Climate Change - The Languish 'Community' Responses?

[crazy canuck]

That's why a baked potato needs butter, cheese, sour cream, gravy, onion, garlic, a steak, a side salad, and maybe some pie.

[Josquius]

It started sane and steadily got madder and madder.

[Eddie Teach]

Eh, baked potato and salad are pretty common sides at steak restaurants.

[Admiral Yi]

But this links to one of the many bees in my bonnet. The UK competition regulator forces supermarkets to have standard national prices - they consider differential pricing as anti-competitive and harmful to consumers. This means that UK supermarkets are pretty homogenous but they also basically only have an interest in large producers who can commit to volume and pricing. It's not the case in, say, France or Spain which is why you see more local produce because the best/cheapest deals if you allow differential pricing is often local. It's probably environmentally best too as well as making for more interesting/diverse supermarket shopping because youo get slightly different offers in different bits of the country.

  That's about as backward as you can get.

[Threviel]

What would be the carbon foot print of that?

Miniscule.

Really, as compared to getting them from a local farmer?

In general when it comes to foodstuffs the production part is by far the greatest part of the environmental impact. Transport is very often in the low single percents of the impact and most of that is from the transport home from the local transport hub. Meaning the transport to the shop and then home from the shop. Which does not change whether the produce is produced in England or Bulgaria, it all gathers in the regional Lidl transport hub and then out to the local Lidl stores.

There are of course exceptions, but in general it's better to produce food where the environmental impact is lowest (often meaning where it's most efficient to grow said food) and then transport it to where it's eaten.

So I can very much believe that the organically grown produce in England is far worse for the environment than the industrially mass produced produce from Bulgaria or New Zealand for that matter. Most obvious are of course tomatoes grown in gas-heated greenhouses in the Netherlands when it could probably have been flown in from Africa for a lesser carbon footprint. But the same is true, only often in less obvious ways for almost all food.

Any way, potatoes might actually be better to grow in England, but even so, since the transport impact is more or less negligible the question you asked is asked wrongly. You should have asked yourself what the carbon footprint from the production is, not what the carbon footprint from the transport is.

That there's such a high focus on transport is probably that it is very visible. Every time we go in a car we're surrounded by lorrys transporting food, and thus it feels like it is very important. And since most of the environmental organizations focuses on what feels important rather than on what is important the focus is on transport.

[Josquius]

I've no idea whether that's true. Let's just assume it is.
The thing is though just not growing food isn't an option. That's emissions that we can't cut no matter what.
Being more logical with where we do things, transport is an area we can cut emissions.

[Threviel]

I've no idea whether that's true.

Then find out, it's not difficult.

But of course, it's far easier to just blame transport and the you don't have to think about it... Because that feels right.

[mongers]

I've no idea whether that's true. Let's just assume it is.
The thing is though just not growing food isn't an option. That's emissions that we can't cut no matter what.
Being more logical with where we do things, transport is an area we can cut emissions.

That's a fair point.

[mongers]

What would be the carbon foot print of that?

Miniscule.

Really, as compared to getting them from a local farmer?

In general when it comes to foodstuffs the production part is by far the greatest part of the environmental impact. Transport is very often in the low single percents of the impact and most of that is from the transport home from the local transport hub. Meaning the transport to the shop and then home from the shop. Which does not change whether the produce is produced in England or Bulgaria, it all gathers in the regional Lidl transport hub and then out to the local Lidl stores.

There are of course exceptions, but in general it's better to produce food where the environmental impact is lowest (often meaning where it's most efficient to grow said food) and then transport it to where it's eaten.

So I can very much believe that the organically grown produce in England is far worse for the environment than the industrially mass produced produce from Bulgaria or New Zealand for that matter. Most obvious are of course tomatoes grown in gas-heated greenhouses in the Netherlands when it could probably have been flown in from Africa for a lesser carbon footprint. But the same is true, only often in less obvious ways for almost all food.

Any way, potatoes might actually be better to grow in England, but even so, since the transport impact is more or less negligible the question you asked is asked wrongly. You should have asked yourself what the carbon footprint from the production is, not what the carbon footprint from the transport is.

That there's such a high focus on transport is probably that it is very visible. Every time we go in a car we're surrounded by lorrys transporting food, and thus it feels like it is very important. And since most of the environmental organizations focuses on what feels important rather than on what is important the focus is on transport.

You make some fair point and as Shelf above also mentioned the tomatoes grown in hothouses is a bad example of intensive energy use.
And I'm not ignoring production carbon impacts, but with potatoes is fairly straight forward, they grown in the ground outside and require quite a lot of water. So not only are there additional transport costs but another important consideration is the extra water use in Egypt and Israel need to grown them, I imagine that's largely irrigated water and both country's populations are facing considerable water resource challenges.

Also we can't assume it's a perfect market, as Shelf pointed out supermarkets operate in all sort of odd ways, it may well be on that particular English producers don't much competitively priced potatoes so the contract goes to an Egyptian enterprise, next week/month the English market price might be back to normal. I doubt most supermarkets take environmental impacts or carbon footprints into consideration when making their buying decisions.

[Threviel]

Potatoes, being of high Andean origin are probably quite well suited to being grown in England and spectacularly bad to grow in the Middle East.

I would suggest buying potatoes from areas where they are well suited for growing so that other areas can focus on what grows well there. Which has very little with transport to do.

If transport is so overwhelmingly important we should strive for every area in the world becoming self sufficient in every foodstuff. 1/10 second of thinking about that should tell one to focus on other things than transport.

Of course transport shouldn't be ignored either, every little thing helps and it is all very complex and full of grey zones.

[Josquius]

I've no idea whether that's true.

Then find out, it's not difficult.

But of course, it's far easier to just blame transport and the you don't have to think about it... Because that feels right.

Wow. Way to completely miss the point. Did you even read the next sentence where I said let's just assume it all is?

I wouldn't agree this is an easy thing to find out BTW. Source?

[Threviel]

Wow. Way to completely miss the point. Did you even read the next sentence where I said let's just assume it all is?

I wouldn't agree this is an easy thing to find out BTW. Source?

Sure, here's the first result of my google search for "carbon footprint of food"

https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet

Let me quote it: "Food accounts for 10-30% of a household's carbon footprint, typically a higher portion in lower-income households.2 Production accounts for 68% of food emissions, while transportation accounts for 5%."

I'm also  interested in your idea that nothing at all can be done about the production part of emissions. Would you care to give me some sources for your quite revolutionary thinking? Or would you rather that I continue to  politely ignore it?

[Josquius]

You're still missing the point.
It doesn't matter if transport is 5 or 90% of the emissions. If there is an opportunity to cut these emissions we should take it.
The same goes for production too of course but the two aren't necessary related or mutually exclusionary.

[Threviel]

You're still missing the point.
It doesn't matter if transport is 5 or 90% of the emissions. If there is an opportunity to cut these emissions we should take it.
The same goes for production too of course but the two aren't necessary related or mutually exclusionary.

Yes, you are quite correct and I believe I addressed it in a post above. But the almost singular focus on transport that many have is a problem. Sure, we can do solar driven transport and halve the emissions from transport or whatever, that will decrease total emissions by 2.5%. It's almost unimportant compared to almost most other efforts that could be made.

Transport emissions is not the big problem, production emissions are 13 times higher when it comes to food. The focus of environmentalists should be on that part if they want to make a huge difference. Thus mongers asked the wrong question, since production is at least 13 times more important than transport.

And when it comes to mutually exclusionary I beg to differ. Lots of dimwits go about buying locally and talking about how it must be better since there's less transport. It's a very convenient way of making them feel good whilst in real terms it's probably many times worse for the environment compared to industrial large scale products from a  better location. That way they don't have to address the real problems.

[Sheilbh]

Thinking about trying to speak to my pension company and see if I can move my funds to sustainable investments - and if there's other "social" choices I can make, for example, I'm very uncomfortable with any investments in gambling companies.

As someone who's spent my entire life just ignoring what's happening to my pension savings I'm slightly concerned I'll actually have to engage brain and work out what funds I'm interested in