Another socialist blog

NPR’s Marketplace did a story this morning about the rise of the urban farmer, which is just a cute way of saying, vegetable gardening. High food prices have encouraged a lot of people to grow their own tomatoes, for example. Stacey Vanek-Smith added up some costs to get into a small garden, and suggested that home gardeners might very well find themselves eating tomatoes that cost $64 each to raise. Bah. Here’s a comment I just sent to the producers of the show.

Stacey Vanek-Smith’s piece about tomato gardening was wrong even within the overly narrow confines of a strictly economic analysis of gardening.

1. Tomatoes are not a commodity. Anyone with tastebuds can appreciate the fact that the round red tomato-like objects at the grocery store don’t taste anything like a vine-ripened tomato. Commercial tomatoes are bred for their ability to withstand rough handling, not for flavor. They are harvested green and treated with ethylene gas to make them appear ripe. So even if home-grown tomatoes are more expensive than store-bought, who cares? It’s like telling me that home grown tomatoes are more expensive than paper towels.

2. Gardening improves both the soil, and the gardener. If Stacey sticks to her tomato project she’ll get exercise, fresh air, and a reminder that with patience comes reward. If her garden is organic, she will enrich a little plot of soil, improving its ability to hold carbon and rain water, among other benefits. It’s more than a retail transaction.

3. Stacey considered only the effect of the garden on Stacey, ignoring the value of her garden to the rest of us. If she grows her own, that’s less pesticides sprayed into the environment. Less fuel is consumed by tractors and tomato trucks, so less carbon dioxide and less demand pushing up my fuel prices. If the benefits to you and me don’t appear on Stacey’s bottom line, then the math is just wrong.

Nuclear power is losing some of the stink it acquired in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster and the Three Mile Island accident. This rehabilitation is undeserved.

Most people I talk to are unaware of the fact that nuclear plant operators enjoy a fat subsidy from the public. In a real free market they would have to buy liability insurance like every other power plant operator, indeed, like every other business. But this isn’t a free market and nuclear power gets a special break, courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act of 1957. Price-Anderson sets a ceiling on the total damages that the nuclear industry’s insurance pool must pay in the event of an accident. The current value of the pool is roughly $12 billion, which sounds like a lot unless you know that the potential damage from a catastrophic nuclear accident is 50 times that.

A 1982 Sandia National Laboratories study, leaked to Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), quantified the consequences of a catastrophic nuclear power accident in the U.S. Besides potentially causing thousands of early deaths and cancers, an accident could cause as much as $313 billion in damages, or about $600 billion today with inflation. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident has cost Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia an estimated $350 billion.

If you enjoyed paying for Hurricate Katrina relief, you’ll love getting the bill for the next nuclear disaster.

With all the talk about how George W. Bush is a failure and an incompetent, it’s nice to know that the Bush administration can still do something right: when you bribe them, you get your money’s worth every time.

Here’s a recent example: Cintas Corp., an industrial laundry company, was shown a proposed EPA rule before it was made public and was allowed to make changes to it. The rule was opposed by environmental groups, operators of hazardous waste landfulls, and others, none of whom were given the same access to the rulemaking process. The chairman of Cintas, Richard Farmer, just happens to have raised $250,000 for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign.

This Earth Day, educate your fellow citizens about food safety. The Center for Food Safety publishes the Food Safety Review, a series of papers on genetic engineering, bovine growth hormone, mad cow disease, and other topics of importance to your health.