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RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR EPISODE 102: Denis Hayes, Nicholas Kachman
February 27, 2016
Renowned environmentalist, Denis Hayes, talks to us about how we should reduce our meat consumption for the good of the planet, while former General Motors exec, Nicholas Kachman, tells us the real cause of GM’s 2008 bankruptcy and also discusses with Ralph how GM should have been a good corporate citizen and warned the people of Flint about the lead in the water. Plus, Ralph grills David about – of all things – music.
Denis Hayes
Denis Hayes helped launch the modern environmental movement as national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970. Mr. Hayes has been the president of an environmental foundation , an environmental attorney, professor of engineering at Stanford, a grassroots organizer, a national environmental lobbyist, and a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute. And that’s just a small sampling of his credits in this field. “Time” magazine selected him as one of its 100 “Heroes for the Planet.” His latest work, written with Gail Boyer Hayes, is Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics and Culture.
Nick Kachman
Nicholas Kachman was an executive at GM from 1957 to 1993, mainly working as a corporate environmental engineer. When General Motors filed for bankruptcy in 2008, there were a lot of excuses given and a lot of fingers pointed at the usual suspects: overwhelming healthcare costs, unreasonable union demands, too much government regulation, and poorly designed cars. Mr. Kachman points to an entirely different reason for the 2008 bankruptcy that led to an enormous taxpayer bailout. He focuses on a long-term strategic decision by corporate management that turned into a financial debacle that still burdens the company today. That decision was called “The Paint Plan.” His book is entitled GM – Paint It Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure.
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RALPH NADER RADIO HOUR EP 102: Denis Hayes; Nicholas Kachman, Russell Mohkiber
ANNOUNCER: From the KPFK studios in Southern California, it’s the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
STEVE SKROVAN: Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Skrovan, with my cohost, David Feldman. Hello, David. How are you?
DAVID FELDMAN: This is going to be a really interesting show. Really interesting.
STEVE SKROVAN: And the man of the hour, the reason we’re all here, Ralph Nader. Hello, Ralph.
RALPH NADER: Hello Steve and David. Yes, it is going to be a very unique show.
STEVE SKROVAN: And I understand you have a new segment you want to spring on us later in the show.
RALPH NADER: Yeah, I’m going to ask exactly the obvious question that’s never asked, and you don’t know what it is, Steve or David, but we’ll take it from there.
STEVE SKROVAN: That’s correct, OK. But before we do that, I just want to say we could entitle today’s show, Cars and Cows, because that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. In the second half of the show, we’re going to be discussing Ralph’s favorite nemesis, General Motors, the company that never learns, apparently. Author Nicholas Kachman’s expose of the hundred billion dollar boondoggle behind the GM bankruptcy is called GM – Paint It Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure. And this is inside, behind the scenes stuff that nobody really knows about, and that’s why you listen to this show. We’ll also be checking in as usual with Russell Mohkiber, the Ellery Queen of the corporate crime beat. But before we get to that, we’ve had a number of listener questions recently, ones that we actually haven’t gotten to yet. These listeners want to know about animal, agriculture, meat consumption and the hazards these activities may pose to our environment. And if you’ve written to us about that, listen closely, because our next guest may have some answers for you. David?
DAVID FELDMAN: Steve, this is our what, 102nd show?
STEVE SKROVAN: That is correct, sir.
DAVID FELDMAN: And did you ever think you and I could have the moral high ground above Ralph Nader?
STEVE SKROVAN: I did not.
DAVID FELDMAN: Are you a vegetarian, Steve Skrovan?
STEVE SKROVAN: I am a vegetarian, yes.
DAVID FELDMAN: Uh huh. Am I a vegetarian?
STEVE SKROVAN: You are a vegetarian, yes.
DAVID FELDMAN: Our guest today is Denis Hayes. He, along with Gail Boyer Hayes has written a book entitled, “Cowed: The Hidden Impact of 93 Million Cows on America’s Health, Economy, Politics and Culture.” Time Magazine selected him as one of its one hundred heroes for the planet. Denis Hayes helped launch the modern environmental movement as National Coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970. Mr. Hayes has been the president of an environmental foundation, an environmental attorney, Professor of Engineering at Stanford, a grassroots organizer, a national environmental lobbyist, and a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute. Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Denis Hayes.
DENIS HAYES: Well, I’m just delighted to be here.
RALPH NADER: Thank you, Denis. I first met Denis in 1970 after Senator Gaylord Nelson and others proposed Earth Day, and Denis was the main honcho, a tall, lanky, earnest young man who exuded seriousness and had considerable managerial skills. I remember that, Denis. There were fifteen hundred events at fifteen hundred campuses for starters, and as you remember, the Earth Day event made the cover of Time and Newsweek, which was a bigger deal then than now, and put the environmental issue on the map, from which it has never receded. So let’s get to this book that you all wrote. Can you just lay out for our listeners, who are oriented to be active, not just to be informed, the thesis of the book?
DENIS HAYES: Well, the thesis is that we really underestimate the impact of cows on the United States. In fact, we did this little informal poll where we would ask people, other than human beings, what are the most important animals in the United States? And people would say dogs and cats and horses. It just, things that made no sense at all. If you look at the 93 million cows, from the founding of the colonies in North America on through to today, they would be United Van Lines for western expansion, Paul Bunyan had Babe the Blue Ox. In a very un-environmental way, they clearcut all of the forests around the Great Lakes. They plowed our fields, provided milk, provided meat, provided leather, provided all kinds of things. Massive impacts upon our culture and economy, and are pretty much underappreciated. And in the process of that, I guess - and this is awfully long for a thesis - we have been treating them abysmally in vast confined animal feeding operations where they are surrounded by disease and just treated brutally like cogs in a vast industrial machine. Our hope is to create basically a consumer movement around - vegetarian would be fabulous, but America’s vegetarians now are less than five percent of the population. The other 95 percent, if they could really reduce their beef consumption by 50 percent, causing that herd to go down to like 45 million, entirely grass fed, grass finished and organic, it would solve a vast array of environmental problems, boost human health, and make the economy more prosperous.
RALPH NADER: Denis, I don’t think people would be surprised to learn that there are more cows in the U.S. than domesticated dogs. And of course, more cows than domesticated cats.
DENIS HAYES: If you do it pound for pound, there’s very substantially more cow than people. We have more cow than humans.
RALPH NADER: What’s the average weight of an adult cow?
DENIS HAYES: Well, it depends on the breed, but anywhere from 1,200 pounds to 16, 1,700 pounds.
RALPH NADER: There you are. The interesting thing about the way we view cows is with massive urbanization, people grow up knowing very little about cows. I mean, they know that cows - when they drive by cow country - seem to always have their heads downward, eating whatever they can eat and that they moo, and they’re popular in children’s animal books. But now that we are much more aware of the environmental impact of cows - granted their history as you narrated - they were extremely important in the development of what is now called the United States and its economy in many ways. Give us a thumbnail sketch of the environmental impact of cows such as methane and other ways they are inadvertently damaging our ecology at a very serious level. And this occurs worldwide.
DENIS HAYES: Sure. In fact, one of the things that caused us to write the book is when we were young and we would drive through what you characterized as cow country, you saw cows. By and large today, Americans can go on for months and months without ever seeing a cow, because they tend to be off in remote areas in gigantic facilities that have an enormous amount of odor, and they’re pretty ugly to look at, and so they are placed where we don’t encounter cows except in idealized renderings on the outsides of milk cartons and things. The environmental problems associated with them can go throughout the entire cow’s life, from a vast amount of the American Midwest that is devoted to growing number two dent corn for cows, an absolutely terrible food for cows. It’s like putting your children on a 100 percent diet of Halloween candy. And the whole purpose is to fatten them up, because fat beef is the highest rated beef by the Department of Agriculture called “marbled.” That’s from fattening, but that’s what it is on through. Those feedlots have to do something with all of the manure that they generate. And by and large, it is the largest really uncontrolled source of water pollution in the United States, bigger than the amount of human excretive that goes through sewage treatment facilities. And these CAFOs, it’s disrupting to what is poetically called a lagoon. But this is not a tropical South Sea island lagoon, this is an absolutely horrible pit full of cow excretive. And almost all of them eventually leak down into the groundwater. As the poop in the lagoons is digested anaerobically by little microorganisms, it gives off methane, and also the same microorganisms in the cow’s guts give off methane that it releases in a series of belches. And methane is, of course, a hugely powerful greenhouse gas. So the cattle industry has its own negative impacts upon the world’s climate. At the same time, cows are pretty destructive of the soil, the way that we are currently grass feeding them. I mean, there are wonderful ways that have been pioneered by a lot of good people that we write about in the book dealing with intensive locational grazing, which actually increases carbon sequestration and makes the soils much healthier and makes the cows much healthier. But we have an awful lot of people on land that should not be supporting cows, and what it’s doing is causing massive corrosion and then the erosion, the carbon that has been sequestered in the soil is released into the atmosphere.
RALPH NADER: How does this compare to pigs, the damage of, you know, tens of millions of pigs? Did you ever go into that area?
DENIS HAYES: You know, that’s a really interesting question. And when one talks about meat, one shouldn’t ignore pigs and chickens and fish and what have you. But you have reached outside the zone in which I can comment comfortably. I haven’t done a comparative analysis of the pigs versus cows.
RALPH NADER: It does seem, however, that they both have one thing in common, that is, industrial agriculture. That is, they’re kept in very, very close confinement. Give us a description of what life is like for a cow in close confinement, if you could. Because this is an area where empathy really is needed. And you know, when you talk about the way pigs are confined, they can hardly turn around. They literally can hardly turn around, they’re packed so tightly together. Give me a description of cows, and then describe the slaughtering process.
DENIS HAYES: OK. Cows typically are able to turn around. They are not as tightly confined as often chickens are and pigs are, but they are in very unsanitary conditions, often up to their hocks in manure. And they don’t have the ability to go out and do what their ancestors biologically were programmed to do, which is get out and roam over the fields and eat grass. They are in these operations where there’s very little exercise. The whole purpose of it is to fatten them. They are fed prophylactically antibiotics, because there’s so much disease there that they’re trying to make sure that they don’t catch, so they give it to them before they’re sick. But antibiotics for cows, as well as for people, make you fat. So giving them the antibiotics is part of the fattening process. Technically, it’s now illegal to give them antibiotics to fatten them, so everybody says well, we’re giving them to them prophylactically so they can avoid the diseases, but the impact is still the same. And those antibiotics are creating a huge number of antibiotic resistant diseases. Eighty percent of antibiotics are now given prophylactically to farm animals, principally cows, and as a result a lot of things that infect people are not responding to antibiotics anymore.
RALPH NADER: Do you know roughly how much of the antibiotics that people ingest, first through prescriptions but also indirectly by eating beef, for example, is there any data on that, Denis? We’re talking to Denis Hayes now, the author, with his spouse, of a terrific book on cows, the history of cows and the present impact of cows on our environment and on our diet. How about the absorptive capacity of people from eating beef that comes from cows that have been heavily fed, perhaps daily, prophylactically as you said, it’s right in their meal, these antibiotics?
DENIS HAYES: The really big danger is the creation of the antibiotic resistant microorganisms that then get passed from the cows to the people. It’s less of a problem that the antibiotics being in the meat and then being ingested by people. But the problem is just enormous. In the course of researching the book, interestingly, completely unrelated to the research, I contracted MRSA. I had this infection in my arm that just started getting - you know first - the size of a ping pong ball and then a golf ball and then a hardball. And we used an antibiotic. It didn’t work. Another one: didn’t work. Another one: it didn’t work. Another one: it didn’t work. It was my sixth antibiotic that finally cured the disease. By the time that got there, I was starting to get pretty damned concerned. I think there is a very real chance that one of the plagues that is coming toward us in the future will be a completely antibiotic resistant bacterium that could have catastrophic consequences for people. And the thing behind all of that will have been our vast abusive use of antibiotics with livestock.
RALPH NADER: Well, if anybody thinks, in our listening audience, that this is a generalization, the medical literature estimates that at least 100,000 people a year in the United States, that’s 2,000 a week on the average, die from the adverse effects of drugs. And a good part of that is an overdose by doctors’ prescriptions and often patient demand of antibiotics, when they’re not even needed. I mean people have colds, if they have viruses as a source of their colds, antibiotics do nothing for them. It’s only if their cold is bacteria-based. So we’re talking here about extremely serious things that are now occurring, that have occurred in the recent decades, not something that’s totally looming on the horizon.
DENIS HAYES: Commenting on the two topics of your program here, cows and cars, if you look at the trend lines, in very large measure because of the good work that you have been doing for so many decades, cars are getting safer than they were when you started out, and the number of deaths are going down. With antibiotics, it’s going exactly the opposite direction. The number of deaths are going up every year from antibiotic resistant diseases. There are now about half as many people die from an antibiotic resistant disease per year in the United States as cars, and that increases about 2,000 people a year, even as the decrease in cars is about, did I say thousand? Million. No, thousand. Excuse me. So those trend lines are going to be converging unless something changes in the next ten, twelve years, and we’re going to be losing more people to antibiotic resistant diseases.
RALPH NADER: This is a responsibility of the medical profession. They’ve got to get much tougher and don’t say, “Well, the patients come in and they demand, ‘give me an antibiotic, doc.’” That’s not good enough. We’ve known about this problem of antibiotic resistance for over fifty years, and the Food & Drug Administration is finally beginning to do something about it in restricting the amount of antibiotics used. Some processing plants and companies, tell us about that. It seems to be in the last couple years, Denis Hayes, some of these big processing companies are beginning to curtail the use of preventive antibiotics in the food that they feed the chickens and cows. Could you tell us something about that?
DENIS HAYES: Well, it’s coming from the grassroots. There is an increasing awareness on the part of people that the way that our agricultural system has evolved - especially over the last 25, 30 years toward increasing gigantism and concentration of power - is not producing food that is good for us. And so you see this huge movement now toward vegetarianism, toward organic products. Initially, the organic stuff was out there mostly because that was going to be good for the environment, but now we’re learning that organic food after organic food is better for us health-wise. I don’t know if you noticed, a couple weeks ago a big study showed that organic milk had 50 percent more, on average, beneficial Omega 3 fatty acids than non-organic milk. And so all of this stuff is coming up that’s affecting major food chains that are now demanding that their meats, among other things, be organic. And if you are organic, you are antibiotic free. And it’s just bubbling up. One of the great tragedies in all of this was that set of things that hit Chipotle, because it was the prime example of a restaurant that was trying to do everything right and was a huge economic success story.
RALPH NADER: Yes. And there are others that are now waking up to it. Because they know it’s good business, right?
DENIS HAYES: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not just the little elite Whole Foods. I mean, we’re seeing this in Costco, you’re even seeing it in Walmart and Safeway. They’re catering to the demands of the public. And to the extent that programs like this cause people - I mean we have this tendency, and you and I are as guilty of it as anyone - to think that the real answers to many problems are to change politics and move public policy. But we’ve been fighting on the Farm Bill now for 50 years and making relatively little progress. Whereas, this grassroots thing - operating very much like the demands for seatbelts, the demands for getting rid of smoking, the demands for all of these things that have changed because the public absolutely required it - is having that impact on our food system as well.
RALPH NADER: That’s right. When we roused the non-smokers in this country, things started to happen in all kinds of directions, and ended up with what was considered unthinkable, having the Congress give the Food & Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco.
DENIS HAYES: It would have been unbelievably rude for my mother not only to ask somebody not to smoke in her house, but to not provide cigarettes and ashtrays on every table.
RALPH NADER: That’s right.
DENIS HAYES: And it’s just a sea change that came. And we’re really asking for people to do the same thing, even to become a little bit obnoxious. If you’re in a restaurant, and they’re offering you beef and you’re a beef-eater, start pursuing it. Find out if it’s organic. Find out if it’s grass finished, not just grass fed. All beef is grass fed at some point in its life, and then grain finished. But if it’s grass finished. Find five or six questions: find out who the ranchers were that they’re getting their meat from and how they know that. Ask if it’s been certified for having been humanely treated by one of the better certification agencies. And if you make those kinds of demands, sooner or later the chefs start responding to that as do the grocery stores.
RALPH NADER: Exactly. It’s called inquiring consumer conversation where they go to buy things. And nobody can stop you from doing that, for heaven’s sake.
STEVE SKROVAN: Well, Mr. Hayes, I’m sorry Ralph.
RALPH NADER: Yeah, go ahead.
STEVE SKROVAN: With that in mind, and knowing all the damage this causes and knowing how personal food is to everybody, how can we morally justify eating meat at all?
DENIS HAYES: Well, that is a terrific question. We evolved as a species eating meat. There’s a fairly well developed literature that says that the human brain developed the way that it did because of the abundance of protein-rich diets. Without weighing into that one way or the other, I think the moral aspects are things that people have different moralities. And we do not eat beef ourselves, but we’re not scorning those that choose to do it. But to eat it in a form that is unhealthy for you and unhealthy for your kids and is wildly destructive of the environment makes no sense at all. So if you are going to be eating beef, reducing it dramatically – the average American now eats a little bit more than a pound a week – if that could just go down to half a pound a week, and it is that stuff that we were just talking about: It is grass finished, it is organic, it’s antibiotic free, then suddenly you’ve sparked a revolution.
STEVE SKROVAN: But isn’t that like saying, “Well, smoke filtered cigarettes,” you know? Or “Cut down to just one pack a day.”
DENIS HAYES: Yeah, it’s a slightly different issue. I mean, with cigarettes you’re saying, “Yeah, and that really didn’t do anything for your health.” With the beef, we’re saying, “Yeah, this really will do something for your health.” There’s a different question though here, about the morality of your interaction with a sentient being that even in the best of circumstances is not treated super well, and at the end of its life is going to be turned into hamburger. And there are a great many people who - again, a small percentage, but still many, many millions of people - who say, “I just do not want to be part of that system.”
STEVE SKROVAN: Right.
RALPH NADER: Not only that, it’s just not healthy. I mean, the studies are starting to pile up that a heavy meat diet is just not good. It’s not good for your cardiovascular system. It’s not good because you’re getting involuntarily a drug prescription like antibiotic residue. And of course, when we got the meat and poultry inspection bill through in the late 60’s in Congress, there’s a lot of filth involved. There’s a lot of sanitation problems, all the way from the feed lots to the supermarkets. Try to give some light on this question. What kind of reactions did you get from the farmers? I mean, you have to feel sorry for the farmers. Dairy farmers are some of the hardest working people in the world, and they don’t make all that much money. And they are threatened with loss of their business. They already have problems in terms of competing with the big guys. What kind of reaction did this book get in farm country generally, Denis Hayes?
DENIS HAYES: Well, there certainly are some folks who have been hyper critical of it, who are - if you will - the Cliven Bundy school of animal agriculture. But what we did in the book, among other things, is profile a great many dairy farmers and cattle ranchers who are doing it right. And you’re right, it’s an awful lot of hard work. But if you do it right, you can make a good, solid middle class, upper middle class living in country where it’s really very good to raise children. People are healthy and robust. And we just got person after person after person that are exemplars of almost the American dream who are making a decent living there. The interesting thing is that the grass finished beef and the organic milk costs a bit more, but they’re worth a lot more. And so if we’re going to be, and one of the questions that comes up is well, this is all fine for the elitists, but what are you going to do about the average Joe? It turns out that if some percentage of your budget is going to be going for protein in your meals, we’re eating way too much of that right now. So if you cut your consumption in half or more, and you’re paying ten percent more for the amount that you have and it’s healthier for you and for your kids, then you’re spending less money on this than you were before and you’re healthier as a consequence. On the question of farmers, we do want to say that there are a great many of them that have become actually fairly close friends of ours, and who are doing everything right. One of the interesting little things on this is that we’ve, it’s almost ironic, you know, when you get to those big feedlots, the cows have tags on their ears with barcodes on them that they literally are processed like something that’s going through an industrial facility. The farmers that were doing it right, almost without exception, gave their cows names. And that seems to have done something really important in a nudging way that changes the relationship and has them treated better and producing better products.
RALPH NADER: And what about the growing taste for bison meat and expanding bison herds? Do you think they have the same damage as cows? They have less fat, I understand.
DENIS HAYES: Bison are absolutely fabulous animals, and we are enormous fans. I will confess a few times a year we do get some bison, and it’s a wonderful meat. It has great texture, very unique kinds of flavors. These are animals that lead pretty wild lives. You do not - bison hanging around in confined animal feedlot operations. There is, even with bison, and tend not to lace them with antibiotics, they are wild critters, incredibly strong and they’ve survived for a very long time with no human intervention in the ecological cycle. Whereas, if you were to take a typical dairy cow out to the farm gate, pat her on the haunches and say, “OK Elsie, you’re on your own,” she’s got a life expectancy measurable in hours. They can’t survive.
RALPH NADER: That’s true. But as you know, Ted Turner has “bison only” restaurants around the country. And the herds - which came close to extinction because of the late 19th century slaughter of the bison by the white man - they were down to about 200 animals at one time. And now they’re in the tens of thousands, are they not?
DENIS HAYES: They are, though a lot of those tens of thousands are hybrids of bison and cows, the so-called beefalo. But Ted has a lot of pure bison in his, a little tiny thing. He’s one of my heroes and I don’t want to say something that’s critical, but in our somewhat maybe purist view, we’d love to have bison as well across the board, and the stuff that we buy is grass finished. There’s a tendency on the part of Americans to want to have a uniform taste where you know what it is that you’re going to be getting. It’s the ultimate beef meal is Black Angus that has been fed for the last couple of years on corn. And you know exactly what that taste is going to be. Whereas with wild buffalo, it’s a little bit like hundreds of different varieties of wine with different soils and different waters and different climates. The taste is different and unique. With bison, the best of them are the ones that are grass finished there as well, as opposed to those that have, some of them are uniform taste because the last several months of their lives they’re fed a corn diet.
RALPH NADER: Denis, before we conclude, give a projection in the future. Where do you think we’re going to be in about 20, 30, 40 years in terms of the consumption of beef? And to what extent is the vegetarian movement making headway by saying you can get very good protein by eating vegetables? You don’t have to eat meat to get protein.
DENIS HAYES: Yeah well, none of us have got really terrific records of projecting 30, 40 years into the future. But if you look at current trend lines, vegetarianism is picking up more and more adherence. There’s stuff going on in laboratories that I find frankly a little bit unsettling, but it’s got a lot of money behind it to grow animal protein in laboratories where you’re culturing it as blocks and you’re feeding nutrients into it, but there are no cows, there’s nothing alive that has consciousness, so there is no animal cruelty. And for some people, that gets you past the moral dimensions of it. Whether that will actually catch on or not is pretty hard to determine, but there’s a lot of academic interest and money floating in that direction. My hunch is that genuine beef consumption from cattle that are out on the range will probably endure, maybe in perpetuity, but certainly for a very long time. It really is deeply embedded in American culture. But if we could do it the way that they did it in the 1940’s, it would be infinitely healthier for people, better for the environment, and vastly better for cows than with the vast agro-industrial complexes that are now treating it like industrial cogs.