways, the department
epitomized the blockheadedness, waste, and abuses of those early months in the
war. The department was led by Major General John Frémont, the flamboyant
former presidential candidate sometimes known as the Pathfinder. Frémont was
blamed for failing to give adequate support to General Nathaniel Lyon who, on a
mission to clear Missouri of secessionist soldiers, was defeated at the Battle
of Wilson’s Creek. More than twelve hundred Federals were killed,
Lincoln was among the angry. With his encouragement,
Congress enacted the False Claims Act of 1863, a landmark law that gave
whistle-blowers a reward for bringing forward evidence of contracting abuses.
Sometimes called “Lincoln’s Law,” it remains one of the government’s key
enforcement tools against fraud today.
Much has been written about the tactics and glory of
battles. But as Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach. Before a commander can even hope to attack,
destroy, or simply wear down an enemy, he must first be able to deliver 3,000
calories a day to each soldier. He must keep them warm and healthy. Then he has
to be able to move them from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time.
“The fighting, the
direction, even the planning of the battles occupies in the whole seconds only
to the hours of labor involved in the preparation & execution of marches.”
Regulations mandated that the Quartermaster Department provide transportation
for all men, food, weapons, and materiel, a list that grew as the war expanded.
It supplied horses to haul artillery,
cavalry, and wagon trains, as well as the forage to feed them. It built
barracks and hospitals. It furnished uniforms, socks, shoes, needles, thread,
pots, canteens, and other goods to the men. The department’s men also
constructed and repaired roads, bridges, railroads, and military telegraph
lines. They chartered ships and steamers, providing the coal to fuel them and
the docks and wharves to unload them.
The supply system relied heavily on depots, and Meigs
gave his depot officers room to run them and their field operations as they
wanted, so long as they followed his rules and principles
In the first year of the war, spending shot up 18-fold to
$174 million annually. It kept rising in each of the next four years. The
outlays by the department now far exceeded any other category of spending in
the entire federal government
Quartermaster employees needed to be entrepreneurial,
dogged, and diplomatic. In every theater of war, at every supply depot and in
the cramped offices they occupied in Washington, they engaged in a complex
dance with clothing makers, weapons factories, railroads, providers of forage,
and many others. They made up many of the steps as they went along.
New technology helped Meigs overcome certain challenges.
Consider Isaac M. Singer’s sewing machine, which eventually helped the Union
surmount the limitations of an industry in which seamstresses stitched most
clothing by hand, or Gordon McKay’s machine for stitching soles onto boots and
shoes.
Northern factories went on to produce nearly a half
million pairs. The army found that they typically lasted eight times longer
than handmade shoes.
Efforts to provide war necessities soon exceeded all
other industrial enterprises in the nation, including as many as 130,000
civilian participants. In superintending this colossal endeavor, Meigs provided
momentum to the nation’s economy for years to come.
For now, in the summer of 1861, Meigs still had to ensure
that Union troops received guns to shoot and pants to wear and food to eat. And
that was far from a sure thing. Though Meigs’s duties did not include buying
weapons, he took it upon himself to dispatch an agent to Europe to acquire a
hundred thousand muskets, twenty thousand sabers, and ten thousand revolvers
and carbines.
Union troops died by friendly fire because of soldiers’
inability to identify friend or enemy. Meigs ordered the irregular clothing
replaced as soon as possible with blue uniforms made under exact
specifications. (His demand for uniformity and efficiency left the nation with
a novel legacy that has come down to this day: small, medium, and large sizes.)
Waste compounded Meigs’s challenge. Infantry soldiers
often abandoned heavy clothing on warm days. He wrote with frustration about a
large, new regiment that cast aside eight hundred coats on a single march, only
to find themselves freezing days later in a cold rain.
Textile mills, which simply could not keep up with the
army’s extraordinary needs.
Finding enough blankets posed an even harder challenge
than providing clothing. Army regulations called for each soldier to receive
two blankets every five years. Gray, wool, and warm, they were substantial
affairs that weighed about five pounds each. The problem was that no one
manufactured enough of them. In
something of an experiment, he also turned to French contractors for entire
sets of clothing and camp gear for ten thousand men—uniforms, belts, knapsacks,
blankets, tents, cooking utensils, and more. He paid the same prices as the
French army, about $800,000 in all.
The America-first crowd now blasted him for spending tax
dollars abroad. The Board of Trade in Boston reached out to Cameron and
predicted dire consequences, including widespread unemployment and nothing less
than the ruin of the American economy. The complaints from the industry
eventually had an effect. Congress prohibited most foreign purchases for the
rest of the war.
Meigs standardized contracting practices and imposed
rules for army buying that generally required advertisements in advance, sealed
bids, and the award of work to the lowest bidders. The results showed. The Union army now fed, sheltered, and
outfitted nearly 700,000 men. It had acquired tens of thousands of horses and
mules, along with harnesses, wagons, and mountains of feed.
Unlike Cameron, Stanton prohibited visitors to his home
and curbed the access of lobbyists and lawmakers in the department, who
previously had wandered through the offices at will. He also limited Congress’s
access to him to just one day a week. Contractors and other visitors also had a
single day for lobbying and other business. Stanton reserved the rest of the
week to run the war.
Meigs was asked to assess plans for gunboats that could
pummel rebel forts, protect river traffic, and support infantry movements. The idea for the boats came from the
recognition that the Union had to control the western rivers to prevail. The
rivers ran deep into the South and offered promising alternatives to the rutted
tracks that often passed for roads there. The Mississippi bisected the
Confederacy and served as a highway of commerce. The Tennessee offered a direct
route to the rear of the enemy.
Hundreds of vessels
transported more than 100,000 men over several weeks’ time.
Department
officers under Meigs eventually leased 753 steamers, almost 1,100 sailing
vessels, and more than 800 barges. They bought or commissioned construction of
about 300 additional vessels.
In addition to moving men, the Peninsula fleet transported more than 14,000 animals, 3,600 wagons,
700 ambulances, mountains of feed for the horses and rations for the men,
pontoon bridges, telegraph gear, and vast amounts of other equipment.
While planning the offensive, McClellan told Stanton that
the roads were passable in every season. As it happened, the flat, sandy
pathways became quagmires in heavy rain that spring. Even lightly loaded wagons
sunk down to their beds. Only mules could get them through. The department
officers quickly adapted to the conditions,
The logistical
demands were unprecedented. The army consumed 600,000 tons or more of supplies
every day, nearly all of which had to be shipped in at great expense.
McClellan made matters still more challenging by prohibiting troops from
foraging in enemy fields unless they paid for whatever they took or issued
receipts guaranteeing government payment later. He thought this benign approach
would win over Southerners and shorten the war—a notion that Meigs condemned as
silliness, or worse. In his judgment,
the Union had to use every means to support its soldiers and exhaust the
rebels’ will to fight. This included
using enemy land to feed the army’s great herds of horses and mules.
Meigs was concerned about keeping up with the army’s
insatiable demand for horses. Union forces relied on the animals to a degree
that might be hard to imagine now. It needed horses and mules to maintain its
very existence. The numbers in play were remarkable. Armies with about 426,000 men would soon have nearly 114,000 horses and
88,000 mules. That’s not counting
the creatures sidelined by illness, wounds, or fatigue. Until now, Meigs had
been lucky in meeting the demand. At the
beginning of the war, Northern states had almost 5 million horses on hand.
Enough were available even to offset the corruption among dealers who sold the
government old, lame, and even blind animals. For many months, the prices
remained steady, with horses delivered to Washington at the cost of about $125
each. But lately the market price had crept up close to $185, putting stress on
both the Treasury and Meigs.
Thousands had been sent back to Louisville. Meigs said
the circumstances showed that Rosecrans simply asked for too many to be able to
inspect them. Besides, Meigs said, the horses were overworked, underfed, and
abused. Why did Rosecrans take his men and their horses on long marches with no
clear purpose? “Such marches destroy the horses,” he wrote. “We have over 126
regiments of cavalry, and they have killed ten times as many horses for us as
for the rebels.
The provision of
forage presented one of the great challenges of the war to Meigs’s
department. Every horse needed to eat 14
pounds of hay and 12 pounds of corn, barley, and oats, while each soldier
required just 3 pounds of food. All together, the animals of the Army of
the Potomac needed more than four hundred tons of forage each day. Without that
fuel, the army could not move. Buying that feed and moving it to the right
place, in a timely way, without bankrupting the government, was a stupendous
logistical problem.
At the beginning of the war, Meigs had left it to
quartermaster officers at each depot and with each army to buy feed as needed.
Those officers soon began competing with one another for supplies, driving up
prices and further depleting a nearly empty Treasury. To contain the costs, a
senior quartermaster officer launched a plan to cut corners by feeding the
animals a less expensive mix of corn and oats. Contractors soon grasped that
they could jack up profits by secretly bulking up the feed mix with less costly
and less nutritious grains. Meigs investigated those scams, studied the market,
and imposed price controls.
Delays due to winter storms, railway disruptions, and
simple chaos sometimes put the animals perilously close to starvation. They
constructed temporary piers. To fashion the piers, they pulled boats and barges
onto shore at high tide, covered them with planks, and then linked them
together. They herded cattle over land, maintaining them in corrals and
butchering them as needed. To minimize chaos, Van Vliet ordered that
supplies remain aboard ships until needed. His
men constructed a steam-hoist to speed the movement of food, ammunition, and
other supplies onto wagons. The systems worked, but available food often could
not be moved quickly enough over narrow, crowded, and mucky roads. Inevitably,
many soldiers could never get enough to eat.
Lee was intent on preventing a siege of Richmond. Federal
soldiers suffered thousands of casualties before McClellan decided to retreat
to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, about 24 miles southeast of Richmond.
In the rush back, the trains of wagons supporting each brigade were permitted
to make their own way. Instead of one well-organized line, there were as many
as nine, all of them vying for position. Competition to get to the head was
fierce because the roads were inevitably ruined for those lagging behind.
Confusion often resulted. The Quartermaster Department bore responsibility. “A
struggle for the lead would naturally set in, each division wanting it and
fighting for it.
They hustled all night long, going some thirty miles to
Manassas Junction. On their arrival, they saw evidence of what the fight
against the North really entailed. Packed warehouses, overloaded railcars, and
long lines of barrels held one of the great stores of supplies brought into the
field during the war. Fifty thousand pounds of bacon, a thousand barrels of
salt pork, hills of flour; jellies, coffee, and tea; piles of uniforms, new
boots, and rifled muskets; toothbrushes and candles. “The hungry, threadbare
rebels swooped down on the mountain of supplies at Manassas like a plague of
grasshoppers,” one historian of the war wrote.
After stuffing themselves and putting on needed clothing,
Jackson’s men gathered what they could carry, torched the remaining supplies,
and fled. The next day, the army forded the Potomac and entered Maryland. Lee
ordered all commanders to reduce their supplies to the minimum. This was in
part to minimize the demands on the overtaxed animals the army needed to move
cannons, ordnance, and food. “All cannoneers are positively prohibited from
riding on the ammunition chests or guns.”
They still did not have enough food or animals. Many
residents were unwilling to accept Confederate money. Lee grew more concerned,
aware that a lack of supplies could hobble his remarkable and dedicated force
every bit as much as fire from the enemy. “I shall endeavor to purchase horses,
clothing, shoes, and medical stores for our present use,
The shortfalls the year before had been replaced by
abundance. The main challenge was moving the materiel to the men in the field.
The main fear was that field generals would not use what they had to crush the
enemy.
Steamboats and
railway offered remarkable advantages to the North, but supplies still had to
get from wharves and depots to soldiers in the field. The wagon was the way.
Meigs admired the regulation army model known as the Conestoga. It had been refined over the
years on the western plains. Stout and lumbering, it had interchangeable parts
that could be repaired in camp with portable forges. Each wagon had a tool box
in front, a feed trough in back, and an iron “slush bucket” for grease hanging
from the rear axle. Freight was protected by a canvas cover. Drawn by four to
six horses, a wagon could move 2,800 pounds of supplies over good roads in good
weather. A team of six mules could carry more than 3,700 pounds, plus about 270
pounds of forage.
No one had established clear guidelines for their use.
The wagon trains that followed the armies reached absurd proportions, causing
chaos and slowing nearly every movement. They carried every kind of comfort:
stoves, kettles, pans, chairs, desks, trunks, valises, knapsacks, tents,
floorboards, and any other conveniences. Loaded in this way, the wagons could
go about two and a half miles per hour over good roads. They could barely move
on bad ones.
In a stern letter to McClellan, on September 9, Meigs
insisted on reforms. He prescribed no more than three wagons for stationary
regiments to carry daily rations. Remaining wagons should be set aside for
supply trains. He said that officers had to curb their appetite for comfort,
including their use of the voluminous Sibley tents. Meigs felt they should make
do with smaller, more portable “shelter tents.” He was motivated in part by the
cost of cotton, which was rising because of the war. Soldiers dubbed the small
shelter a “dog tent,” because that’s what it seemed fit for; sometimes they
stuck their heads out of the tents and barked like dogs.
The name for the small shelters eventually became “pup
tent.” The quartermaster pegged the
ideal use of wagons at about one for every 80 men, roughly the standard adopted
by Napoleon. He noted that the Army of the Potomac used about one wagon for
every 34 men, an untenable arrangement. “The extra wagons, now filled with
officers’ baggage, should be emptied, and the officers compelled to move
without this unnecessary load,
In a related push for mobility, earlier Meigs had
circulated a French proposal for the organization of a light, highly mobile
“flying column” of troops that would lighten the burden on the army’s
logistical system and diminish the need for wagons and animals. The paper,
prepared by a contractor to the French army, prescribed columns with 2,000 infantry,
400 cavalry, two pieces of artillery, and 50 horses. Soldiers would carry eight
days of their own rations, including coffee, tea, sugar, rice, seven pounds of “sea biscuits,” and
“desiccated and compressed vegetables.” The paper said the soldiers would be
divided into squads, the members of which would share the burden of carrying
equipment, including sections of shelter tents. In theory, the flying columns
created a nimbler force, at least in the short run. Wagons loaded with
additional supplies could follow in the rear. “Alarm the enemy, break up his
camps, and keep always advancing,” the paper said. Squads should take along hand mills for
grinding corn, with the aim of lessening the burden on the Quartermaster
Department to provide flour for bread.
After experimentation and refinements, the board found
the flying column system workable. At Meigs’s urging, Rufus Ingalls, chief
quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac, began adopting variations of the
system in future campaigns.
Drawing on lessons learned from earlier campaigns, along
with the experiments with flying columns, Ingalls and Meigs directed the long
wagon trains well out of the way of the troops. Baggage and tents were not
stored near the fighting. Soldiers carried only a small amount of food, and
ammunition was delivered at night, mostly by wagon. Troops rarely saw the
operations that sustained them. Ingalls established a temporary depot 25 miles
behind Union forces, at the head of a small rail line and a road leading to
Baltimore.
Several
quartermaster men were asked to oversee collection of huge amounts of materiel
left behind by both armies, including muskets, ammunition, cartridge boxes,
knapsacks, clothing, and more. But that collecting the gear was harder than he
had expected. People came in “swarms to sweep & plunder the battlegrounds”
of souvenirs. Some took guns, bayonets, and other equipment by the wagonload.
One man made away with a six-pound cannon and lowered it into a well. Others
took horses and mules, cutting out or burning away the US brand on the animals
to obscure evidence of their thefts.
Eventually scores of looters were arrested and assigned the grim work of
burying the bodies of men and horses. More than 24,000 muskets and rifles,
10,000 bayonets, 2,400 cartridge boxes, sabers, belts, and hundreds of other
items were retrieved eventually and made available to the army.
By capturing half of Mississippi, Grant and Sherman
blocked the supply of beef cattle to the rebels in the east and prevented
Richmond from sending weapons, food, clothing, and reinforcements to the west.
The soldiers carried only what they needed for the trip
and the following few days. That included forty rounds per man and two days’
cooked rations. Commissary and quartermaster men arranged to provide coffee and
sugar during the journey. Planners made
sure that the trains moved in the dark to conceal them from rebel spotters in
distant hills.
The logistical challenges facing the quartermaster corps
were nearly overwhelming. Thousands of
mules died from starvation and the work of hauling in rations for 50,000 men
and forage for the starving horses, many of which no longer had strength enough
to pull artillery. Mule carcasses lined the rough road all the way to
Bridgeport, Alabama, where the Union army had a boatyard and maintained
supplies. Rebel cavalry made a devastating attack on the tenuous supply line.
The attack, on October 2, destroyed more than 300dred loaded wagons. The rebels
killed or captured 1,800 mules. The army, with enough ammunition for less than
a day’s fighting, hung on “by the merest thread.” Meigs scrambled in his usual
way. He urged Stanton to send more mules, in part to support Hooker’s arriving
men. He guided pioneer troops who had
put two abandoned sawmills into action, spitting out lumber for bridges, boats,
and fortifications. He oversaw the inventory of equipment and metal from a
large foundry and a destroyed bridge, stuff that was eventually transformed
into rolling mills for rail lines.
A key to this was the construction of a steamboat that
could ply the upper Tennessee River, which could not be reached easily from
downstream because of thin water at Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
A quartermaster man, Captain Arthur Edward, had
responsibility for building the boat. Meigs arranged for delivery of
specialized supplies, including boilers and engines that were floated down the
Ohio River and shipped by rail to the boatyard at Bridgeport, on the upstream
side of Muscle Shoals. Mechanics and carpenters hustled down from the North to
help out. The quartermaster team built the steamer from a flat-bottomed scow
outfitted with pontoons, a new steam engine, a rough pilothouse, and a paddle
wheel. The team fashioned a cabin from a rough frame and covered it with
canvas. With the boat nearly complete, Grant launched a stealthy campaign to
take key points on the river. At three in the morning on October 27, 1,400 men
floated silently nine miles down the Tennessee on other pontoon boats,
surprising the rebels at Brown’s Ferry. The Union force dismantled those boats
and used the pontoons to build a bridge.
On May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac began its great
Overland Campaign into the Confederacy. It would culminate nearly a year later
with the fall of Richmond, but only after what Grant described “as desperate
fighting as the world has ever witnessed.” The numbers associated with the
offensive—the supplies, the men, the deaths—remain notable. The force included
nearly one hundred thousand infantry, fifteen thousand cavalry, and six
thousand artillery men.
They deployed
4,300 wagons to carry an immense supply of pork, crackers, coffee, salt, and
sugar, along with mess kits, ammunition, and baggage. On hand to draw the
wagons were 23,000 mules. More than 30,000 horses carried cavalry soldiers and
pulled the artillery. Beef cattle followed on the hoof, to be butchered as
needed. Grant later estimated that if put into single file and spaced properly,
the train would have extended the 70 miles or so from the crossing on the
Rapidan to the city of Richmond.
Ingalls adopted a strict method for using the wagons. As
soon as they were emptied, they generally would be sent to the rear for
resupply with identical provisions. Apart from creating a new level of
efficiency, his system addressed one of the great logistical burdens of the
war, the feeding of animals. Instead of having to carry tons of forage for
themselves, the animals often ate when they returned to depots.
Maj. Gen. Philip
Sheridan, whose rapid rise through the ranks was fueled by his aggression,
echoed Grant’s relentlessness. With 10,000 cavalry soldiers, he carved a path
toward Richmond, inviting an attack from the smaller rebel cavalry force
under Jeb Stuart. They lived largely off
what they found and destroyed railroads, trestle bridges, and telegraph lines
along the way. At one rebel depot, Sheridan’s men dismantled or torched 100
railcars, 2 locomotives, and 1.5 million rations, including 200,000 pounds of
bacon, according to Sheridan’s estimate.
Behind it all, legions of supply workers, sometimes
operating in the line of fire, provided steadfast support. For the crossing of the James River, army engineers built what was one
of the longest floating bridges in the history of warfare, a 2,200-foot-long
structure composed of 101 wooden pontoons. It enabled the crossing of a line of
3,500 beef cattle and a wagon train 35 miles long. The quartermasters,
meanwhile, had to hustle to keep pace with the destruction of horses. In the
first six months of 1864, the Army of the Potomac received almost 40,000
cavalry horses, representing two complete remounts.
In less than a month, the city’s hospitals took in 18,000
new patients. Many of them died in short order, and then the corpses stacked up
faster than they could be buried. A stench drifted over the city like smoke.
Meigs had to provide the answer to a grim, practical question: Where would all the bodies go?
In July 1862 Congress authorized Lincoln to create
national cemeteries for servicemen. As the war ground on, finding burial sites
became a monumental challenge. By the spring of 1864, the pine and rosewood
caskets passed through Washington in a seemingly unending flow. On May 13 a
cemetery on the property of the Old Soldiers’ Home ran out of room. Nearly
6,000 soldiers had been interred there in less than three years. Another 2,000
had been buried at Harmony Cemetery and elsewhere in the vicinity of
Washington. Added to that were burials of more than 4,100 deceased former
slaves.
They succumbed to gunshots, cannon fire, and bayonet
wounds; diseases that included dysentery, typhoid, and diphtheria; infections
contracted during surgeries; and the blunt physical or emotional shock of
losing a limb.
Meigs soon dug a mass grave nearby, a huge pit to hold
the bones of unidentified soldiers.
In the war’s Western theater, the armies under Sherman
moved steadily closer to Atlanta. Every movement depended on support from the
railroad construction corps. The supply line began far back at Nashville. It
extended 151 miles to Chattanooga. The railcars carried provisions, clothing,
gear for the men, and forage for the animals.
The supply line later snaked its way toward Atlanta, 136
miles farther along the Western & Atlantic Railroad. The rebels attacked and destroyed sections of both lines repeatedly.
They twisted the iron tracks and burned the timber cross ties. Meigs ordered the completion of the rolling
mill in Chattanooga that he and his men began working on during the siege the
previous fall. The mill enabled them to
straighten 50 tons of rails each day, far more quickly and at a far lower cost
than manufacturing and shipping the rails from the North. The railroad workers
rebuilt more than a dozen bridges that summer.
Chattahoochee River. It
took the corps just four days to rebuild the 780-foot-long, 92-foot-high bridge
over the river. All told, the logistical work during the campaign was among the
most impressive of the war. Rail lines in the region under Union control rose
to 956 miles from 123 miles a year before. The number of cars shot up to 1,500
from 350.
Sherman calculated
that it would have taken almost 37,000 wagons to carry the same loads as the
railroads, in the same stretch of time.
The force brought relatively few wagons. Sherman encouraged his men to forage
liberally and to take or slaughter mules, horses, hogs, and other animals. The
Union rules for war had changed. Gone was the sense of delicacy about civilian
interests. The army cut a broad swath through the fertile state, some thirty
miles on either side of its path to the sea, causing perhaps $100 million in
damage, or roughly $1.5 billion now.
It fell to Meigs to ensure that the men received supplies
at its terminus, even though no one in Washington knew for sure where that
would be. Sherman planned to head to Savannah. Meigs reckoned it was possible
Lee would pull out of Petersburg and confront Sherman’s army, forcing it toward
Pensacola. To Meigs, it demonstrated like never before the viability of warfare
untethered from supply lines. He was especially taken by the fact that
Sherman’s men found forage for their animals rather than relying on costly
deliveries from the North.
Nearly everything
had to be delivered by sea, with Northern ships cycling in a constant stream
along the East Coast. Grant’s siege force required a virtual armada to keep it
supplied, including 190 steamers, 60 tugs, 40 sailboats, and 100 barges. Those
vessels comprised a mere subset of the Quartermaster Department’s ocean fleet,
which in the last year of the war included 719 vessels that cost more than
$92,000 a day on average to operate. The department operated another 599
vessels for river transport.
The war ends. 600,000 men died
Next came the task of demobilization. The men of the army
had to be discharged, paid, and transported home. Once again, the Quartermaster
Department managed. In 40 days, some
233,000 men, 12,800 horses, and 4 million pounds of baggage traveled across the
border between war and civilian life. By
winter, a second wave brought the diaspora’s total to 800,000. The
department’s transportation branch had never been busier. The logistics were
akin to those needed for the massive offensives of the previous year—save for
the absence of gunfire.
Much more still had to be done for the dead. The bones of
tens of thousands of Northern men lay in forests, fields, and shallow graves on
battlefields across the South. Men scoured the landscape for remains. For two
weeks, they buried and reburied bodies and bones. They had no difficulty
deciding where to build new cemeteries. They efficiently chose the places of
the greatest carnage, and interred more than 50,000 bodies across Georgia,
Virginia, and Maryland.
By late 1866, more than three dozen national military
cemeteries anchored battlefields across the country. They held the remains of
almost 105,000 Union soldiers—with many more to come. Meigs calculated the cost
of removing and reburying the bodies at about $9.75 each.
The department held fire sales of 207,000 horses and
mules, 4,400 barracks, hospitals, and other buildings and mountains of
irregular or damaged clothing.
To help former slaves eke out a living and guarantee them
a measure of economic freedom, he urged lawmakers to give each family five
acres of land. “The emancipation of the negro slave is incomplete as long as,
being without land, he is at the mercy of his former master.” His lobbying came
to nothing. President Andrew Johnson showed no interest in the cause. In his
frustration, Meigs predicted Southerners would resume their oppressive ways and
return “like dogs to their vomit. They can not enslave but they will outrage
& oppress. Their hearts are not changed.
Quartermasters were still needed after the war ended
since settlers needed the protection of soldiers, and the soldiers needed
supplies from the Quartermaster Department.
BEFORE THE WAR
[my comment: I was only going to take notes on the supply
chains and other aspects of supplying soldiers for battle, but Meigs was such
an amazing man I found myself noting other aspects of his life as well. Yet most of them are left out below, but this
gives you some idea of how accomplished he was across many fields, plus his
great skills as a leader and hard work to execute complex projects quickly and
under budget with complete and utter honesty, unlike many of the scoundrels
around him.]
On March 29, 1861, Army Captain Montgomery Meigs, just
home from work, found a letter waiting for him. Secretary of State William
Seward wanted him to go to a meeting at the White House as soon as possible.
President Abraham Lincoln had a problem to solve and needed to talk to a
soldier about certain military operations. It was unusual for a president to
seek advice from a captain, but these were unusual times, and Meigs was an
unusual man.
Meigs was an army engineer with no fighting experience,
but few could match his mix of creativity and talent for organization. He had
built the capital’s new aqueduct, including a bridge with the longest masonry
arch in the world. He also was the man behind the US Capitol’s recent expansion
and the ongoing installation of its great dome.
Philadelphia was a bustling business center quickly
filling with schools, churches, and businesses. It retained the charm of a
provincial city, giving way quickly to unspoiled countryside. About sixty-three
thousand residents relied on wood to heat their homes. Farmers brought food to
the city by wagons.
Meigs soon become a brevet second lieutenant in the Army
Corps of Engineers, an elite organization that played a primary role in
building the young country’s roads, canals, bridges, and harbors. Its
achievements included the country’s longest highway, the Cumberland Road, west
of the Ohio River.
In the summer of 1837, one of his first assignments
paired him with another West Point graduate, Robert E. Lee, class of 1829.
Their task was to find ways of improving navigation on the Mississippi River.
Meigs admired Lee, “then in the vigor of youthful
strength, with a noble and commanding presence, and an admirable, graceful, and
athletic figure. He was one with whom nobody ever wished or ventured to take a
liberty, though kind and generous to his subordinates, admired by all women,
and respected by all men.
They would remain fond of each other until a national
crisis turned them into mortal enemies.
***
Meigs helped rebuild Fort Delaware, a massive
fortification on Pea Patch Island destroyed by fire. The project posed many
challenges. The island had formed from silt over the centuries, and the mud
went forty feet deep in places. Meigs and other engineers created an intricate
wooden grillage as a foundation, pounding more than twelve thousand wooden
piles into the mud, using steam-powered pile drivers. Builders had been using
such structures since the days of the Roman Empire.
***
President Polk underscored his support of the annexation
of Texas from Mexico. The new president was prepared to go to war. For the
soldiers who would put his words into action, this meant a chance to earn
glory, a rise in rank, and a boost in salary, which resulted in appalling
casualties, including more than 13,280 American dead. Many of his army colleagues became famous and
received promotions. Among them were Ambrose Burnside, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses
Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jackson, later known as “Stonewall.
***
The location of the blaze could not have been worse, the
reading rooms of the Library of Congress. Just the night before, a nearby hotel
had burned down. Fire in the confines of the Capitol could spell disaster. The
great pile of wood, brick, and sandstone was more than the center of the
government. It also anchored the young country’s outsized aspirations to
greatness. The building had been under construction or renovation for a half
century. Though architects and builders had done their best with the budgets they
had, the place had become a grand, handsome tinderbox on a hill.
After a daylong battle, two-thirds of the fifty-five
thousand books were reduced to gray ash. Lost too were maps, charts,
thousand-year-old bronze medals, and more.
Investigators quickly determined the cause. On the floors
below, the drafty committee rooms had large fireplaces, which lawmakers had
kept stoked in a struggle against the subzero frost that had enveloped the
District in those first days of winter. Sparks had ignited a wooden joist
jutting into the flue of a poorly constructed chimney.
Nothing could contribute more to the health, comfort, and
safety of the city and the security of the public buildings and records than an
abundant supply of pure water, I respectfully recommend that you make such
provisions for obtaining the same
But lawmakers simply couldn’t divine the benefit of
spending millions on work so far from their home districts. But the library
fire stirred them to action. They agreed to allocate $5,000, more than ever
before, to support the search for a solution.
Meigs was to conduct a survey and find “an unfailing and
abundant supply of good and wholesome water” for the nation’s capital and
neighboring Georgetown.
In a 1,700-year-old book Meigs found a grand Roman water
system that would work well. The Potomac water would course through
seven-foot-wide conduits made of bricks, dropping on average about
nine-and-a-half inches each mile. The minimum cost would be just over $1.9
million.
Meigs would be allowed to succeed only if he directed
some of the work to the right people and their friends. To prevail, he would
have to master the dark arts of politics and bureaucratic wrangling—while also
managing men, overseeing millions in spending, and seeking solutions to mind-boggling
engineering problems. Meigs’s first lessons in Washington corruption came at
the Capitol, a building that epitomized the striving and contradictory
character of the republic it represented. From the fields down the hill,
Congress’s home appeared stately and steadfast. Prints at the time showed it as
a romantic vision, cloaked in a gauzy bank of moist air. In reality, it was
drafty, damp, and cramped. And that was only the start of the problems. Design
flaws made it nearly impossible for lawmakers to understand one another during
debates.
Work on the aqueduct languished for lack of funding, and
opponents on Capitol Hill held up proposals for new infusions of cash.
Designing the Capitol
Meigs’s plans, derived in part from an earlier proposal,
placed the legislative chambers in the interior of the expanded building. His
changes would give lawmakers private rooms and passageways beyond the reach of
the public or reporters. To link the building to the outside world, he planned
to install a telegraph. His plans included monumental staircases, glazed
ceiling panels, and galleries capable of seating 1,200 people. He also called
for stained glass set in iron frames in the ceiling and a lobby in the House
wing that featured Corinthian columns. Much of what he proposed was modelled on
Renaissance painting, architecture, and ambitions. Because he had never
traveled abroad, nearly all his ideas came from books. Meigs soon took aim at the building’s
engineering problems, including the atrocious acoustics and a substandard
heating system.
The physics of sound had long confounded scientists and
builders. Certain churches, theaters, and concert halls over the centuries had
just the right angles and proportions to enable speakers to hear one another at
great distances, often with amazing clarity. In the best spaces, such as
Milan’s La Scala opera house, singers and actors could easily cast their voices
to the back seats. Obtaining such effects took ingenuity or plain luck. In the
legislative chambers in Washington, the result was a fog of sounds. That was a
significant defect in a building where talk and debate were the reasons for
being. The three men visited concert halls, theaters, churches, and a prison.
They spoke from different parts of every room, taking note of the duration,
volume, and direction of the echoes. They made drawings showing the general
form of the spaces.
In his plans for moving the chambers to the center of the
building, he also eliminated windows. Behind this unorthodox idea was a double
agenda. Solid walls would eliminate exterior sounds and drafts, which he
assumed blocked voices from reaching distant points in the room. Without
windows, he also would have to create an unprecedented, steam-powered fan
system for pumping air through the legislative chambers.
Cast iron and new building methods might be the hallmarks
of the industrial revolution, but the homely red baked brick provided its
foundation. England had used billions of bricks in the first half of the
century. Almost every project Meigs supervised relied on bricks, including the
Capitol’s inner walls and the aqueduct’s culverts and tunnels.
Most Americans took pride in their bland tastes. To them,
stark interiors and whitewashed walls reflected what Meigs called a “republican
simplicity.” In contrast, Meigs wanted to emulate the complex designs, vibrant
colors, and richness that characterized much Renaissance art.
Meigs’s desire to make the Capitol a palace of art. Meigs
went on to commission oil paintings, elaborate ironwork, and columns adorned
with carvings of native plants and vegetables. He secured permission from the
Capitol gardener to gather sticks, leaves, and flowers as models for metal
ornaments to decorate doors of the House chamber. In fulfilling the captain’s
artistic vision, a foundry at the Capitol also produced decorative cherubs,
grapevines, lizards, beetles, and flies. When he learned that two Ojibwa
leaders were in town to settle a treaty with the federal government, he called
on a decorative stonecutter to make likenesses of them. The busts remain among
the finest nineteenth-century depictions of Native Americans.
The construction demands posed by the dome were
unprecedented. Almost nine million pounds of iron components had to be lifted
one by one and bolted into place by men who had never worked at such heights. There
was little room for error.
How would the tower stay upright during the strain of
lifting? For the answer, Meigs turned to the techniques of ship rigging. Stays
like those used on the mast of a schooner would hold the derrick in place. But
under the pressures exerted here, hemp ropes like those used on ships would
shred.
***
Militaristic rhetoric grew more extreme by the week. On
May 8 the District was jolted when a Southern-born representative shot dead an
Irish waiter at the Willard Hotel, an anchor of political and social life in
the city. The shooting had no direct connection to slavery, but Northerners saw
it as a symbol of Southern aggression and intolerance. Meigs was appalled, writing, “This is one
example of the evil of carrying weapons.
On May 22 Brooks walked up to Sumner at his Senate desk,
where he was preparing mail.
Brooks began pounding Sumner with a gold-headed cane made
of gutta-percha, a hard, rubbery substance. Brooks chose the cane because he
thought it would deliver maximum pain without actually killing. The first blow
stunned and blinded Sumner. Others came quickly.
When others in the Senate moved to help Sumner, Keitt
held them off. The attack stunned the nation. Northerners saw it as an effort
to silence “an eloquent and erudite” spokesman for freedom. In the South,
editorialists applauded the episode, with some deriding Sumner as “an inanimate
lump of incarnate cowardice.” Brooks was lauded as a hero and given canes to
replace the one he had broken during the attack. Radicals in the South would do
almost anything now to protect slavery, the institution that anchored their
society.
Democrats selected James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a
bland 65-year-old bachelor. He had served so long and often as a lawmaker and
diplomat that he was nicknamed Old Public Functionary. The fledgling Republican
Party went with John Frémont, the politically connected but inexperienced
“Pathfinder,” who had earned renown for his exploration of the West. The
American Party, which promoted nativism, chose former president Millard
Fillmore of New York as a compromise candidate. The South generally lined up
behind Buchanan. In the North, it was not clear who the electorate would
support. Many Northern regular voters were energized, even radicalized, by
events in Kansas. Voters pored over newspaper accounts of the campaign and
turned out everywhere for raucous political rallies, concerts, and picnics. They
were treated to a remarkable array of stump speakers, including Greeley,
Seward, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Abraham Lincoln gave close to ninety speeches.
On March 4, 1857, one of the most hapless men in American
history was inaugurated president of the United States, President James
Buchanan.
Meigs’s new boss, Secretary of War John B. Floyd, was a
former governor of Virginia. He came into office with the apparent conviction
that it was his right to provide patronage to his friends. He also thought that
slave ownership was the natural right of Southerners. The Buchanan
administration was filled with Southerners, who jammed the parties and seemed
at times to be celebrating their standing in the capital. Floyd took advantage
of the power that flowed from the South’s dominance. Soon after taking control
of the War Department, he began turning his authority on Meigs. In one move, he
urged the captain to begin applying a political litmus test to his workforce.
He wanted to purge followers of the Know-Nothing movement, who objected to
Irish, Germans, and Catholic immigrants. More to the point, they also opposed
slavery, which offended Floyd.
Meigs and other sensible folk—including Abraham Lincoln,
then a lawyer in private practice in Springfield, Illinois—thought the group’s
members were nearly unhinged.
More pressing now was another of Floyd’s demands. He
wanted Meigs to award every contract automatically to the lowest bidder. At
first blush, this seemed reasonable. Competition helped keep prices low for
taxpayers. But Meigs knew that something else was afoot. Experience taught him
that certain companies engaged in a type of legal extortion. They lowballed
their original bids and then, when the work was too far along to stop, demanded
more money. Floyd’s games and machinations rarely ceased.
Administration leaks suggested that Meigs was about to be
fired soon wafted through the capital. Floyd then added to the pressure,
ordering Meigs to provide advance notice of any impending purchases worth
$2,000 or more. In late August Floyd redoubled his effort to purge the
workforce of political undesirables.
Opinions about the new chamber varied. Some praised the
circulation system. Others grumbled that the temperature was too high or low.
An article in the Boston Post said that the acoustics could not have been
worse. One unsigned piece published in the Philadelphia Inquirer predicted that
the hall “is, I fear, to prove an entire failure. I have not met the first man
yet who speaks of it favorably.
Meigs had a hard time accepting that his younger brother
tolerated slavery and considered secession a legitimate possibility. He decided
that Henry had sold out, trading his family’s veneration for the country for
“the almighty dollars which he has invested in Columbus Mills.”
AFTER THE WAR
The federal Pension Bureau needed a new building, and
Congress took the unusual step of naming Meigs to build it. Meigs once calculated that the space holds 4
million cubic feet of air. The volume of air inside was key to his goal of
air-conditioning the place. He came up
with an innovative scheme involving vents in the walls that allowed fresh air
in, and hot air to rise up and escape. His theory about the space turned out to
be true, as the courtyard served as a natural chimney. By 1985, the great brick pile was so admired
that it was transformed into the home of the National Building Museum.
Miscellaneous politics in the war
McClellan blames his endless retreats on the Quartermaster
(not true of course) but an example of the nasty politics Meigs had to deal
with (dozens more examples left out)
Luck seemed to be on the Union’s side. On September 13 a
Union corporal near Frederick, Maryland, saw an envelope on the ground that
contained Lee’s plans for the campaign, Special Order 191, wrapped around three
cigars. It was the greatest intelligence coup of the war, a single document
spelling out the positions of Lee’s divided forces. But McClellan hesitated
under the impression that enemy forces outweighed his own. The delay gave Lee
time to gather his troops near Antietam Creek, not far from the town of
Sharpsburg. McClellan massed his men there as well. On September 16 he took
still more time to examine Lee’s lines and put his units into what he
considered proper positions.
He ordered a retreat back across the Potomac. No one on
the Union side moved to stop him. McClellan claimed later that he had planned
on resuming the fight but felt compelled to bury the dead. He also said his men
needed rest and that he saw “long columns of dust” to the south that he said
proved rebels were arriving to reinforce Lee. “This army is not now in
condition to undertake another campaign nor to bring on another battle”. He directed Halleck to order McClellan to
cross the Potomac, fight the enemy, or drive him south before the roads became
impassable in fall rains. And now
McClellan turned to an old excuse, contending the Quartermaster Department had
let him down. The army could not move because it had not received enough
horses, clothing, or other supplies. McClellan said he had done what he
could with what he had been given.
Before fossil fuels arrived, we depended on the energy
from burning wood to make metals, bricks, ceramics, structures, and other
objects, and the muscle power of men and animals to do work.
We discovered fire at least 250,000 years ago for cooking
and warmth. Hunters and gatherers relied
on muscle power when hunting, fishing, trapping, and gathering until
approximately 12,000–10,000 B.C.. when agriculture began and transformed
societies into sedentary villages. Work
animals were domesticated to do the arduous work of plowing. Civilizations with
excess muscle power were able to put it to other uses, such as constructing the
13,170 mile Great Wall of China, which probably required 2,000 years and
millions of laborers. In Egypt the great
pyramid in Khufu had 2.3 million blocks weighing from 2.5 to 80 tons, which
probably took 25,000 laborers at least 20 years to build.
Ways to use energy more efficiently with mechanical
devices such as pulley systems, windlasses, tread wheels, and gear wheels were
invented that made muscle power go even further.
Now we’re almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels for
our unprecedented high quality of life, yet we know fossils are finite and
likely to decline.
So it is time to look again at what we can gain from
muscle power, which will have to increasingly replace fossil fuels as they
decline.
This has the added bonus of helping to cope with the
obesity crisis. The authors estimate
that an average American has 5 pounds of excess fat, which translates to
133,000 GJ of stored energy. Using human
muscle as an energy source has the added benefit of reducing heart disease,
strokes, and diabetes.
Gym members comprise a large potential muscle power
workforce. Over 54 million people are
members of a fitness center in the U.S. where their potential electricity
generating exercise is wasted. Instead,
members do the opposite and consume electricity, since equipment such as
treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, and rowers are electric. And air conditioning to keep members cool
uses additional electricity.
This study looked at how much electric power could be
generated by 40 members at a gym in South Carolina.
At best, 3-5% of the gym’s average daily electricity demand could be provided at a large cost. To convert the rowing machines to generate electricity would take 33 years to pay back, perhaps longer than a rowing machine will last.
