I was recently reading an excellent book, Physical Activity and Obesity (2000), edited by Claude Bouchard of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisians State University, and wanted to include some excerpts here. The book is a collection of essays by experts in exercise science and sports medicine. From it I’ve gathered that as a society we’ve underestimated the role that lack of physical activity plays in our current obesity epidemic. Instead, we’ve tended to focus on our food intake.

“The war on muscular work has been a remarkable success,” Bouchard comments (p. 14). But that success comes at with significant costs. Here is an excerpt from Mr. Bouchard’s introduction:

Even though individuals bear responsibility for maintaing healthy weights, national surveys in developed countries and the compendium of data around the world by the International Obesity Task Force indicate that programs with a focus on individuals are not enough…. What is needed is a series of major policies aimed at transforming our environment and the way we live. Indeed, nothing short of a paradigm shift has any chance of success in the efforts to curtail the increase in the number of people who are chronically in positive energy balance. City planning, building codes, mass transit systems, car use, safe footpaths and cycling paths, pedestrian-only city centers, school schedules and programs, and the media are among the areas that will require transformations if we are to attenuate the impact of the current “obesogenic” environment.

The challenge is enormous. Evolution has endowed humans with complex regulatory systems of appetite and satiety as well as with physiological and metabolic characteristics determining basal metabolic rates and food- or cold-induced thermogenesis. The recent past in affluent societies reveals that these biological systems cannot cope well in an environment in which palatable foods are abundant and energy expenditure of activity is low. In particular, the lesson from the last decades is that it seems to be extremely difficult and perhaps impossible for a large fraction of sedentary individuals to regulate food and caloric intake to be in balance at low levels of daily energy expenditure. The energy expenditure from physical activity is thus too low for most people to be able to eat normally without having to be on caloric restriction diets from time to time or having to be constantly restraining their food intake. It has been estimated that the current deficit of energy expenditure from physical activity compared to that of the recent past ranges from about 300 to 800 kcal/day. If this range of estimates is close to the true values, it implies that adults would have to add one to three hours of brisk walking every day to their current daily regimen to be in energy balance at a normal body weight level. This is a major public health challenge indeed! (15-16)

Another essay in the book – “The Cost of Obesity and Sedentarism in the United States,” by Graham A. Colditz and Anna Mariani, addresses the tremendous health-related costs associated with lack of physical activity:

The sum of obesity (7% of health care costs) and of inactivity (2.4% of health care costs) is here used to estimate the total direct costs of inactivity. Overall, a minimum of 9.4% of all direct costs incurred in delivering health care in the U.S. is attributable to insufficient energy expenditure…. Note that these are conservative estimates. (60-61)

Note also that these latter numbers do not include indirect costs such as lowered worker productivity

My wife and I attended the 21st Annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum at St. Olaf College last Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14. In an arrangement with the Norwegian body that grants the prize, the forums are held at a group of Minnesota and Iowa colleges founded by Norwegian settlers. Since the 2007 Peace Prize was given to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the topic was, of course, climate change. Fortunately for me, the location for this year was St. Olaf.

It was a wonderful and inpsiring conference, and I wanted to share with you the two sessions that stood out the most for me:

The first was the opening keynote address by Dr. Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University. He gave an excellent and entertaining lecture about the scientific understanding of climate change. He also explained the process that the IPCC uses in making its reports, and in the question-and-answer session he made some informative comments about climate change skeptics, among other things (the questioner had asked about George Will and his views on climate change). I recommend watching the video of his talk. It’s worth the investment of time. (Alley starts at around 32 minutes into the video.)

The other particularly inspiring session was a presentation by college and high school students about their work on climate change. This gave me great hope for the future. The youth are taking action: forming groups, lobbying politicians, organizing their fellow youth, getting people to do energy audits, and more. Many of the students had just attended PowerShift, the big climate change student conference in Washington, D.C. the week before. Timoth Den Herder-Thomas of Macalester College was especially impressive in his comments, and he told about the upcoming Summer of Solutions event, in which youth will work on grassroots project related to climate change and also potentially lay the groundwork for careers in this burgeoning field. There is so much to do, and we need their leadership. Now the older folks just need to get out of the way.

I recommend Thomas L. Friedman’s recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America. Friedman has done his homework for this book, talking with dozens of scientists, business leaders, policy analysts, and environmentalists. He argues that we face five major problems that have reached a crisis point today. As he writes, “The convergence of global warming, global flattening, and global crowding is driving those five big problems – energy supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, energy poverty, and biodiversity loss – well past their tipping points into new realms we’ve never seen before, as a planet or as a species” (p. 37).

Friedman deserves special praise for highlighting the problems of biodiversity loss, or the extinction of species. Based on my reading of science sources over my years of doing test development work, this is a problem that our leaders have not dealt with effectively, and it is being accelerated by climate change.

The strengths of this book are its detail and its wide-ranging inquiry. It does have some weaknesses: Friedman’s tendency to personalize his analysis, as when we learn about his many visits with the global elite at posh spots throughout the world; occasional overly specific detail, as in the section on the future “Energy Internet” or “smart grid”; and his nearly exclusive focus on technological and business-oriented solutions, a focus that many environmentalists criticize.

I did appreciate the fact that he calls for the development of an “ethic of conservation,” even if he has doubts about whether major lifestyle changes are required in the new “energy-climate era.” Here is an excerpt related to this issue:

To become good stewards and good trustees, [according to MIchael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard], “we will need to rein in our tendency to regard the earth and its natural resources as wholly at our disposal for present needs, wants, and desires. We have to develop new habits and attitudes towards consumption.”

Otherwise, whatever technologies we devise will simply be used to extend our current habits of profligate consumption to the huge, burgeoning middle classes of a hot, flat, and crowded world…. Does [this] mean that we, as individuals, have to edit our lifestyles down to a bare minimum, or get by with much less than the average American upper- or middle-class family consumes today? There is an anticapitalist, anticonsumerist, back-to-nature wing of the environmental movement that believes we should and almost delights in advocating that. By the way, that may be right, and should not be dismissed. My point is that we don’t know yet, because we have not tried even the obvious stuff that we do know would have real effects and would not involve fundamental changes in our lifestyle.

Telling every individual on the planet who wants or can afford a car that they cannot have one would be changing our lifestyle. But banning cars over a certain weight or engine size, or bringing maximum speed limits back down to 55 miles per hour, or banning taxis that are not hybrids – such efforts do not strike me as fundamentally cramping anyone’s lifestyle…. Forcing everyone to ride a bike to work would involve changing our lifestyle. But requiring municipalities to set aside bike lanes running from suburbs to inner cities doesn’t strike me as cramping anyone’s lifestyle (and might make our whole society healthier). [And Friedman goes through a list of many other examples] (pp. 192-193)

Two Minnesota organizations have released an important document, the Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan. Created by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), the new plan makes policy and research recommendations that are intended to preserve the state’s natural resources in the face of increasing demands and impacts from our society, including climate change. Carbon emission reductions are one of the important goals of the plan.

I haven’t yet had time to do more than a cursory reading of the report’s executive summary and its transportation chapter. Here are a few excerpts from the executive summary:

The Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) funded a unique partnership among the University of Minnesota and the consulting firms of Bonestroo and CR Planning to evaluate the state’s natural resources, identify key issues affecting those resources, and make recommendations for improving and protecting them. More than 125 experts, including University scientists and public and private natural resource planners and professionals, participated in the 18-month effort. …

• The key issues for which recommendations are made in this report are:
• Land and water habitat fragmentation, degradation, loss, and conversion
• Land-use practices
• Transportation
• Energy production and use, and mercury as a toxic contaminant related to energy production

Here are the three recommendations from the Transportation chapter:

• Transportation Recommendation 1: Align transportation planning across state agencies and integrate transportation project development and review across state, regional, metropolitan and county/local transportation, land use and conservation programs.
• Transportation Recommendation 2: Reduce per capita vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through compact mixed-use development and multi- and intermodal transportation systems.
• Transportation Recommendation 3: Develop and implement sustainable transportation research, design, planning, and construction practices, regulations, and competitive incentive funding that minimize impacts on natural resources, especially habitat fragmentation and non-point source water pollution.

The report clearly deserves closer reading and the attention of state leaders. Note especially the involvement of leading state scientists and planners.

For more information, see the official press release and a Star Tribune article.

While any hope for a federal response to climate change this year died today in the U.S. Senate, I’m at least somewhat encouraged by the fact that my wife has located another resource that catalogs the many claims made by climate change skeptics and offers responses to each. It’s in Grist, the environmental news and commentary web site that’s based in Seattle, and it’s titled “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.” I don’t know what you’re community is like, but mine has plenty of skeptics, and I need all the help I can get.

I’m not a regular reader of Grist, though my wife is. They take a lighter approach to environmental issues – lighter than yours truly, for example. I like their slogan: “Grist: it’s gloom and doom with a sense of humor. So laugh now – or the planet gets it.”

See also their commentary on the carbon footprint of biking versus driving, in which they run some of the numbers and, as commonsense would indicate, find that biking comes out ahead.

Earlier this month the Minnesota Climate Change Advisory Group (MCCAG) released its final report. This group of over 50 stakeholders was formed by Governor Tim Pawlenty to assist in developing a Minnesota Climate Mitigation Action Plan (that’s a lot of capital letters). It has some impressive names on it, including Will Steger, the polar explorer and climate change activist; Prof. David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, one of the most esteemed biologists in the world; and J. Drake Hamilton of Fresh Energy, whom I heard recently give an excellent speech on climate change and our response to it. The group also has many other prominent figures representing business, labor, churches, environmental organizations, and other groups.

I’ve read the executive summary and Chapter 5: Transportation and Land Use and was encouraged by what I found. The group has outlined policies for achieving a nearly 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025 (with 2005 being the base year), and most of the recommendations were approved unanimously.

The public can now enter comments about the report online (deadline is midnight on Sunday, April 27), and I encourage people to do so. At the very least, you can read the executive summary before doing so, though it is not all that short at 16 pages.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me whether the report claimed that enacting the policies would provide a net savings to the state and its people. It seems the policies would save the public money rather than cost them money, judging by the discussion on page 6 of the executive summary. The report does attempt to quantify the cost of various policies. The most cost-effective measure, for example, is improved statewide building codes; that’s the no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry »

In its December 2007 issue, Scientific American Body published one of the best articles I’ve read on the topic of the relationship between the “built environment” – our roads, buildings, etc. – and our health. The article, by Kathryn Brown, presents some of the relevant statistics; describes efforts by “built-environment advocates” in communities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Columbia, Missouri; and examines the scientific debate on how best to build communities that foster physical activity.

I was especially interested in the paragraphs below (emphasis added), which describe research that shows the positive influence of densely populated, mixed-use communities on physical activity. (Mixed-use communities mix different land uses together – residential, commercial, recreational, public, etc. – to give people shorter distances between different destinations.) Just to show that I’m interested in an open inquiry, I’ve included the author’s brief discussion of a Heritage Foundation editorial that questions the role of the built environment in determining a condition such as obesity. Read the rest of this entry »

An excellent article in the January/February issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine looks at the contributions of University of Minnesota researchers to biofuels research. Writer David Rotman interviewed Vernon Eidman, Stephen Polasky, C. Ford Runge, and David Tilman, U of M faculty members who have examined the economics and ecology of biofuels. “There may be no better place to get a realistic appraisal of biofuels than the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota,” Rotman writes (p. 2).

The article expands beyond this Minnesota connection to look at the work of other researchers and venture capitalists such as Vinod Khosla. It examines future biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol and novel hydrocarbons. The latter would most likely be created by “superbugs,” yet-to-be-discovered or -engineered microbes that would break down feedstocks into hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons would have more energy per unit than ethanol.

Reading about such genetic engineering, my mind always wanders to uncomfortable thoughts about superbugs that have unintended consequences. Should I be so worried?

This past year turned out to be a record-breaker for Arctic warming, according to scientists quoted in an article by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press science writer. The portents are not good and should embolden us to act more aggressively to curb carbon emissions.

Below are some excerpts from the article. Warning: some of the quotes from the scientists are among the most alarming that I’ve seen on the climate change issue.

Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

“The Arctic is screaming,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government’s snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I read an article in the StarTribune about today being Blog Action Day, during which all bloggers are invited to address a common issue of concern – in this case, the environment. That topic comes up regularly in this blog, and I had already planned on addressing one aspect of it.

I was pleased that the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to the scientists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore for their work on global warming. During the past year I’ve commented about the most recent IPCC reports (see posts on February 26, May 4, and May 11), which predict disastrous consequences if humanity does not take steps to mitigate global warming. Fortunately, we’re seeing more action on this issue every day. Read the rest of this entry »