Transport makes up only 6% of the greenhouse gas emissions from food
blog.yeticheese.com
blog.yeticheese.com
This is the key problem, with “eat local” and all similar initiatives.
Yes, reducing emissions by tiny percentages is still a good thing. But too often, by focusing the conversation on these small individual actions, we miss the forest for the trees.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...
Oct 27, 2019. So not long ago.
Maybe, just maybe, we could stop that before telling me to unplug my phone charger or switch off my router at night.
It’s like our federal budget: when times our tough, we “tighten our belts” by cutting basic research or education funding from 5% to 2%, but won’t flinch at spending >50% of discretionary budget on “defense”.
You would think that this would mean that the almond farmers would simply buy water from any rice farmers who had seniority in their water rights. Hahahahahahhahahaha, you fool! That would make sense, so it's illegal. Also, if an alfalfa farmer who did get water didn't use it all (in the name of conservation, perhaps) they'd lose access to that water forever.
I’m not generally interventionist, but I think the markets have failed us here (unless I’m severely misunderstanding things, please correct me). I‘m all for almonds and rice, but we really should be taxing the externalities. I’m pessimistic we’ll ever get to that equilibrium.
But yeah. All this focusing on consumer water use is a distraction. We need to have an honest discussion about how the agriculture water system should be architected, so the state can continue to be productive for generations to come.
and (2) because property rights (to aquifer water) do not exist and are not enforced. This is one of the Big Three Things that Kill Market Efficiency (the other two being barriers to entry and high transaction costs).
If you want to intervene, intervene to restore market order. Convert water allocation rights into to property, allow them to be bought and sold, and give somebody title to the local groundwater, somehow. Make things cost the right amount of money. If that means almonds are too expensive to grow anymore, then that will happen. If that means almonds are worth it long term and they should get the water instead of the alfalfa in the short term, that will happen too.
If people could buy and sell water rights, those with property on an aquifer would get harvesting rights proportional to their land. They could sell it to the almond farmers, and ask for a price that’s more or less equal to the farmer’s expected profit, which cuts into the farmers’ margin.
This is kind of analogous to selling crude oil to refineries (petroleum is like almonds!). I’d expect big companies to buy up land to secure water rights. Probably the same companies that own massive almond plantations, because vertical integration.
I don’t think that this system would reverse aquifer depletion? Unless we artificially restrict the supply of water in the water rights contract?
But let's talk aquifer. If I want to be uncreative and say that the aquifer is owned by some specific bigcorp, instead of by nobody, the incentives for Bigcorp would be to restrict the supply to maximize the long-run monopoly profits (discounted for time). I don't know that this is the best arrangement, as Bigcorp managers may see fit to put short-term profit ahead of that long term goal... but I guarantee you it's better than the current incentive structure, which is basically "pump like crazy — or someone else will and you'll be left dry!"
But besides "bigcorp" ownership, there are some resource trust structures, I think, and existing landowners could be given some ownership in one of those, which they could buy and sell? They're mostly used in oil or gas today.
I think the right should be proportional to land size, and the X number should aspire to be Y% above replacement rate, to account for water poaching, measurement inaccuracies, etc.
X would be set once per year, and announced well before planting season to allow time for planning. It wouldn’t eliminate almonds and pistachios, but it would dramatically reduce them.
I think such a move would face huge opposition from farmers with large plantations, rightly. I wonder how much it would cost to “bail” them out, so they can start over with a more sustainable crop.
The cost benefit of depletion vs hoarding isn’t convincing enough, IMO, because the owners could always delude themselves into thinking that the next big wet season is next year. The fact that water is renewable on human time scales (unlike oil) complicates the calculus.
That said, I agree that this system would be better. It’s better for markets to exist. But I do think it should be regulated to limit the supply side, because I think we’re too short term-ist to make the right decisions here. These are generally the only situations where I’m comfortable with advocating for intervention.
On another level, I think we all want to feel like we're doing something to address the major problems of our time. And these things are something.
Why?
Because it can become a personal spur towards getting something meaningful done: which means collective political action to completely upend the out of control machine we are refusing to fix.
By all means, deprecate gesture politics, but only if you are doing something else more meaningful. Otherwise it comes close to being triple-layered hypocrisy.
This is why these sorts of people tend to be known as liking to talk about their lifestyle choices. They know they don’t mean much, but if they convince 5 people and they all convince 5 more, etc, it will spread faster than some viruses we might be familiar with.
We need to get there with food, too. E.g., can producers like Impossible and Beyond make burgers that are tastier, healthier and cheaper than their meat counterparts? I think they can, and in the end the masses will only change their behavior with products and services like this.
Of course, we still need action on a political and economic level such as a carbon tax.
On a societal level, we also have a collective "attention budget". Every news story about plastic straws is one that's not discussing a carbon tax.
A sufficiently strong carbon tax, by the way, would ultimately have the effect of causing everyone to buy more local food, at least in proportion to its carbon impact.
We use it pretty colloquially at work to talk about the impacts of a bad night of sleep or a late night: “I’m missing a couple spoons today, sorry if my code reviews are a little off”.
It's also possible that, like muscle-building, we get more the more we use it. People who become thoughtful about their energy consumption think about impact more, think about global issues, and then are more likely to protest in favor of environmental legislation.
There are limits, we can't attend to too much at once. But maybe we can actually see two ways of living where one has very limited chances for dedicated attention and another offers many hours of available dedicated attention. Be physically well, use good attention habits etc.
Much of what you're saying amounts to priorities. We should indeed figure out our top priorities and then figure out the most effective means to get there. Makes me think of http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to...
e.g. Many environmentalists think that, if we can just stop building pipelines, fuel will become more expensive and people (usually other, poorer people) will drive less. This attitude helped prevent a key pipeline in Canada (Energy East) from being built. This pipeline would have sent oil from Western Canada to Eastern Canada, which currently imports a significant portion of it's oil by tanker from foreign countries. Now Alberta oil is being shipped West, put on panamax tankers in Vancouver, sailed through the Panama Canal, and then up to the East coast of Canada. There it is bought for the same prices as foreign oil by Canadian refineries. All that's happened is some oil companies are making less money per barrel because of transport expenses. This wasteful route hasn't impacted fuel prices in Eastern Canada at all.
The forest in this case, is that people need to buy smaller, more efficient vehicles or EV's, and build communities that require less driving. However, I have no doubt that I will get an earful from someone for daring to suggest that an oil pipeline could be a good thing for the environment. To be clear, I am specifically saying that the Energy East pipeline would have been more environmentally friendly than shipping oil from Western to Eastern Canada via the Panama canal.
Too much of popular environmentalism is utterly unscientific and harmful to the environment. It's not just the "eat local" fad.
Because paying higher prices is okay, especially if you can afford it and others can’t.
But the real problem is excess consumption, and the solution is eating less overall, which no one wants to do. Reducing quality of life is the forest, but who wants to do that for future generations’ benefit?
I'm broadly in favor of making society more equitable, but I'm wary of the idea that we can solve both at once. The purveyors of the "Green New Deal" disagree with me, and I'm not at all opposed to what they're doing—but I worry that, the more problems you try to address at once, the harder it is to reach broad consensus. We need to fix climate change.
A simple carbon tax, by the way, could also alleviate this problem, by distributing the proceeds back to the populace.
Maybe we could work on that somehow, seeing as how the rich you are, the bigger your environmental footprint tends to. Someone who's spending all the money on food vs. someone who has to try really, really hard to spend all their money.
Anecdote: a few years ago, I was talking about summer holidays with my boss - I was going by coach to Berlin; he was taking his family to Japan to ski and would be going by helicopter daily from his hotel to the better, remote slopes. Maybe a 50% carbon tax would've meant I stayed at home entirely, but he wasn't the type to worry about money at all, so... yeah.
Actually, I'm of the opinion that when the government has more money to spend on programs for citizens, society as a whole anyway, so I don't think it even matters so much what we do with the revenue (as much as some programs are certainly better than others).
But, I don't like to use this argument, because I know a lot of people disagree about the benefits of government programs / wealth redistribution, and I would really really really like for addressing climate change to not be a political issue. Unless you flat-out think Climate Change is a hoax, there is no reason for us not to tax carbon.
Basically the problem is that taxes are deeply connected with the government budget. The idea of a tax whose only purpose is rewarding environmentally behavior is absolutely foreign to the average person.
NPR did a great podcast episode on how plastic manufacturers responded to environmental concerns in the last century: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/757539617
This reduces fuel supply, shifting the supply curve left. Ceteris paribus, this increases the world price for fuel.
https://www.morethanshipping.com/imo-2020-and-oil-prices-in-...
Moreover, the total energy being transported is surely much higher than the oil burned. That’s the key feature of oil....it is energy dense!
Instead of saying "oil is harmful" you end up saying "oil is totally fine as long as you don't use pipelines".
Sand in a machine that you don't want, is not necessarily a bad thing, even if right now today, because of inertia, you still need the machine.
The people who own the machine and get the most out of it disagree, but I don't think anyone has any obligation to care about them.
I think, you don't get to call it short-sighted or ignorant. You only get to call it a position and a course of action you don't agree with.
Otherwise, I would say that anyone making the argument you are making is the short-sighted and ignorant one. Being unwilling to suffer any pain today as part of a long term investment to bring about some eventual change, instead just handwaving that something should happen ("people should use more renewable energy") without suggesting how it could be done or putting up with any inconvenience to see it done. My guess you would object to that.
1. These emissions include semi-permanent sinks (where carbon is converted into dirt or trees that don't need to be cut down annually), but not the fact that carbon is absorbed to grow the plants. Unlike transport, this carbon doesn't simply appear. If you take this into account it reduces the overall carbon from Ag by ~20%.
2. Fruits and vegetables have MUCH more energy spent on transport, over 50% in some cases once you account for CO2 absorption. Potatoes as well. See page 61 (fig S13) of the supplement on the original paper: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2018/05/30/...
Meats and milk (and to a lesser extent rice- methane from the water paddies) are overwhelmingly the largest cause of Ag GHG emissions and why transport seems to play such a small role. It's the only case that buying locally doesn't make a difference.
I also mentioned some more caveats in the article, e.g. transport does matter for goods such as berries and green beans, which are highly perishable and therefore transported by air planes.
Organic farming also requires more land than non-organic farming, which means more forest and wetlands cleared for agriculture to produce the same amount of food.
Here's an interesting study on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...
Maybe it's the pigs and cows who should be told to eat local?
So, if a plastic straw costs two cents, then at most about 1/200th a gallon of oil/gas was used to both make the plastic and ship it to wherever you are.
It is very easy to look at the visual volume of straws or bags and feel like it is a lot of plastic - but in reality it is the equivalent amount of oil usage as driving a few more blocks.
The proportion of people who will change habits based upon convenience is high.
In addition, food production and distribution systems are immensely heterogeneous. They tend to be predictable in structure based upon land use patterns (urban planning). Apartment dwellers spend less on transport and more on packaging, but don't grow much food or raise animals. With small family units, cook-for-one kitchens and duplicate appliances, waste is highest. Suburbia dwellers spend more on transport but might grow food and raise animals or at least keep chickens. Waste is also high, often due to spoilage. Villages and rural dwelling people may very well produce all their own food and may walk everywhere, with no transport. Waste is lower, since crops may be picked or animals slaughtered only when required.
Since changing people's lifestyles to a sustainable reality requires drastic lifestyle changes and is therefore untenable, I believe the key to significantly reducing resource wastage in the food distribution globally is more efficient distribution and the deduplication of resources (kitchens, appliances, grocery stores, etc.). Obviously this can be sold based on convenience, but cuts across tightly held beliefs around individualism, identity and tradition (amongst others). For various reasons such as population density, social norms, mobile payment penetration and legal and regulatory environments, I believe the future technologies in this space will be set in the world's highest density cities in Asia, and then re-exported to a lagging west.
Good point. Another key thing is economics. Nice vegan eco-friendly locally sourced sausage there buddy. 10 bucks? No thanks.
If the people with power to do so cared about animals and the climate, they'd do everything they can to make sure their vegan products are affordable to poor people. They need to be at least cheaper than the meat products. But that does not seem to be the case.
> Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local
Fossil-fuel production actually emits more methane than meat production does (but meat production is number two and a very big slice). So by cutting down on fossil fuels you will have a bigger impact on solving the methane problem than going vegetarian, and you'll also be solving the longer term CO2 problem. But every bit counts. Vegetarianism (or near-vegetarianism) is quite healthy too.
If we stopped meat production entirely right now, in a few decades we'd be back at ancient levels and the temperature would drop accordingly. But if you are worried about a climate apocalypse that our children and grandchildren are going to have to deal with, going vegetarian now is going to have little impact on that problem. CO2 is still the bigger and more long-term problem.
The CO2 from methane breakdown was sourced from the atmosphere in the first place. And it goes back into the atmosphere. It's part of the permanent surface-atmosphere CO2 cycle.
Atmospheric CO2 -> Grass -> Ruminant animal -> Methane -> Atmospheric CO2
Fossil fuels, OTOH, bring up CO2 from deep in the earth where it has been sequestered for eons.
If we ate less meat and turned the pasture into woodland, we could sequester quite a lot of CO2 on the order of 50 years or so. Longer if we buried the wood. And I'm not against that.
But it seems silly to me to focus on these minor hacks to surface cycles for temporary gains when the clear long-term problem is fossil fuel. We need to keep focusing on fossil fuel.
intersting, i didnt know that
> But it seems silly to me to focus on these minor hacks to surface cycles for temporary gains when the clear long-term problem is fossil fuel. We need to keep focusing on fossil fuel.
definitely, agree 100%
- Developing recipes that a palatable, convenient, relatively cheap, and which meet people's nutritional goals.
- Teach people to cook those recipes.
The Carbon Farming Solution:
http://www.perennialsolutions.org/shop/the-carbon-farming-so...
Author is Eric Toensmeier.
From his about page:
http://carbonfarmingsolution.com/bio
Eric Toensmeier is the award-winning author of Paradise Lot and Perennial Vegetables, and the co-author of Edible Forest Gardens. He is an appointed lecturer at Yale University, a Senior Biosequestration Fellow with Project Drawdown, and an international trainer. He has studied useful perennial plants and their roles in agroforestry systems for over two decades.He is the author of The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agricultural Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security.
Caring about the environment is about more than climate change, but if the target is to tackle climate change, the answer is NO meat, not local organic meat (and dairy).
By fighting the climate change you're fighting the life itself :)
We have an ambitious goal of getting down to 1 trillion (or even 250 million) tonnes of CO2e per year by 2050 because of how bad things will get if we don't.
As game theory (and the tragedy of the commons) would suggest, there will be cheaters. But those cheaters are not overwhelming the overall downward trend.
I'm not sure what the rules about changing a title is, but the article makes an excellent point and it would be a shame if people who don't read the article get it wrong like I did.
Nothing else to take away from it. Pretty much a pointless "well duh" article with an end comment that we need to do less travel by road and air. Well that will never happen and another pandemic will force more on the roads separately instead of sharing bus, train, or plane. However BEV will pretty much solve the majority of the pollution side but it will increase miles traveled.