Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us.
And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
Texas has a dominant ruling structure dominated by religious fanatics and resource extraction for now. Alot of the extremist nonsense is driven by the sense that demographics will drive power shifts, so cashing in is key. At some point, the “freedom” argument will flip — what is more in alignment with the cowboy myth than self-reliance where your rooftop or land provides?
It's perfectly reasonable to think local in terms of redundancy, but the primary way of delivering power should be concern of as many people as possible. It's like having an insurance plan with a lot of members. Distributing the costs and risks across as many people as possible helps keep things cheaper and mitigates risk. No one is going to care if only your power is out, but when there are a lot more stakeholders, when the grid extends across city, county, state, even country lines, if there are issues, there's more pressure to get them fixed.
* Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally
* More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally
That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason.
It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
There are a lot of factors limiting local farms' ability to deliver at a cheaper price point, like corporate consolidation, land being converted into suburban sprawl, a lack of local value add and processing infrastructure, huge subsidies (and water resources) being wasted on commodity growers, an aging farmer population, etc.
Do you really think that if a head of cabbage was fetching $150 a pop at my grocery store that Earl who owns the farm across the street from me is going to stubbornly continue to grow commodity tobacco at a profit of $2000 an ACRE? (About 35 cents a plant.)
We’ve created a system where investments and massive subsidy made to turn the desert into a garden destroyed agriculture nationally. It’s a predictable black swan scenario that has impactful and broad implications.
Most humans think in "next paycheck" terms not "risk-adjusted" terms, but at the same time, the Covid supply chain issues whacked people in the head with "this is a black swan" and "fragility" sticks.