Daily Archives: August 14, 2017

Farmers in the Mesilla Valley have started the annual chile harvest, and soon the sweet smell of roasted chiles will drift from Hatch, New Mexico, to El Paso and beyond.

You cant grow the same chiles in California, said Anita Rodriguez, a third-generation New Mexico farmer. You cant grow the same flavor because our climate is different, our land is different, the soil is different.

Demand for New Mexico chile stems from national interest in Hatch. The small town 40 miles north of Las Cruces has developed a reputation for producing some of the nations best chiles.

Some orders are small and some huge. This year, Austin-based restaurant chain Chuys plans to buy more than 3 million pounds of Hatch green chile. The chain opened its first El Paso location two years ago.

The green chile has amazing flavor. We are hearing good things from customers all over, said Chuys spokesperson Hilary Delling.

New Mexican chile production is not what it once was. In 1992, an estimated 34,500 acres of green chile was harvested in New Mexico. Farmers harvested 8,700 acres in 2016, according to the United States Department of Agriculture in New Mexico.

The decline in New Mexican chile production has been attributed to growing competition from outside industry and shortages in labor and water.

This year, farmers hope to match or slightly exceed last years crop. Heavy rain showers in late June and early July lifted hopes. More acres were planted this year to meet higher demands, according to the New Mexico Agriculture Department.

Chuys, a publicly traded company, has taken New Mexico chile season and the Hatch name nationwide, distributing chilies to its more than 80 restaurants throughout the United States, as far Washington D.C.

While they might not produce millions of pounds of chile, smaller farms in Las Cruces will supply the El Paso area as well.

Anita Rodriguez grows green chile on little more than an acre of her familys small farm in Las Cruces to supply El Paso markets and restaurants. Rodriguez has followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, who was a full-time farmer, and her father, who farmed as a hobby. She calls her farm Utopia.

After graduating from New Mexico State University in 1996, Rodriguez moved to Mexico City with $500 in cash and three credit cards to survive.

With a little help, Rodriguez found a job at the American School Foundation, where the children of diplomats and large businesses owners went to school. She taught middle-schoolers about where food comes from and how to prepare food.

When she moved to El Paso in 2016, Rodriguez began talking to her family about growing organic crops. She said it took some time to convince her dad.

During a short walk through the farm, she showed El Paso Inc. the farms organically grown chile, parsley, chives, basil, watermelon, cantaloupes, and tomatoes.

While major farms use large vehicles and tools to collect and sort chile crops, Rodriguez uses a bucket and her hands.

My interest in agriculture all began with planting those first chile seeds in the field with my dad, she said.

Rodriguez said green chiles are picked when they are firm and stored until they are sold. The picked chiles are transported to Shahid Mustafa, the chair of a co-op of about eight farms called Sol y Tierra.

Mustafa said the co-op is made up of small farms from all over the region. The farms are located from Chaparral, New Mexico, to Socorro, Texas. The co-op provides farmers markets and restaurants with organically grown produce.

The market in El Paso has, in terms of restaurants, shown more interest, he said. In Las Cruces, the biggest customer for Sol y Tierra has been public schools.

Last week, Rodriguez was tasked with supplying True Food, a local buying club, with 60 pounds of green chile and another 60 pounds to two different farmers markets.

She is not concerned. Rodriguez said she can pick 84 pounds of chile in less than an hour.

Email El Paso Inc. reporter Aaron Montes at amontes@elpasoinc.com or call (915) 534-4422, ext. 105. Twitter: @aaronmontes91

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Chile harvest begins in Hatch - El Paso Inc.

Life without oil, natural gas and coal would most likely be nasty, brutish and short

Al Gores new movie, a New York Times article on the final Obama Era manmade climate disaster report, and a piece saying wrathful people twelve years from now will hang hundreds of climate deniers are a tiny sample of Climate Hysteria and Anti-Trump Resistance rising to a crescendo. If we dont end our evil fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles and go 100% renewable Right Now, we are doomed, they rail.

Maybe its our educational system, our cargo cults easy access to food and technology far from farms, mines and factories, or the end-of-days propaganda constantly pounded into our heads. Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Lets take a short journey into that idyllic realm.

Suppose we generate just the 25 billion megawatt-hours of todays total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (Thats not total energy consumption, and it doesnt include what wed need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) Wed need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines!

Spacing them at just 15 acres per turbine would require 12.5 billion acres! Thats twice the land area of North America! All those whirling blades would virtually exterminate raptors, other birds and bats. Rodent and insect populations would soar. Add in transmission lines, solar panels and biofuel plantations to meet the rest of the worlds energy demands and the mostly illegal tree cutting for firewood to heat poor families homes and huge swaths of our remaining forest and grassland habitats would disappear.

The renewable future assumes these eco-friendly alternatives would provide reliable, affordable energy 24/7/365, even during windless, sunless weeks and cold, dry growing seasons. They never will, of course. That means we will have electricity and fuels when nature cooperates, instead of when we need it.

With backup power plants gone, constantly on-and-off electricity will make it impossible to operate assembly lines, use the internet, do an MRI or surgery, enjoy favorite TV shows or even cook dinner. Refrigerators and freezers would conk out for hours or days at a time. Medicines and foods would spoil.

Petrochemical feed stocks would be gone so we wouldnt have paints, plastics, synthetic fibers or pharmaceuticals, except what can be obtained at great expense from weather-dependent biodiesel. Kiss your cotton-polyester-lycra leggings and yoga pants good-bye.

But of course all that is really not likely to happen. It would actually be far worse.

First of all, there wouldnt even be any wind turbines or solar panels. Without fossil fuels or far more nuclear and hydroelectric plants, which rabid environmentalists also despise we couldnt mine the needed ores, process and smelt them, build and operate foundries, factories, refineries or cement kilns, manufacture and assemble turbines and panels. We couldnt even make machinery to put in factories.

Wind turbines, solar panels and solar thermal installations cannot produce consistently high enough heat to smelt ores and forge metals. They cannot generate power on a reliable enough basis to operate facilities that make modern technologies possible. They cannot provide the power required to manufacture turbines, panels, batteries or transmission lines much less power civilization.

My grandmother used to tell me, The only good thing about the good old days is that theyre gone. Well, theyd be back, as the USA is de-carbonized, de-industrialized and de-developed.

Ponder America and Europe before coal fueled the modern industrial age. Recall what were we able to do back then, what lives were like, how long people lived. Visit Colonial Williamsburg and Claude Moore Colonial Farm in Virginia, or similar places in your state. Explore rural Africa and India.

Imagine living that way, every day: pulling water from wells, working the fields with your hoe and ox-pulled plow, spinning cotton thread and weaving on looms, relying on whatever metal tools your local blacksmith shop can produce. When the sun goes down, your lives will largely shut down.

Think back to amazing construction projects of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome or even 18th Century London, Paris, New York. Ponder how they were built, how many people it took, how they obtained and moved the raw materials. Imagine being part of those wondrous enterprises, from sunup to sundown.

The good news is that there will be millions of new jobs. The bad news is that theyd involve mostly backbreaking labor with picks and shovels, for a buck an hour. Low-skill, low-productivity jobs just dont pay all that well. Maybe to create even more jobs, the government will issue spoons, instead of shovels.

That will be your life, not reading, watching TV and YouTube or playing video games. Heck, there wont even be any televisions or cell phones. Drugs and alcohol will be much harder to come by, too. (No more opioids crisis.) Water wheels and wind mills will be back in fashion. All-natural power, not all the time.

More good news: Polluting, gas-guzzling, climate-changing cars and light trucks will be a thing of the past. Instead, youll have horses, oxen, donkeys, buggies and wagons again grow millions of acres of hay to feed them and have to dispose of millions or billions of tons of manure and urine every year.

Therell be no paved streets unless armies of low-skill workers pound rocks into gravel, mine and grind limestone, shale, bauxite and sand for cement, and make charcoal for lime kilns. Homes will revert to what can be built with pre-industrial technologies, with no central heat and definitely no AC.

Ah, but you folks promoting the idyllic renewable energy future will still be the ruling elites. Youll get to live better than the rest of us, enjoy lives of reading and leisure, telling us commoners how we must live. Dont bet on it. Dont even bet on having the stamina to read after a long day with your shovel or spoon.

As society and especially big urban areas collapse into chaos, it will be survival of the fittest. And that group likely wont include too many Handgun Control and Gun Free Zone devotees.

But at least your climate will be stable and serene or so you suppose. You wont have any more extreme weather events. Sea levels will stay right where they are today: 400 feet higher than when a warming planet melted the last mile-thick glaciers that covered half the Northern Hemisphere 12,000 years ago.

At least it will be stable and serene until those solar, cosmic ray, ocean currents and other pesky, powerful natural forces decide to mess around with Planet Earth again.

Of course, many countries wont be as stupid as the self-righteous utopian nations. They will still use fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric, and watch while you roll backward toward the good old days. Those that dont swoop in to conquer and plunder may even send us food, clothing and monetary aid (most of which will end up with ruling elites and their families, friends, cronies and private armies).

So how about this as a better option?

Stop obsessing over dangerous manmade climate change. Focus on what really threatens our planet and its people: North Korea, Iran, Islamist terrorism and rampant poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death among the billions who still do not have access to electricity and the living standards it brings.

Worry less about manmade climate cataclysms and more about cataclysms caused by policies promoted in the name of controlling Earths climate.

Dont force-feed us with todays substandard, subsidized, pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-renewable energy systems. When better, more efficient, more practical energy technologies are developed, they will replace fossil fuels. Until then, we would be crazy to go down the primrose path to renewable energy utopia.

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death

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Life in fossil-fuel-free utopia - Canada Free Press

Photograph by Tim Hout.

With her fifth novel, The Burning Girl (Norton), Claire Messud forgoes clever satire for elegant sympathy. Slim but impactful, her narrative follows the diverging paths of a pair of teenage girls in a small town, torn apart by men, drugs, and, most polarizing of all, fantasy. If you have to imagine, asks the troubled Cassie, why imagine something bad? The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page.

V.F. writer Tom Sanctons juicy The Bettencourt Affair (Dutton) is the very picture of un grand scandale about the worlds richest woman. First novels as rich and enchanting as Augustus Roses The Readymade Thief (Viking) dont come around too often, and when they do, they rarely combine secret societies, teenage runaways, and Marcel Duchamp. Acclaimed novelist Kamila Shamsies Home Fire (Riverhead) is a blaze of identity, family, nationalism, and Sophocles Antigone. V.F. contributing editor Kurt Andersens erudite Fantasyland (Random House) is a study of magical thinking and mania throughout American history. Meanwhile, fantasy becomes reality in NBC reporter Katy Turs Trump-trailing Unbelievable (Dey Street).

Back in a flash: Sam Stephenson takes a wide-angle view of a celebrated photo-essayist in Gene Smiths Sink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Only connect with Bill Goldstein as he peers through a literary lens at The World Broke in Two (Henry Holt). And whats black and white and flashy all over? Famed photographer Jean-Pierre Laffonts New York City Up and Down (Glitterati).

Its all cafeteria trays and dormitory IDs until it isnt. Vanity Fairs Schools for Scandal (Simon & Schuster), edited by Graydon Carter, offers not just an inside peek but a multifaceted examination of the dramas that unfold on Americas most elite campuses. From the unraveling of allegations at big-name institutions (Duke University, University of Virginia) to art thefts at Transylvania University, Schools for Scandal presents a syllabuss worth of riveting journalism. As V.F. editor-at-large Cullen Murphy writes in the books introduction, schools are a point of intersection for just about every social phenomenon on the planet; come for the Trump University filleting, stay for John Kerry playing boodleball, a violent soccer-hockey hybrid, in Yales Skull and Bones Tomb.

George Giustis Kromekote: Salesmaker for the World of Music, from The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (Abrams), by Steven Heller and Greg DOnofrio.

Photographs from the George Giusti Collection/Cary Graphic Arts Collection/Rochester Institute Of Technology/permission of Robert Giusti (Kromekote).

Judith Newman reveals the tender side of tech in To Siri with Love (Harper). Literary biographer James Atlas is a writers writers writer in The Shadow in the Garden (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie signs a magical lease on The Golden House (Random House). Yve-Alain Bois and Ben Easthams Ed Ruscha (Rizzoli) puts us in a typographical trance. Jonathan Dees The Locals (Random House) shrinks class warfare down to size. Kristen Iskandrian explores maternal bonds in Motherest (Twelve). Adorn your life with all things Alice Temperley (Rizzoli). Mumble a prayer for Stephen Colbert in Stephen Colberts Midnight Confessions (Simon & Schuster). Absorb Danielle Allens account of an abbreviated life, just Cuz (Liveright). Gabriel Tallents My Absolute Darling (Riverhead) captures a compelling young heroine. Three eccentric socialites buttress Judith Mackrells The Unfinished Palazzo (Thames & Hudson). The Red-Haired Woman (Knopf) takes us outside Istanbul and inside the mind of Orhan Pamuk. Culinary icon Alice Waters goes farm-to-bookshelf with Coming to My Senses (Clarkson Potter). Its racial Utopia for two but not forever in Danzy Sennas New People (Riverhead). Heather Harpham finds Happiness (Henry Holt) when her life is rocked. Emily Culliton dazzles in The Misfortune of Marion Palm (Knopf). William Taubman leaves his mark on Gorbachev (Norton). Mike Perry manufactures a hipster maze in The Broad City Coloring Book (Laurence King). Russell Westbrook (Rizzoli) dares us not to sweat his style. Daniel Handler deftly details All the Dirty Parts (Bloomsbury). Loudon Wainwright IIIs Liner Notes (Blue Rider) delves into death, decay, and other delights.

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What to Read This Month: Katy Tur's Unbelievable, Claire Messud's The Burning Girl, and More - Vanity Fair