The life cycle analysis that the economists in New Zealand did was useful and cautionary, and from a certain point of view it was a really important set of questions to ask. For those not following the most recent discussion, read previous posts and comments to catch up. But the research question may well have been the wrong question, from a global warming concerns perspective. Their analysis looked at the total carbon footprint of a meal of lamb imported into the United Kingdom from New Zealand vs. eating a locally produced English lamb. That might be very defensible from a research design perspective--comparing a total life cycle for two highly similar if not identical products. The problem may be, however, that both meals have too much of an impact.
What if the real question isn't which of these two lambs has the lower carbon footprint, but is actually a different question? What if the question is, what is the best constellation of food choices I can make to have the least negative impact on the planet? For consumers in the UK, the answer might be grass fed beef, free range chickens, and vegetables from France, for instance. I don't know if that is what the answer would be, but I do think that is a better way to frame the issue. It would be pretty difficult to build a website that lets people put in their location, answer a few questions, and then get recommendations on how to structure your food choices so that they were as least harmful as possible. But it should be relatively easy to calculate an average carbon footprint for categories of foods, that people can refer to. Someone may have even done it.
Of course, eating is also about a lot of things, and calculating the carbon footprint of your meal on top of the fat content, calories, Weight Watchers points, and such, just kind of ruins the fun of it all. Tomorrow morning I'm planning on checking out the new Farmer's Market, and just savoring it without too much angst.
1 comments:
I agree that you've put forward a better way to think about the issue. I bet a big part of the answer to reducing the carbon footprint of the diet is to eat as little meat as possible. Meat takes a lot more energy to produce than grains, vegetables, and fruit. In addition, cows are a significant source of methane, although quite a bit of that could be captured if we wanted to. It makes the picture a little bleak when you realize that meat consumption is set to explode in China and India.
A few months ago I attended a job talk about climate change. The speaker was presenting a scenario for carbon reduction that would keep predicted temperature increases below 2 degrees C. He began by assuming that everyone in the world made all of the economically easy changes—Compact Fluorescent Lights, improved efficiency, all of the things that can pay for themselves. That doesn’t get us even close to where we need to be. By the speaker’s calculations, in addition to the easy changes it would cost somewhere between several hundred and a couple of thousand dollars per person per year to get the carbon and methane emissions down enough to keep the predicted temperature increase below 2 degrees C. And even that cost estimate assumed that the money was transferred to China (and some other developing countries, but primarily China) because it’s cheaper to reduce the emissions there than it is here. We’d probably have to spend double that amount if we kept the money in the U.S. The speaker thought this was feasible, but I don’t see the political will for this kind of massive transfer of funds from the U.S. to China.
There are plenty of reasons to dramatically increase energy efficiency, but it's very sobering to think about how much further we have to go to limit the predicted temperature increases.
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