Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Bumface
Are you implying that transport of food is 6% of global GHGs?
Because that's wrong. It's maybe 2%, using the most generous estimates.
And if you analyze the carbon intensity of the transportation chain to get food to your table, you'll find most of it is incurred by the trucked legs, not by the shipping. Driving your car to the grocery store ends up being significant because you are moving such a small mass of food relative to mass transportation.
So within that 2%, a significant portion of it will still be there to truck it in from your local farm and then for you to drive it home from the farmer's market.
Your argument is that we should optimize for a portion of 2% of global GHGs instead of optimizing for 20% of global GHGs, by producing as efficiently as possible.
I'm not considering any of your ethics arguments, because just as you said we should focus on producing local food more efficiently, I'll just throw out that we should focus on producing foreign food more ethically. Use it as a platform to raise the global standard of living and workers rights. That's a lot more noble than some efficiency projects that are not affordable for most of the world.
|
How do we raise the standard of living in foreign countries? Tell China to be good to be people? Is that realistic?
Also, it's really easy to manipulate these GHG counts in favor of whatever food source you want to promote. For example, we've seen figures for cattle showing both net neutrality and extreme production.
With the issue of shipping, you're just using the shipping itself. What about the production of this ships? Their maintenance? To maintain the workers? When you're dealing with an entire industry, like global shipping, you're looking at a long supply chain of consumption, not just a simple calculation of emissions.
The notion that we can't do things locally more efficiently is just wrong.