Richard Conniff's Blog, page 45

Republicans To Speak Out For Climate Change Action

Well, I don’t normally print press releases verbatim, but I just wrote on the role of Republicans in the fight to solve the acid problem.  That was back when the Republican Party still believed in the value of good government and the importance of saving the, you know, Earth.  Now some of the people from that successful campaign are about to speak out on climate change.  Check it out tomorrow morning at 10:

There are strong voices in the Republican Party that believe it is important to take action on climate change. Tomorrow, four Republican EPA Administrators will testify before a Senate Environment & Public Works sub-committee on Wednesday, June 18 at 10:00am ET. They will speak about the consensus around climate change, policy and regulatory solutions, and the urgency to act as U.S. communities face increasingly severe climate-related impacts.

The testimony will be webcast live here: http://www.epw.senate.gov. The official announcement is pasted below.

In addition to their roles as former EPA Administrators,

 

William D. Ruckelhaus and Lee M. Thomas are also current board members of the World Resources Institute.

Please let me know if I can help connect you with one of the Administrators or another WRI expert about the significance of the testimony.

Take care,

Rhys

___________

Rhys Gerholdt

Media Specialist | World Resources Institute

****MEDIA ADVISORY**** 

U.S. Senate Committee on

Environment and Public Works

*Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety*

“Climate Change: The Need to Act Now”

 BACKGROUND:    Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, will convene a hearing to examine climate change and the need to address it.

WHEN:                            WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 2014, 10:00 AM ET

LOCATION:                   EPW Hearing Room

406 Dirksen Senate Office Building

Washington, DC

WEBCAST:                    Webcast will be available at http://www.epw.senate.gov starting at 10:00 AM ET

WITNESSES:                 (Order subject to change)

Panel I:

The Honorable William D. Ruckelshaus, Strategic Advisor, Madrona Venture Group, and Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency


The Honorable Christine Todd Whitman, President, The Whitman Strategy Group, Former Governor, State of New Jersey, and Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency


The Honorable William K. Reilly, Senior Advisor, TPG Capital, Chairman Emeritus, ClimateWorks Foundation, and Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency


The Honorable Lee M. Thomas, Former Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency


Dr. Daniel Botkin, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara


The Honorable Luther Strange, Attorney General, State of Alabama


Dr. Joseph R. Mason, Hermann Moyse, Jr./Louisiana Bankers Association Endowed Professor of Banking, Louisiana State University, and Senior Fellow, The Wharton School

To Stop Tobacco Smugglers, Send in a Very Large Rat

Have banana? Will travel.

Every year, large criminal organizations smuggle enough tobacco for 657 billion cigarettes across international borders. That amounts to almost 12 percent of the tobacco trade, and it costs governments $40 billion to $50 billion a year in lost tax revenue. But the more important result is that smuggling makes cigarettes available far more cheaply, thus increasing the number of people who smoke. Smuggling often happens with the reported complicity of big tobacco companies, who profit by it. And yet stopping or slowing the trade would prevent 164,000 premature deaths every year by 2030, mostly in poor countries that are already afflicted with other health threats.

How to get there? It may take a rat to catch a rat, according to a new study in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior. Specifically, it may take batteries of African giant pouched rats lined up at seaports, like a different kind of longshoreman, to locate shipments of illicit t0bacco by sniffing the air from shipping containers.

These rats are in fact giants, relative to most other rats, with some weighing in at more than four pounds. They’re native to much of Africa, and still relatively common in the wild there. The “pouched” in their common name refers to their chipmunk-like cheek pouches. African giant pouched rats can live in captivity for eight years, making them popular as pets in some areas, and even the researchers in the new study dignified their test rats with names. (Ethnically diverse names, at that. They sound like a New York law firm: Harrison, Habreeze, Myron, and Bravo.)

This species, Cricetomys gambianus, has already demonstrated its remarkable olfactory powers as a cheap and efficient way of detecting and removing land mines from war zones.With training, these rats are not only sensitive enough to smell land mines underfoot, but—critically—they are also light enough not to explode them. Handlers follow behind the leashed rat and mark all mines for removal crews. The Belgian nonprofit APOPO (the full name translates to “Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development”) reports that since it started mine-clearing operations in Mozambique in 2006, the rats have helped find and clear more than 3,000 land mines.

More recently, African giant pouched rats have gone to work in the medical world, helping to detect hidden cases of tuberculosis, a deadly disease that is once again epidemic in many developing countries. The conventional method of detection requires a trained technician to examine a patient’s saliva sample through a microscope, and the average human can handle only about 40 samples a day. A trained rat can check that many specimens in seven minutes, according to APOPO. Deployed in partner hospitals in Tanzania in 2010, the rats increased the tuberculosis detection rate by 43 percent in the first year.

The protocol used for sniffing out tuberculosis is essentially the same as the one now being proposed for detecting illegal tobacco shipments.  It involves a special cage with 10 sample wells in the bottom. The rat sniffs each well briefly and pauses when it detects the target scent. In training, getting the target right brings a food reward, and the rat quickly becomes adept at running down the line and stopping at the smell it has learned to associate with the reward.

For the tobacco study, researchers stored filter paper near packs of cigarettes, and other forms of tobacco, for a period of days to weeks. Sometimes they added in extra scents, like curry or coffee, to confuse the test rats. Then they ran the paper samples through the test cages of Harrison, Habreeze, Myron, and Bravo. Harrison seems to have been the ace of the group, scoring 100 percent for seven cigarette brands. But all four rats managed to spot 80 percent or 90 percent of the cigarette samples, with false positives well under 1 percent.

Couldn’t dogs, those other celebrated sniffers, do just as well? It’s possible, but the rats are easier to house, feed, and maintain, says APOPO researcher Amanda Mahoney. They’re also easy to ship wherever they’re needed, and they don’t have to bond with an individual to do their work.

Mahoney and her coauthors acknowledge that there is still plenty of additional research needed before African giant pouched rats go to work in seaports around the world. It remains to be seen, for instance, just how many hours a day a rat can spend sniffing and still remain effective. Using rats would also require developing a system to draw air from shipping containers through filters, which the rats would then examine.

But if it happens, it will be yet another example in the surprising list of ways rats are now helping humans breathe easier.

A Republican Way to Fix Vast Environmental Problems

(Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)

It’s not a term you hear much these days, but acid rain was one of the great environmental perils of the late 1980s. Back then, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide were raining down across the countryside, particularly in New York, New England, and the Canadian Maritime provinces. The problem was coming from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. It was causing lakes to become acidic, producing a cascade of effects that killed fish and wiped out aquatic plant populations. Acid rain was also destroying timber, peeling paint, corroding bridges, and turning stone statues to mush.

Why don’t we hear much about acid rain anymore?

There’s a hint of the answer in a study just out in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Every summer for the past 23 years, the coauthors have been sampling 74 lakes across New England and New York state, and they report that acid rain is rapidly retreating. Concentrations of sulfate compounds in rain and snow declined by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2010, while nitrate concentrations fell 50 percent. Levels of these pollutants in lakes fell correspondingly.

“This is really good news for New England,” coauthor William McDowell, at the University of New Hampshire, said in a statement. “Lakes are accelerating in their recovery from the past effects of acid rain. Our data clearly demonstrate that cleaning up air pollution continues to have the desired effect of improving water quality for our region’s lakes.”

Maybe because the coauthors are scientists, not politicians, they don’t get into the details of how that cleanup came about, and that’s a pity. What happened to acid rain in 1990 could become the most practical way to address the far larger problem of climate change—and in a politically polarized era, it has what ought to be the advantage of being a remedy with Republican roots.

Here’s how the acid rain cleanup happened: In the 1970s and ’80s, the environmental movement had largely focused on an abrasive strategy of command-and-control government regulation combined with “sue the bastards” litigation. Out of frustration with the slow pace of change, one group, the Environmental Defense Fund, began to flirt with the idea of letting the marketplace come up with its own solutions. Late in 1988, EDF president Fred Krupp pitched this approach to C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel for the new administration of President George H.W. Bush. Gray bit. (I told the full story in a 2009 issue of Smithsonian.) The resulting proposal to address acid rain was built largely on what was then called emissions trading and later became known as cap and trade.

The basic idea was to get around the infuriating business of having government bureaucrats tell polluters how to clean up their act. Instead, the government simply set a cap on the level of pollution and left the polluters to figure out how to fix the problem on their own. A power company started the year with an allowance to emit a certain amount of “NOx and SOx” within the cap. (Environmentalists who opposed the idea called this “a right to pollute.”) The company could invest in cleanup and then trade away its excess allowances. Or it could delay and just buy excess allowances from a cleaner company. But the cap moved a little lower each year, meaning the pool of allowances got smaller and more expensive, increasing the pressure to reduce pollution.

Cap and trade became the law on acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act of 1990. It passed the House with 324 votes and the Senate with 89. Utility companies complained loud and hard that it was going to cost them $25 billion a year. In fact, the tab now runs less than $2 billion annually. By cutting acid rain in half—even as electrical output increased—the cap-and-trade solution also generates benefits variously estimated at $59 billion to $116 billion a year, 95 percent of it accruing to humans in the form of avoided death and illness. Healthier lakes and forests are almost an incidental side effect.

Apart from the new study demonstrating once again that, yes, cap and trade works and that we can fix vast environmental problems cheaply and quickly, why is this worth talking about now?

The real appeal of cap and trade has always been its potential to address the much larger challenge of climate change. But when that idea came up in Congress in 2009, Republicans vehemently attacked their own ingenious innovation, denouncing it as “cap and tax” and sending it to defeat in the Senate after a hard-fought battle in the House.

In the face of continuing Republican intransigence on the issue, the Obama administration has done little or nothing to address climate change in the intervening years, even as scientific evidence and real-life experience with extreme weather have made the deadly consequences more apparent.

But cap and trade may yet get another chance. The Environmental Protection Agency last week announced regulations to cut power plant greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, and one item back on the table is a cap-and-trade program.

Does the plan have a prayer? Much as critics like to demonize government—and environmental regulation in particular—the history of the acid rain problem is a reminder that government is simply the means by which we fix problems, protect one another, and improve our lives. If you happen to be vacationing in New England this summer—whether you are a Democrat or a Republican—pay attention to the cleaner air, the healthier lakes, and the greener forests. Nice, isn’t it? That’s your government at work.

Come back believing that together, we can face up to the much larger problems ahead.

The Scariest Thing About the Food You Eat

(Photo: Joel Sartore/Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart.

One evening in June 2011, at their home in a suburb of Portland, Ore., Melissa Lee and her husband sat down to a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs with their 10-month-old daughter. It was one of the first times Ruby Lee ever tasted meat. What followed, over the next few days, was a new parent’s nightmare of fever, diarrhea, listlessness, and doctors—culminating in an urgent phone call about blood test results: “Get Ruby to the hospital now.”

Ruby’s bloodstream was infected with a virulent bacterial strain, Salmonella Heidelberg, from the ground turkey she had eaten. She was one of 136 victims in that outbreak and among the 47.8 million cases, including 3,037 deaths, of food-borne illnesses in the United States that year. Medical detective work and DNA fingerprinting soon traced the outbreak back to Cargill, the privately owned agribusiness giant based in the Midwest, which had to recall more than 35 million pounds of ground turkey.

Ruby Lee

Ruby spent seven days in the hospital on an intravenous drip line. (The needle had to be moved from hand to foot to arm because her tiny body kept rejecting it.) Then she spent four days at home with an antibiotic line threaded into her heart. “The bacteria strain that she got, we didn’t find out till later, was antibiotic resistant,” Melissa Lee recalled not long ago. “So the fact that the antibiotic they gave her actually worked was a minor miracle.” Four other commonly prescribed antibiotics would have failed. “It was sheer luck that they gave her the right one.”

The problem for Ruby Lee and 2 million others in the U.S. who contract antibiotic-resistant infections every year is a kind of Catch-22: When antibiotics knock down unwanted bacteria, they make room for other bacteria that happen, by some quirk in their genetics, to be protected.   These survivors proliferate, and eventually become so dominant that the antibiotic simply has no effect.  It’s natural selection, and the more antibiotics in use, the faster it happens. The result is that important antibiotics no longer work against staph infections, urinary tract infections, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and a growing list of other diseases. We thought we had conquered these ancient killers at the beginning of the antibiotic era (which started on D-Day, 70 years ago).  But now our old enemies are back.

So after a lifetime in which a doctor could usually wipe away almost any infection simply by applying pen to prescription pad, we now stand at the brink of “a post-antibiotic era.” That’s according to an April 2014 report from the World Health Organization, and it could mean “an end to modern medicine as we know it,” Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of WHO, recently warned. “Things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.” In Britain, the top health official has said that antibiotic resistance threatens to become an “apocalyptic scenario,” with effects comparable to those of a catastrophic terrorist attack.

We know some of the culprits. The astonishing power of antibiotics to conquer disease made people so giddy at first that they proposed adding the drugs to canned foods, or even spraying them into the atmosphere at hospitals. Patients demanded antibiotics even when they weren’t necessarily appropriate, for a baby with an ear infection or a viral sickness. But doctors and hospitals began to see the results of misusing antibiotics almost immediately, in the form of resistant illnesses. With many old antibiotics no longer effective and no new ones coming onto the market to replace them, the medical community is now curtailing misuse of antibiotics to keep the last few lifesaving drugs effective for at least a few more years.

One large area of antibiotic misuse has hardly changed at all, however, partly because until recently no one knew just how astonishingly large it is: The single largest consumer of antibiotics worldwide since shortly after World War II isn’t the medical community at all; it’s the meat industry. The antibiotic era had just begun when researchers accidentally discovered that the addition to feed of low, or subtherapeutic, doses of antibiotics made livestock grow faster, possibly by suppressing bacteria in the gut.

From the start, researchers knew that chronic exposure to antibiotics would inevitably cause bacteria to become resistant. But the meat industry has argued that this resistance remains confined to animals and does not spill over to affect human health. “It is an ongoing debate about whether animal antibiotic use can adversely affect human health,” says Cargill, on its website, and that’s about the most anyone in the industry will concede.  Proponents of continued livestock use also point out that antibiotics have made it possible to keep animals healthy in large-scale production facilities—enabling industry to provide cheap meat in abundance for American dinner tables. Routine use of antibiotics, and the resulting lower cost of meat, have been significant factors in the doubling of meat consumption in this country, from just over 90 pounds per person in 1940 to 184 in the peak year of 2004. (Incidence of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers has spiked over the same period; medical science links all of these conditions to excessive meat consumption, which has put enormous pressure on the health care system entirely apart from the effects of antibiotic resistance itself.)

But scientific evidence about the public health risks of antibiotic use in meat production is becoming increasingly precise. That now pits much of the health care community and a broad coalition of political, social, and retail organizations against the giants that dominate the meat business—among them Cargill, Tyson Foods, ConAgra, Perdue Farms, Smithfield Foods (acquired by the Chinese firm Shuanghui International in fall 2013), and JBS S.A. (the Brazilian firm that acquired Swift + Company in 2007). Those companies account for the lion’s share of the 90-billion-plus pounds of red meat and poultry produced in the U.S. each year. Executives at these companies sometimes acknowledge the need to move away from some antibiotic uses, if only because of changing consumer attitudes on the issue. But antibiotics have made it possible to grow more animals faster and in more crowded conditions—the central premise of the highly concentrated modern livestock industry—so the prospect of reducing their use has little appeal. Moreover, demands for  changes that could eat into the meat industry’s bottom line come as it faces sharply increased feed costs and annual meat consumption that’s down 18 pounds per capita since 2004. (Accounting varies, but meat producers still manage to rake in well over $100 billion a year.)

The companies that supply the antibiotics—Zoetis (which spun off from Pfizer), Eli Lilly’s Elanco, and Phibro Animal Health are some of the biggest suppliers—also have little incentive to change. Selling drugs for use in livestock and companion animals has been one of the industry’s few bright spots, according to pharmaceutical analyst Steve Scala at Cowen and Company. It’s been a stable source of growth at a time when the human side of the business looks flat, with drugs becoming more expensive and difficult to develop.

But the antibiotics controversy could become a drag on that market, because cases like Ruby Lee’s are becoming disturbingly more common. Infections that resist antibiotic treatment now kill at least 23,000 Americans every year and cost the economy as much as $35 billion annually in added health care and lost productivity. Though doctors, hospitals, and patients who over- and misuse antibiotics bear some of the blame, new studies are for the first time implicating livestock antibiotics, too, and that has increased the demand for limits.

BREAKING THE CODE OF SILENCE

Until recently, antibiotic use in food animals has been largely hidden from public view. It started in 1949, when the drug company Lederle Laboratories (which would become part of Pfizer) introduced antibiotics for routine use in food animals. A company scientist later admitted that Lederle described the new product at first merely as a source of vitamin B12, rather than as an antibiotic, “to avoid any registration problems.” It was another year before the Food and Drug Administration found out that American food animals were being fed antibiotics on a routine basis, and the FDA did not learn for another 60 years exactly what a whopping dose of antibiotics our food animals were consuming. But a law passed in 2008 required drug companies to report their agricultural sales more fully, and in 2010, the FDA shocked the world when it announced that 28.7 million pounds of antibiotics—80 percent of all use in this country—were being devoted to livestock production rather than to human health care.

Even now, drug industry executives almost never talk directly about this hefty business of selling antibiotics to livestock producers. Several of the biggest makers of antibiotics for livestock declined multiple requests for interviews with executives involved in that part of company business. A phone call requesting an interview at Phibro, for instance, elicited this response: “I’m not sure we would do that. I can take the information If you don’t hear from us, that means they’ve decided not to do it.” Zoetis emailed its policy statement on the issue. An Elanco spokesperson acknowledged that antibiotic resistance is a problem in both human and animal medicine, but not that livestock antibiotics have been a factor in the developing crisis. He said the company would comply with measures being developed by FDA “to narrow the use” of antibiotics in food animals.

The pharmaceutical companies’ reticence makes sense. Their business depends on the goodwill of doctors and on a reputation for providing safe and effective drugs. Yet it’s becoming apparent that drug companies have for decades been promoting and profiting from the overuse that’s part of the antibiotic resistance crisis, to the considerable peril of doctors and patients everywhere.

Hence, when journalists phone to talk about livestock antibiotics, pharmaceutical companies generally send them on to Ron Phillips, who works two blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C. He’s a vice president for legislative and public affairs—that is, a lobbyist—for the Animal Health Institute, an association of animal drug manufacturers. In an interview, Phillips argued that the industry is innocent of the charge of causing the resistance epidemic for what can seem like logical reasons: Only about half the antibiotics used on farms are medically important to humans, and the connection to human health care is a lot less clear than when doctors put antibiotics directly into human patients. Antibiotics also get added to feed in relatively small doses—a fraction of a standard therapeutic dose. “Animal antibiotics make our food supply safer and people healthier,” the Animal Health Institute declares on its website. Phillips cited a study suggesting that animal use of antibiotics accounts for no more than 3.5 percent of the resistance problem.

But that study turns out to be more than a decade old, based on a questionnaire answered by 20 people, and written by a consultant to Pfizer. That’s how it often goes with the science in support of antibiotic use in food animals. When proponents cite “more than 12,000 studies” backing its safety and effectiveness, they are generally referring to studies sponsored by the same drug companies that are selling the antibiotics. These studies mostly took place in the 1950s and seldom lasted more than a few weeks.

THE GROWING EVIDENCE ON HUMAN SICKNESS

More recent studies indicate that it is routine for resistance to spill over from food animals to people, in ways we are only beginning to recognize. When the poultry industry in Quebec voluntarily (and temporarily) stopped using a cephalosporin-type antibiotic marketed by Pfizer Canada a few years ago, government researchers noticed that levels of resistant Salmonella and E. coli on supermarket chicken soon dropped. So did resistant Salmonella infections in humans. When the industry reintroduced the antibiotic, resistant bacteria reappeared in both meat products and human consumers. A Pfizer spokesperson commented that injecting the drug into chicken eggs before they have hatched, as the poultry companies had been doing, is an off-label use, and Pfizer does not sell for off-label uses. (This is a measured response considering that Pfizer in the first decade of the 2000s settled four separate cases involving criminal and civil charges, including once paying a fine of $2.3 billion for marketing human drugs for off-label use. And it’s estimated that 20 to 30 percent of drugs are prescribed off-label.) An author of the study countered that Pfizer sold the companies the vaccination machines used to administer the drug.

In another recent study, researchers shopping at supermarkets over a two-year period found resistant E. coli on almost every chicken product and to a lesser extent on beef and pork. Genetic analysis showed “extensive similarities” between the resistance genes in the E. coli on food and those in human patients suffering resistant E. coli infections, said James R. Johnson, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota and an infectious disease specialist at the Veterans Administration Health Care System in Minneapolis. Moreover, the drugs to which the E. coli were resistant were the same antibiotics that were being fed to livestock.

Proper cooking would of course kill these bacteria, but consumers still face a risk as they handle the raw meat in the kitchen. Children can pick up Salmonella and Campylobacter bacteria, Johnson said, just from riding in a supermarket cart with meat products nearby. In most cases, that kind of contamination is temporary: Different bugs prefer different hosts, and they pass through with no apparent ill effects.

E. coli is different. The same strains inhabit the intestines of humans and animals alike, and the species routinely swap them back and forth. It usually doesn’t matter much, so long as they stay in the gut. But they don’t, said Johnson, and there has been a frightening increase in the resistant infections that occur when E. coli gets in the urinary tract, the blood, and even the brain. Patients may go days or even weeks before doctors can find an antibiotic that still works. One result is that a seemingly routine urinary tract infection can now sometimes kill. Worldwide, an estimated 800,000 people die each year from extra-intestinal infections of all kinds caused by strains of E. coli. Even vegetarians are at risk: Over the past few years E. coli outbreaks have occurred in sprouts, packaged salads, spinach, and cookie dough.

For those who defend agricultural use of antibiotics, such studies add up to correlation, not causation. If the same resistance genes turn up in humans and food animals, said Charles Hofacre, a professor at the University of Georgia, that may just mean that overmedicated humans are infecting the food animals, rather than the other way around.

Johnson acknowledged that patients who die “tend to be older, sicker, more debilitated, more health care dependent, and more antibiotic exposed, all of which predispose to having a resistant strain.” Life is complicated like that, and it means that causation is elusive, much as it was when public health officials were trying to demonstrate the link between tobacco and cancer.

“It’s going to be quite difficult to slam-dunk prove that any of these resistance genes emerged because there was antibiotic usage in a food animal,” said Hofacre.

SQUANDERING A MEDICAL MIRACLE

But while we argue about proof, said Tyler Smith, a researcher at The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, “we are squandering a medical miracle on the basis of very limited evidence that it is necessary to produce animals.” Denmark and Sweden have already sharply restricted the use of antibiotics in food animals, he noted, without “long-term negative effects on industry.”

The lack of Hofacre’s “slam-dunk” proof, combined with pressure on Congress from agricultural interests, has led the FDA to take an uncharacteristically light-handed approach to livestock antibiotics over the years, an approach that has earned it some scathing criticism. “For over thirty years,” a federal judge declared in a 2012 ruling, the FDA “has been confronted with evidence of the human health risks associated with the widespread subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in food-producing animals and…has done shockingly little to address these risks.” A court also ordered the FDA to act on its own 1977 finding that use of tetracycline and penicillin in livestock feed contributes to drug-resistant bacteria strains and should only be used for therapeutic purposes, and demanded that the FDA belatedly determine whether five other antibiotic classes are safe to use in food animals.

The FDA is appealing that order while, it says, it is pressuring drug manufacturers and meat producers to use antibiotics more judiciously. Under current rules, for instance, a farmer can walk into an agricultural supply store, buy a bottle of veterinary penicillin off the shelf, and treat his own animals with the drugs as he pleases. Instead, the FDA proposes for the first time to require a prescription from a veterinarian for use of antibiotics in food animals. Over the next three years, livestock producers would also phase out the use of antibiotics merely to promote growth, one of the four uses (or “labels”) allowed under current FDA rules.

But that would be voluntary, and getting rid of the growth-promotion label might not reduce antibiotic use. Drug companies understand “that there are other ways to get antibiotics into animals without calling it growth promoting,” said Gail Hansen, a veterinarian and senior officer, human health & industrial farming, at The Pew Charitable Trusts. One veterinarian who defended current practice even argued that routine feeding of subtherapeutic antibiotics could increase under the new rules, merely re-labeled as “prevention.” To further complicate the issue, the same federal judge who reprimanded the FDA in 2012 has described its voluntary approach as “contrary to the statutory language,” adding that the agency has “forsaken” its obligation to ensure the safety and effectiveness of drugs.

Lack of transparency about agricultural use of antibiotics also continues to handicap the agency, according to Tyler Smith at Johns Hopkins. The FDA can readily track human antibiotic use and draw detailed maps correlating it with local patterns of antibiotic resistance. But under current rules, it has no idea where agricultural antibiotics go after leaving the drug companies for the feed mills. The feed mills are required to record, but not report, how they mix the antibiotics into their products. That loophole, said Smith, means that an FDA epidemiologist trying to figure out why resistant infections are hospitalizing more people in a particular area has to visit the mills to inspect the physical records. But there are hundreds of them.

European governments, meanwhile, have responded to the resistance crisis with aggressive disclosure requirements. Germany now collects data on both human and animal use of antibiotics down to the postal code level, making it easier for researchers to correlate usage patterns with changes in antibiotic resistance. Denmark has instituted a “yellow card” system to flag excessive antibiotic use by individual farms.

William T. Flynn, a deputy director for science policy at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, thinks it’s doubtful anything that rigorous “would even be workable” here, he said, given the scale and complexity of U.S. agriculture. Instead, the FDA has sought public comment on options for improved disclosure. Some of those comments will be included in the agency’s next summary report on the issue, said Flynn, and may help the agency evaluate whether its voluntary strategy for reducing use of antibiotics on livestock is working. Industry has rejected reporting requirements as too cumbersome and costly. But secrecy may lose its appeal as farmers and the livestock industry begin to confront their own potential vulnerability on the front lines of the resistance crisis.

SEQUENCING SLAM-DUNK PROOF

Changing the debate in startling ways is rapidly expanding research on the microbiome. Advances in DNA technology now allow researchers to study the microbes living within our bodies and in our domesticated animals in unprecedented detail—and that promises news both good and bad for the meat industry.

The harbinger of this change was a bacterial strain that first came to the attention of public health officials in 2003, after Eric and Ine van den Heuvel, a farm couple in the Netherlands, scheduled their six-month-old daughter for surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. Before Eveline could be admitted to the hospital, a test showed that she was carrying an unknown strain of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria resistant to the potent antibiotic methicillin. Researchers dubbed it MRSA ST398 (for “methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strain 398”). Investigators soon turned up other cases in Eveline’s family and in the surrounding community. This was a big deal: Methicillin was developed to treat bacteria resistant to most penicillins, and was one of the best drugs available for treating routine staph infections.

All of the cases were closely tied to pig farms like that of the van den Heuvels, where antibiotics were routinely administered to healthy animals. Researchers went to work gathering samples of ST398 from humans and livestock in 19 countries. To investigate the strain in detail, they turned to whole genome sequencing, a powerful tool that now costs as little as $300 to analyze an organism’s complete DNA (down from $500,000 just a few years ago). This technology makes it possible to trace the recent evolutionary history, or phylogeny, of a bacterial strain and determine when and where a particular trait entered the genome.

“We went in thinking it was a pig strain,” said the principal investigator, Lance Price, a professor at George Washington University and a leader in the field of genomic epidemiology. Instead, ST398 turned out to be a case of the humans contaminating the animals—but with a troubling wrinkle: The antibiotic methicillin worked just fine to control the original human strain of ST398. But after it jumped species, living in pigs forced it to adapt. By the time it jumped back to humans, exposure to the antibiotics used in pig farming encouraged the growth of a mutant strain with a resistance gene, rendering methicillin powerless. (It took months—and abandoning the use of agricultural antibiotics—but the van den Heuvels were able to purge Eveline of the strain and get her the heart surgery needed to save her life.)

A few years ago a small pilot study in this country found ST398 in 20.5 percent of pig farm workers. Michael Male, coauthor and veterinarian to Iowa pig farms, cautioned that this may just be a case of temporary contamination, not colonization or infection. ST398 is also a relatively innocuous strain of MRSA, at least so far. But he added, “It raises everybody’s eyebrows.”

It may also raise eyebrows among liability lawyers. Up to now, the cost of antibiotic resistance has fallen on society at large, not on hospitals or companies that misuse antibiotics. But over the next few years, whole genome sequencing could turn that around so the costs are borne by the individual company whose practices created the antibiotic resistant strain or promoted its spread.

Because of the ability of the new technology to do detailed detective work, said Rob Knight, a microbiome researcher at the University of Colorado, it won’t be like the fight over tobacco, in which it took decades to make the statistical connection to cancer convincing. “If you have the complete genome and the phylogeny that points you right back to one geographically isolated source that’s on one particular company’s feedlot, that’s going to be really hard to argue against,” Knight said. “And it’s easy to explain in the courtroom: Here’s the genome, and here’s how it matches up with this genome that we found on this company’s feedlot, and here’s 100,000 genomes from all over the country that don’t match.” In short: “slam-dunk” proof (provided that database of 100,000 genomes gets built).

Antibiotic resistance has figured in liability lawsuits only if it has complicated a client’s treatment, said Seattle attorney William Marler, who specializes in food poisoning cases. (He represented Ruby Lee, for instance, after conventional DNA fingerprinting tied her Salmonella strain directly to ground turkey from Cargill.) But resistance could play a bigger part in future lawsuits. “The one thing that genetic fingerprinting has done, and whole genome sequencing will do,” said Marler, “is, it narrows and solidifies what’s a case and what’s not a case.”

The other factor that may end or limit the practice of routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock is the market. In a survey last year by Consumer Reports, 61 percent of shoppers said “antibiotic-free” meat was worth an extra nickel a pound to them—and 37 percent said they’d pay up to a $1 a pound more. Restaurants from Panera Bread to Chipotle Mexican Grill have already anticipated this demand by enacting policies to reduce, phase out, or eliminate sourcing from suppliers that use antibiotics, as have supermarket chains such as Wegmans (stung in 2012 by an E. coli outbreak from a salad mix) and Whole Foods Market.

Some livestock producers are also waking up to the idea that just getting rid of the “growth promotion” label may not be enough. “In the past, the big companies were less willing to have an honest, serious conversation about cutting back on antibiotics, and I am seeing that change,” said Helene York of Bon Appétit Management Co., which runs 500 cafés and restaurants for college campuses and corporations, including Google and Starbucks.

Bon Appétit decided back in 2003 that its poultry suppliers should not be routinely administering antibiotics, and in 2007 that its ground beef should be from animals that have never been given antibiotics, period. At first it struggled to find suppliers, said York. But the big meat-producing companies that once gave the company the polite brush-off now “know that how they are going to grow has to be more responsible than how they got to where they are.”

So far the rising concern about antibiotic resistance has been good news mainly for companies like Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Foods (owned by Perdue) and independent farmers like Russ Kremer in Missouri. They’re making a market for premium-priced meat in those people in the Consumer Reports poll.

THRIVING WITHOUT ANTIBIOTICS IN THE FEED

Kremer started out in the 1970s attending farming social events sponsored by drug companies, and he believed what they said about the magic of subtherapeutic antibiotics. But his own bout with a resistant infection, and a fear that he was helping to create “monster bugs” on his farm (which is, no kidding, in the unincorporated community of Frankenstein), caused a change of heart. The first year after “kicking the drug habit,” he recalls today, he saved $16,000 on drugs and veterinary fees, and his pigs were healthier to boot. Kremer now helps other farmers switch to the “sustainable value-added market.” They use probiotics—microorganisms thought to be beneficial—to keep their animals healthy and boost growth rates. Oregano oil is a standard ingredient. So are derivatives from colostrum—a form of milk produced just after childbirth—to help stimulate immune function.

It may sound like something out of the food co-op fringe, but this is where research into the microbiome promises to deliver good news even for the largest meat companies and perhaps also for their customers. Until recently, producers have been largely in the dark about the microbes that live in and around their livestock. They’ve never really known, for instance, exactly what it is that antibiotics do that makes animals grow faster. But microbiome research makes it possible to understand the microbes involved at every stage in an animal’s life—and also tweak them. That’s putting the big livestock companies, and the drug companies that supply them, on a new path.

In response to the shifting marketplace, Eli Lilly’s animal health division, Elanco, is currently expanding its line of growth-promoting natural enzymes as an alternative to antibiotics in livestock feed. Likewise, probiotics are now a hot topic at Perdue Foods: “I would’ve said, 10 years ago when we were looking at it, that probiotics didn’t prove out any of the claims. Today they are much more refined,” said Bruce Stewart-Brown, senior vice president of food safety and quality for Perdue. “We’re still learning about these products and how they work in different kinds of chicken. But, oh, yeah, we use ’em.”

At Cargill, source of the meat that poisoned Ruby Lee with antibiotic-resistant Salmonella, researchers have been experimenting with competitive exclusion, a technique for getting chicks started by inoculating them with “good” intestinal bacteria so there’s no room for “bad” bacteria to take hold. “The turkey recall of 2011 got us thinking again,” said Mike Robach, vice president of food safety. “This popped out at us.” Early in 2012, company researchers treated half the turkey chicks in a test population with competitive exclusion. The other half served as a control, receiving no special treatment. Next day, researchers fed both groups a meal deliberately loaded with Salmonella. A week later, the treated birds had only a 10th as much Salmonella as the controls. If the technique wins FDA approval, said Robach, “it would allow us to continue to reduce the use of antibiotics in these animals.”

Would his company ever abandon subtherapeutic antibiotics completely? Robach would not put a timeline on it. But he didn’t flat-out dismiss the idea either. “I think we’re on that path,” he said, “and we’re going to get there sooner rather than later.”

The question is whether the industry will shake its antibiotics addiction before consumers give up on mass-produced meat altogether.

Don’t Look Now, But You’re Probably Swimming With Dinosaurs

Richard Conniff and hostile friend.

The other night, I was out working on the dunes near my house on Long Island Sound when I noticed strange widespread footprints, with a tail mark slashing back and forth down the middle.  It mystified me for a moment, and I stopped what I was doing to follow the track down to where it started in a creek coming out of the salt marsh.

Then I remembered.

It’s June. The snapping turtles are emerging from the water to lay their eggs. There was a second trail 10 feet away from the first, presumably where Big Mama headed back to the creek after covering her nest. I didn’t hunt for the nest itself. The 35 or so eggs laid by a typical snapping turtle need to incubate until they hatch in early August. They’ll have enough trouble till then avoiding careless beachgoers and hungry raccoons and foxes.

A few years ago, I showed a British visitor a big female snapping turtle wandering on this exact spot, and his eyes fell out of his head. The Brit was the guy who produces the TV series River Monsters. So you’d figure he’d be a little jaded. But

it was as if I had just shown him a living dinosaur, and maybe I had. The modern snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) emerged 40 million years ago. But it’s not much different from the most primitive turtle dating back 215 million years.

Snapping turtles are big and scary looking, with dazzled, demented-looking eyes. The largest one ever caught weighed 68 pounds, and 45 pounders are not uncommon. Alligator snappers, a common name that applies to three species, live in the Southeast and are even bigger. I once helped catch a 95-pounder for a research project, and they can get to be up to 200 pounds, though it may take them a century to get there.

They are also survivors. Snapping turtles have adapted to modern life and live even in Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. They are the most common turtles in North America. Alligator snapper populations, on the other hand, were severely depleted by habitat loss and commercial hunting for their meat. Catching them is now outlawed in many states and regulated in others, and the population seems to be stable.

Both kinds of snapping turtles face other hazards, including a tendency to bio-accumulate PCBs, endocrine disrupters, and other pollutants. A recent study by David Steen and his coauthors x-rayed turtles and found that 10 percent to 30 percent of snapping turtles had ingested fish hooks. Becoming roadkill is also a hazard, especially right now when females are out wandering. Yet snapping turtles endure.

Here is a comforting thought, for next time you venture into a freshwater lake, pond, or river: Snapping turtles will almost certainly be there with you, even if you never see them. We swim with them routinely. Despite our paranoid fears, these creatures are harmless to human swimmers. They will prey on fish, frogs, salamanders, snails, leeches, snakes, small mammals, and, yes, baby ducks and goslings.  But there is no record of a snapping turtle ever biting anyone who was not trying to handle or molest it.

A friend of mine named John Rogers used to make his living trapping snapping turtles for the soup market, and one of his stops was at the site of the legendary 1969 Woodstock music festival. A week after festivalgoers happily went skinny-dipping there, Rogers collected several dozen snapping turtles, averaging 20 pounds apiece, from that same pond. They never bothered the swimmers.

Out of the water, it’s a different story. The snapping turtle’s head can’t pull back into the safety of its shell. So instead, it comes rocketing out on its elongated neck. The turtle can leap up off its front legs, hissing ferociously. The hooked jaws gape open, ready to clamp down on anything unlucky enough to come in reach. It is an admirable display, unless your fingers are involved.

“The likable thing about snapping turtles is that they are, in a word, trouble,” as one writer has put it. (Oh, hell, the writer was me, in my book Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time.) But they are interesting trouble—“tough, reclusive, and fiercely independent, unhuggable in a culture determined to make all animals cute, paragons of the ‘Don’t tread on me’ spirit in a society that thinks nature ought to be approachable. Snapping turtles are throwbacks not merely to the dinosaurian epoch during which they evolved but also to our own past as a nation. They are hardheaded American originals.”

So what should you do if you see a snapping turtle?

Stand back and admire.

But mostly, stand back.

How Acting On a Hidden Environmental Threat Saves $11 billion

Prevention doesn’t come naturally to the human spirit. Even if we know better, paying the immediate cost often seems more daunting than the possibility of paying a much higher cost (death, say) at some unknown date in the future. This emotional disconnect is what makes it so hard to persuade people to eat less, exercise more, practice safe sex, or take action to prevent climate change.

Lately, the “why worry?” line of thinking has turned up in the debate over invasive species. If you think it’s hard making parents understand that their unvaccinated child could die from measles, just imagine how hard it is to convince them that they should also worry about, say, invasive beetles turning up in the backyard. To make prevention even less likely, some critics now argue that introduced species are often harmless, or in some cases beneficial, and that there are just too many of them to fight. At best, they say, we spend a great deal of money to slow down the invasion. But we can never stop it completely.

A new case study being published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology replies—if I may sum up the scholarship in a phrase—that this is a lot of crap. The coauthors look at the current poster child of invasive species, the emerald ash borer, a beetle with a glittering green carapace and a nasty habit of killing some of the most majestic trees lining the streets of North American cities, as well as in our yards and forests.

Emerald ash borers (also known as EAB) arrived from Asia by accident in the 1990s, and biologists first detected them in Detroit in 2002. In North America, they focus exclusively on ash trees (hence the name), and as their larvae bore into a tree, they block off its ability to transport nutrients and water.

Alarmed at the prospect of dying forests, the Nature Conservancy and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis launched a wide-ranging series of studies on the problem. “By 2003, at least 5–7 million ash trees were dead or dying in a six-county area of southeastern Michigan,” the authors of one such study wrote early this year, “and it was becoming apparent that EAB had the potential to devastate ash on a continental scale.”

The new study looks at the preventive measure undertaken by 70 signatory countries, including the United States, to slow or stop the invasion. ISPM15, as it’s known, requires manufacturers in international trade to treat wood pallets and wood crating (like the box holding your supermarket clementines). Treatment typically involves heat or fumigation with an insecticide, at a cost of about $1.50 per pallet. That added up to a whopping $437 million in 2005, the first year of implementation, with the expectation of continuing costs at a much lower level as pallets run through their typical six-year life span.

So was it a waste of money? McGill University biologist Brian Leung and his coauthors calculated how many insect pests turned up on crates and pallets before ISPM15. They noted that the required treatments are 52 percent effective, meaning that they don’t kill every insect—they just slow down the invasion. But they also noted that the treatment doesn’t just target emerald ash borers.

With no treatment at all, says Leung, the United States could have expected 200 other wood-boring insect species to become established here. This country can still expect “substantial increases in forest pests,” according to the study, at least in part because we consume so many imports. But ISPM15 at least cuts this army down to an ultimate invasive force of 100 species. Making the treatment 100 percent effective would require more expensive technologies or switching to plastic, says Leung, and might well be worth it. That’s a cost-benefit analysis he and his coauthors have not yet undertaken.

So looking just at the ISPM15 rules as they stand, here’s the bottom line: The United States will begin to see a return on investment in 2016. Counting all the costs of treatment, as well as all the avoided costs from damage to our forests and street trees by invasive insect pests, we will enjoy a net benefit in excess of $11 billion by mid-century. In other words, prevention works, even if the “substantial net benefits…become apparent only after multiple decades.” (In an interesting parenthetical afterthought, the coauthors add that the same holds true for policy to reduce carbon emissions.)

All these numbers may still seem abstract. So let’s make it personal: Last year, after my father’s death, I was getting ready to sell his house. One day in the front yard, I looked up at three tall, magnificent trees that had been growing there my entire life. It was June, and they were suddenly bare. “Emerald ash borers,” the tree contractor explained. The bill to remove the trees was $2,900.

Step out into your own yard, and you may see the same thing, if you are lucky enough to have ash trees. It might make you think differently next time biologists warn that we need to act now to keep something bad from happening in the uncertain future. You may even find yourself thinking, like me, that paying $1.50 today is much less painful than paying $2,900 down the line.

The Monsters Are Wandering

I was out working on the dunes near my house on Long Island Sound when I noticed strange footprints, with a tail mark down middle.  It mystified me for a while.  That I remembered. It’s June.  The snapping turtles are coming out of the water to lay their eggs.

I found a second trail 10 feet back from the first.  I forgot to notice the direction, but presumably it was Big Mama heading back to the depths.

A few years ago, I showed a British visitor a big female wandering on this exact spot and his eyes fell out of his head, as if I had just shown him a living dinosaur, which maybe I had.  The Brit, by the way, was the guy who produces the tv series “River Monsters.” So you’d figure he’d be a little jaded.  But snapping turtles are a sight.

 

A Great Idea from when the GOP Still Believed in Solutions

The “cap-and-trade”  idea is back in the news.  Here’s my article from the August 2009 issue of Smithsonian reminding everyone that this was originally a Republican innovation:

John B. Henry was hiking in Maine’s Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. “I thought he was smoking dope,” recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change—an approach being hotly debated in Congress—you could say that it got its start on the global stage on that hike up Acadia’s Cadillac Mountain.

People now call that system “cap-and-trade.” But back then the term of art was “emissions trading,” though some people called it “morally bankrupt” or even “a license to kill.” For a strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists, it represented a novel approach to cleaning up the world—by working with human nature instead of against it.

Despite powerful resistance, these allies got the system adopted as national law in 1990, to control the power-plant pollutants that cause acid rain. With the help of federal bureaucrats willing to violate the cardinal rule of bureaucracy—by surrendering regulatory power to the marketplace—emissions trading would become one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of the green movement. Congress is now considering whether to expand the system to cover the carbon dioxide emissions implicated in climate change—a move that would touch the lives of almost every American. So it’s worth looking back at how such a radical idea first got translated into action, and what made it work.

The problem in the 1980s was that American power plants were sending up vast clouds of sulfur dioxide, which was falling back to earth in the form of acid rain, damaging lakes, forests and buildings across eastern Canada and the United States. The squabble about how to fix this problem had dragged on for years. Most environmentalists were pushing a “command-and-control” approach, with federal officials requiring utilities to install scrubbers capable of removing the sulfur dioxide from power-plant exhausts. The utility companies countered that the cost of such an approach would send them back to the Dark Ages. By the end of the Reagan administration, Congress had put forward and slapped down 70 different acid rain bills, and frustration ran so deep that Canada’s prime minister bleakly joked about declaring war on the United States.

At about the same time, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) had begun to question its own approach to cleaning up pollution, summed up in its unofficial motto: “Sue the bastards.” During the early years of command-and-control environmental regulation, EDF had also noticed something fundamental about human nature, which is that people hate being told what to do. So a few iconoclasts in the group had started to flirt with marketplace solutions: give people a chance to turn a profit by being smarter than the next person, they reasoned, and they would achieve things that no command-and-control bureaucrat would ever suggest.

The theory had been brewing for decades, beginning with early 20th-century British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou. He argued that transactions can have effects that don’t show up in the price of a product. A careless manufacturer spewing noxious chemicals into the air, for instance, did not have to pay when the paint peeled off houses downwind—and neither did the consumer of the resulting product. Pigou proposed making the manufacturer and customer foot the bill for these unacknowledged costs—”internalizing the externalities,” in the cryptic language of the dismal science. But nobody much liked Pigou’s means of doing it, by having regulators impose taxes and fees. In 1968, while studying pollution control in the Great Lakes, University of Toronto economist John Dales hit on a way for the costs to be paid with minimal government intervention, by using tradable permits or allowances.

The basic premise of cap-and-trade is that government doesn’t tell polluters how to clean up their act. Instead, it simply imposes a cap on emissions. Each company starts the year with a certain number of tons allowed—a so-called right to pollute. The company decides how to use its allowance; it might restrict output, or switch to a cleaner fuel, or buy a scrubber to cut emissions. If it doesn’t use up its allowance, it might then sell what it no longer needs. Then again, it might have to buy extra allowances on the open market. Each year, the cap ratchets down, and the shrinking pool of allowances gets costlier. As in a game of musical chairs, polluters must scramble to match allowances to emissions.

Getting all this to work in the real world required a leap of faith. The opportunity came with the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush. EDF president Fred Krupp phoned Bush’s new White House counsel—Boyden Gray—and suggested that the best way for Bush to make good on his pledge to become the “environmental president” was to fix the acid rain problem, and the best way to do that was by using the new tool of emissions trading. Gray liked the marketplace approach, and even before the Reagan administration expired, he put EDF staffers to work drafting legislation to make it happen. The immediate aim was to break the impasse over acid rain. But global warming had also registered as front-page news for the first time that sweltering summer of 1988; according to Krupp, EDF and the Bush White House both felt from the start that emissions trading would ultimately be the best way to address this much larger challenge.

It would be an odd alliance. Gray was a conservative multimillionaire who drove a battered Chevy modified to burn methanol. Dan Dudek, the lead strategist for EDF, was a former academic Krupp once described as either “just plain loony, or the most powerful visionary ever to apply for a job at an environmental group.” But the two hit it off—a good thing, given that almost everyone else was against them.

Many Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staffers mistrusted the new methods; they had had little success with some small-scale experiments in emissions trading, and they worried that proponents were less interested in cleaning up pollution than in doing it cheaply. Congressional subcommittee members looked skeptical when witnesses at hearings tried to explain how there could be a market for something as worthless as emissions. Nervous utility executives worried that buying allowances meant putting their confidence in a piece of paper printed by the government. At the same time, they figured that allowances might trade at $500 to $1,000 a ton, with the program costing them somewhere between $5 billion and $25 billion a year.

Environmentalists, too, were skeptical. Some saw emissions trading as a scheme for polluters to buy their way out of fixing the problem. Joe Goffman, then an EDF lawyer, recalls other environmental advocates seething when EDF argued that emissions trading was just a better solution. Other members of a group called the Clean Air Coalition tried to censure EDF for what Krupp calls “the twofold sin of having talked to the Republican White House and having advanced this heretical idea.”

Misunderstandings over how emissions trading could work extended to the White House itself. When the Bush administration first proposed its wording for the legislation, the EDF and EPA staffers who had been working on the bill were shocked to see that the White House had not included a cap. Instead of limiting the amount of emissions, the bill limited only the rate of emissions, and only in the dirtiest power plants. It was “a real stomach-falling-to-the-floor moment,” says Nancy Kete, who was then managing the acid rain program for the EPA. She says she realized that “we had been talking past each other for months.”

EDF argued that a hard cap on emissions was the only way trading could work in the real world. It wasn’t just about doing what was right for the environment; it was basic marketplace economics. Only if the cap got smaller and smaller would it turn allowances into a precious commodity, and not just paper printed by the government. No cap meant no deal, said EDF.

John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, was furious. He said the cap “was going to shut the economy down,” Boyden Gray recalls. But the in-house debate “went very, very fast. We didn’t have time to fool around with it.” President Bush not only accepted the cap, he overruled his advisers’ recommendation of an eight million-ton cut in annual acid rain emissions in favor of the ten million-ton cut advocated by environmentalists. According to William Reilly, then EPA administrator, Bush wanted to soothe Canada’s bruised feelings. But others say the White House was full of sports fans, and in basketball you aren’t a player unless you score in double digits. Ten million tons just sounded better.

Near the end of the intramural debate over the policy, one critical change took place. The EPA’s previous experiments with emissions trading had faltered because they relied on a complicated system of permits and credits requiring frequent regulatory intervention. Sometime in the spring of 1989, a career EPA policy maker named Brian McLean proposed letting the market operate on its own. Get rid of all that bureaucratic apparatus, he suggested. Just measure emissions rigorously, with a device mounted on the back end of every power plant, and then make sure emissions numbers match up with allowances at the end of the year. It would be simple and provide unprecedented accountability. But it would also “radically disempower the regulators,” says EDF’s Joe Goffman, “and for McLean to come up with that idea and become a champion for it was heroic.” Emissions trading became law as part of the Clean Air Act of 1990.

Oddly, the business community was the last holdout against the marketplace approach. Boyden Gray’s hiking partner John Henry became a broker of emissions allowances and spent 18 months struggling to get utility executives to make the first purchase. Initially it was like a church dance, another broker observed at the time, “with the boys on one side and the girls on another. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to walk into the middle.” But the utility types kept fretting about the risk. Finally, Henry phoned Gray at the White House and wondered aloud if it might be possible to order the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a federally owned electricity provider, to start buying allowances to compensate for emissions from its coal-fired power plants. In May 1992, the TVA did the first deal at $250 a ton, and the market took off.

Whether cap-and-trade would curb acid rain remained in doubt until 1995, when the cap took effect. Nationwide, acid rain emissions fell by three million tons that year, well ahead of the schedule required by law. Cap-and-trade—a term that first appeared in print that year—quickly went “from being a pariah among policy makers,” as an MIT analysis put it, “to being a star—everybody’s favorite way to deal with pollution problems.”

Almost 20 years since the signing of the Clean Air Act of 1990, the cap-and-trade system continues to let polluters figure out the least expensive way to reduce their acid rain emissions. As a result, the law costs utilities just $3 billion annually, not $25 billion, according to a recent study in the Journal of Environmental Management; by cutting acid rain in half, it also generates an estimated $122 billion a year in benefits from avoided death and illness, healthier lakes and forests, and improved visibility on the Eastern Seaboard. (Better relations with Canada? Priceless.)

No one knows whether the United States can apply the system as successfully to the much larger problem of global warming emissions, or at what cost to the economy. Following the American example with acid rain, Europe now relies on cap-and-trade to help about 10,000 large industrial plants find the most economical way of reducing their global warming emissions. If Congress approves such a system in this country—the House had approved the legislation as we went to press—it could set emissions limits on every fossil-fuel power plant and every manufacturer in the nation. Consumers might also pay more to heat and cool their homes and drive their cars—all with the goal of reducing global warming emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels over the next ten years.

But advocates argue that cap-and-trade still beats command-and-control regulation. “There’s not a person in a business anywhere,” says Dan Esty, an environmental policy professor at Yale University, “who gets up in the morning and says, ‘Gee, I want to race into the office to follow some regulation.’ On the other hand, if you say, ‘There’s an upside potential here, you’re going to make money,’ people do get up early and do drive hard around the possibility of finding themselves winners on this.”

Richard Conniff is a 2009 Loeb Award winner for business journalism.

What’s Scarier Than a Savage Piranha Attack?

A particularly gruesome email came in the other morning from Suriname, a beautiful country on the northeastern shoulder of South America. Early last month, a family from the Netherlands was vacationing at a resort on the Suriname River. The eight-year-old daughter was playing with her brother in the shallows, in an area supposedly protected by a “piranha-proof” net. Suddenly the children started screaming.

Another tourist carried the girl out of the water, with blood streaming down from her foot. At the hospital, doctors identified the deep divot cut out of the girl’s right foot as the toothy bite of a piranha. The family caught the next plane back to the Netherlands for further treatment.

The story made my eyes go wide, as my informant no doubt knew it would. Jan H. Mol is a fish biologist at the University of Suriname, and he and I have traded notes on piranhas since traveling together on an expedition in Suriname a few years ago. We’ve both spent a fair amount of time in the water with piranhas and lived to tell the tale (one of my books is titled Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time). We’ve also both made considerable effort to discount piranhas as a threat: They rarely attack humans, and they only do that crazed swarming thing where there is concentrated food—for instance, fish guts heaved overboard at a fishing dock. Piranha attacks like the one on the Dutch girl make good headlines, but they are extraordinarily rare.

The truth is that Mol was using the attack to bait the hook and reel in a journalist: The real threat in Suriname, he went on to argue, isn’t piranhas. It’s the American aluminum company Alcoa and its local subsidiary, Suralco, which is the largest private employer and taxpayer in Suriname.

The beauty of Suriname is that it has managed to remain almost entirely undeveloped. It’s still 85 percent forested and thus one of the greenest countries in the world. That has made it a special interest of the environmental group Conservation International, which has conducted a series of expeditions around the country. Almost 10 years ago, one such expedition, sponsored by both CI and the mining company Suralco, surveyed wildlife in a series of plateaus in the Nassau Mountains, in the northeastern part of the country. Mol participated in that expedition and found, among other things, that the streams running down the steep mountainsides were home to a surprising diversity of fish, including six species new to science and a rare catfish (Harttiella crassicauda) found only in the headwaters of Paramacca Creek. Other specialists discovered a rich diversity of other wildlife, including a spectacularly colorful purple frog subspecies endemic to the area.

The final report of that expedition recommended the creation of a nature park on the Nassau Plateau to protect the unique Paramacca Creek watershed. In the report, Suralco said that it “endorses the concept of conservation of biodiversity by operating in a manner that minimizes impacts on natural habitats and biological resources.” Mol vividly recalls that, at the press conference announcing the expedition results, Suralco’s general manager, Warren Pedersen, appeared to announce “that the bauxite of Nassau Mountains could stay where it is.”

But ever since, according to Mol, Suralco has indicated its continued interest in mining the Nassau Plateau—most recently last month in a local newspaper. Alcoa’s director of corporate affairs confirmed to TakePart, “A feasibility study relating to the development of a mine at the Nassau Plateau is in progress.” Working with environmental consultants, the company has developed what another source describes as elaborate plans to work around sensitive areas and minimize damage. But Mol argues that the area is too small for even the best-planned project and that the loss of forest cover, and the removal of the bauxite “sponge,” will destroy the hydrology of the area, intermittently drying out Paramacca Creek. The extinction of the two endemic fish species, and perhaps also the frog subspecies, would be forever.

Mol makes the point that piranhas are sensational and attract headlines. But the more important stories pass quietly beneath the surface, and they have to do with the steady, grinding power of development—rooted in our casual but seemingly endless demand for a can of soda, a take-out container from the lunch place, or yet another roll of aluminum foil—to overwhelm efforts at conservation. The only way to stop mining in the Nassau Mountains for good, says Mol, is to reach American consumers and put pressure directly on Suralco’s American parent, Alcoa.

Meanwhile, recommendations for a nature park in the Nassau Mountains have gone nowhere.

Should We Test a Vaccine for Wild Chimps on Captive Ones?

(Photo: Guenter Guni/Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

Let’s say you have a technology that could save chimpanzee and gorilla species, our closest primate kin, from the almost certain prospect of extinction in the wild. But to make it work, you must first do biomedical testing on captive chimpanzees, a practice that has been denounced as cruel and largely unnecessary by the revered primatologist Jane Goodall and many others.

That’s the ethical dilemma posed by a study appearing today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It notes that outbreaks of the Ebola virus “have killed roughly one-third of the world gorilla population,” leading in 2007 to the listing of western gorillas as critically endangered. It also reports the results of the first experiment to vaccinate captive chimpanzees against this notorious disease.

While the immediate focus is on Ebola, the coauthors, led by University of Cambridge population biologist Peter D. Walsh, suggest that the study sets a precedent. Effective human vaccines often languish because drug companies cannot justify the huge expense of doing proper trials to bring them to market, especially when they treat conditions found only in impoverished regions. Hence the Ebola vaccine in the study remains unavailable for human use. But “our study demonstrates that it is feasible,” the coauthors write, “even for modestly funded ape conservationists to adapt such orphan vaccines as conservation tools by confirming their safety and immunogenicity using trials on captive chimpanzees.”

Orphan vaccines could protect chimpanzee and gorilla populations not just from Ebola, they suggest, but also from the respiratory viruses that commonly spill over from field researchers and tourists, as well as from SIV (simian HIV), malaria, and other deadly afflictions. But only, Walsh argued in an interview, if they can be properly tested first in captive chimpanzees.

Walsh worked for many years in West Africa, at a time when Ebola was killing many of the chimpanzees and gorillas he and other researchers were studying. Eradicating the disease isn’t possible, because it has a natural “reservoir host” in fruit bats. But Walsh noticed “the wavelike spread of infection” moving predictably across populations and realized that it might be possible to contain an epidemic. “You figure out where it’s going to show up,” he theorized, “and you go ahead of it” with one of the Ebola vaccines that have already been tested in captive macaque monkeys. Vaccinating apes has the advantage of being relatively easy compared with ending logging or the commercial bush meat trade. Vaccinate chimps and gorillas—as Goodall famously did when polio spread to the population she was studying in the 1960s—and “you knock off one big part of the extinction equation with this one fix,” Walsh maintains.

Yet even as ape populations were being decimated, Wash was unable to convince major conservation groups to act. “Invasive medical management is like the third rail of wildlife conservation,” he explained. He argued that this scruple was out of date when epidemic disease was piling onto bush meat hunting and habitat destruction to drive great apes toward extinction in the wild. Finally, representatives of Seattle billionaire Paul G. Allen “heard my ranting” and put up the money to test the idea.

Because park managers, veterinarians, and others expressed concerns about using live vaccines in the wild, the study team chose to work with a novel vaccine technology, a virus-like particle, or VLP. It’s basically a fragment from the exterior of the virus, just enough to elicit an immune system response but not to cause an infection. The researchers tested the vaccine in two different formulations on a half-dozen captive chimps at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana. Following vaccination, the chimps all developed a robust immune response without apparent side effects.

For obvious reasons, the researchers did not go on to test the effectiveness of the vaccine by exposing the chimps to Ebola. Instead, they transferred immune properties from the chimps to experimental mice. All unprotected mice died on being exposed to Ebola. But of those receiving immune products from the more successful vaccine formulation, 60 percent survived. The research team has gone on to test the vaccine in a field study on gorillas in Africa; those results have not yet been published.

The coauthors of the current study go out of their way to make a political statement about biomedical testing. “To our knowledge, our study was the first conservation-related vaccine trial on captive chimpanzees,” they write. “It may be the last. U.S. government policy is now headed toward an end to biomedical testing on captive chimpanzees in the United States, the only developed country to allow such research.” If that happens, they warn, “there will be nowhere left to do conservation-related trials on chimpanzees. Thus in an effort to pay back an ethical debt to captive chimpanzees, the U.S. Government is poised to renege on an even larger debt to wild chimpanzees,” including the ones “that will die from viruses transmitted by American tourists and researchers.”

They argue for establishment of “a humanely housed captive chimpanzee population specifically dedicated to conservation research, with funding at a level comparable to the tens of millions of dollars the U.S. Congress has already allocated to house ‘retired’ research chimpanzees.” There’s precedent for such an effort: Four decades ago, Goodall was closely involved with the development, design, and operation of the Stanford Outdoor Primate Facility, a research enclosure dedicated to chimp conservation.

Asked to comment, Kathleen Conlee, vice president for animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States, cited government reports that chimpanzees are largely unnecessary for biomedical research. When the Humane Society ran a 2009 undercover investigation of the New Iberia facility, she said, it found that only about 20 of 240 captive chimpanzees were involved in research studies. The rest “were simply being warehoused. We would argue,” she added, “that you don’t need captive chimpanzees in U.S. laboratories” for the kind of experiments in the new study. “We have said that there could be the possibility of doing this study in the wild, or in sanctuaries in Africa that have chimpanzees that need protection from Ebola because they have exposure.”

Walsh countered that government officials in Africa would never allow experimentation with untested drugs on animals in the wild.

“I will never be able to test these vaccines,” he added, “if they shut down the labs.” Without that kind of direct attack on disease, he asserts, apes and gorillas could become extinct in the wild. “They’ll exist in zoos and wild populations that are effectively zoos, but they won’t be out there operating as part of the wildlife community.”

It comes down to a choice between individual rights and species survival, he said. Do we accept the ethical compromise of requiring a few individual chimpanzees to pass their lives in captivity to save entire species? Or do we stand on ethical purity and risk letting gorillas and chimpanzees vanish forever from the wild?