Skip to main content

Michael Grunwald - five way interview

Michael Grunwald is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author who is now a contributor to the New York Times opinion section. His new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, is already transforming the debate over how to feed the world without frying it. Mike is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine, and the critically acclaimed author of The Swamp (about the Eveglades and Florida) and The New New Deal (about the Obama stimulus bill). He lives in Miami with his wife, Cristina Dominguez, his teenagers, Max and Lina, and his three deranged dogs. 

Why this book?

Food and agriculture generates a third of our greenhouse gas emissions; it's also the leading driver of water shortages, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity losses. It occurred to me that I didn't know squat about it, and since I wrote a lot about the climate, a lot of people were probably as ignorant as I was. What I learned is that the crux of most of our environmental problems is that we're eating the earth; two of every five acres of land on the planet are now farms or pastures, while only 1 of every 100 acres are cities or suburbs. We're losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest to agriculture every six seconds. And I quickly realized that our carbohydrate problems are a lot more interesting than our hydrocarbon problems. We basically knew what to do about energy - electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity - and we were gradually starting to do it. We didn't even know what we need to know about food and ag, and those problems were getting worse every day. So it seemed like an important topic to tackle.

Why do you think the US, the EU and the UK are so resistant to the obvious problems with biofuels?

Two decades ago, solar and wind power were still global rounding errors, a new documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? chronicled the death of that technology, and farm-grown fuels looked like the only plausible alternative to fossil fuels. Of course, the farm lobby loved biofuel subsidies and mandates, and as I chronicle in the book, the farm lobby has absurd amounts of influence. So when a brilliant and somewhat obnoxious lawyer named Tim Searchinger started publishing scientific papers showing that using farmland to grow fuel instead of food would induce massive amounts of deforestation to replace the food, there was massive pushback, not only in political circles but in academic and scientific circles as well.

Is there any evidence that Tim Searchinger’s ideas are getting traction where they can make a difference? 

Searchinger's revelations - biofuels are a land-use disaster, biomass power is another climate catastrophe masquerading as a climate solution, regenerative 'carbon farming' is mostly bullshit - have shredded a lot of conventional wisdom on those issues. They've forced defenders of those fake climate solutions to come up with increasingly preposterous arguments to justify them, and I tell the stories of a few of those defenders who actually changed their minds. Searchinger certainly hasn't stopped the expansion of biofuels or biomass power or carbon farming, but he's probably helped slow the growth. 

What’s next? 

I'm going to write about food and climate for The New York Times, Canary Media, and anyone else willing to publish me. This stuff is very important and very undercovered, so I want to keep reporting, banging my spoon on my high chair about it.

What’s exciting you at the moment? 

I think my pretty obvious thesis that we need to make more food with less land so that we can eat less of the earth is inspiring some really healthy discussion in the food, agriculture, and environmental worlds. Some regenerative advocates are just pissed off - when I debated an agroecology professor in Berkeley about the importance of high-yield farming, Alice Waters was glaring at me the whole time - but others are grappling with my ideas and even trying to incorporate them with their own ideas. Food and ag people tend to stay in their silos, so to speak, so it's been cool to see some breakouts.

Image credit: Jody Gross

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more