We Are What We Eat

The Union of Concerned Scientists tells us there are three really important things that we consumers can do to reduce our negative impact on the environment: 1) reduce our energy use in the car and home, and 2) choose sustainable food choices. It shouldn't surprise anyone that both of these arguments boil down to reducing the use of fossil fuels, but I think it does. Everyone knows that we use non-renewable energy for transportation and for heating and cooling our homes, but fewer people understand the relationship between food and oil.


In the aptly labeled "industrial food system" we obviously use polluting non-renewable energy to run the vehicles that transport the food from far away, but the fertilizer and pesticides we use are also both largely made from petroleum and requires a great deal of energy to produce, not to mention the packaging. So, for every calorie of food that is produced in this system we have burned an awful lot of oil. Producing and transporting meat is even worse, especially when you consider the tremendous amount of plant food it takes to raise meat producing animals. In The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, the UCC concludes that two of the most beneficial changes in food consumption are to eat less meat and eat more organic foods.

I won't argue with that advice except to say that I would suggest emphasizing local food more than organic food. Author Michael Pollan determines in The Omnivore's Dilemma that buying organic food produced far away provides far less benefit than does buying conventional food grown locally. The main problem is that the industrial farm system has co-opted "organic" and seriously diluted the relative benefits it provides.

In contrast, conventional food grown on relatively small, local farms generally use significantly less fertilizers and pesticides than factory farms and the transportation factor is obviously greatly diminished.
As you consider what you might do to strive for a sustainable Frederick, consider buying food from people who love where you live as much as you do -- local farmers.

Bumper Sticker Alert: Drill, Daby, Drill.

Bumper stickers just might be evil.

Of course I see some with which I agree, and many that make me laugh. But we can never let ourselves forget that putting a slogan on our car is NOT the same thing as communicating. What bumper stickers do, in effect, is identify you as part of a team -- which draws a line between you and their team. There are times for teams, and public dialogue is not really one of them. Once that line is drawn, something funny happens in our brains: we choose sides. It's automatic and unconscious. Again, there are times for sides, but finding understanding isn't one of them.

I'm starting a recurring segment: Bumper Sticker Alert. I'll try to tackle BSs from both sides, as both sides are equally likely to be foolish. But don't be surprised if most are on the "conservative" side, for the simplistic reason that conservatives are more likely to argue against change.

Anyway, today's BS:

Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.

First, my emotional response which largely mirrors the greenies' response: if we know oil is ultimately a big part of the problem we face in the world -- why should we work so hard to get more of it out to pollute the world?

Of course, the economic reality is that oil runs our machines and non-oil machines are not yet near. The sad fact is that we'll need to keep drilling and burning oil while we work to turn this ship around (let's just try to systematically reduce our usage and increase our efficiency as we work on those green machines).

So, as time rushes us forward we'll probably eventually get at that approximately 19 billion barrels underneath the arctic and off the U.S. shores. I don't like it, and I'll drag my feet, but I suspect it will happen.

The reason I would yield -- that is, raise my dragging feet, is NOT because of the argument behind this idiotic sticker. The simple fact is that drilling here anytime will not effect our prices one bit. Understand this -- global oil consumption is currently running somewhere around 80 billion barrels a day. Every day. So, if we get jiggy and drill baby drill right now, we'll add 19 billion barrels of oil to the global market over the next 25 years.

Do you understand the idea of supply and demand and how it determines price? Does it make sense that if the current quantities demanded and supplied net out to 80 billion barrels per day at a given price, then adding some fraction of 19 billion of oil to that supply, the prices will not go down.

Do you think you can grow a bushel of tomatoes for sale and expect them to drop the price that grocery stores charge?

Consider the oil companies who will invest whatever they invest to get at that oil. When it starts pumping out of their refineries, do you think they will check out the current global prices and charge less for their oil? Why, because they love America? Get real.

My suggestion for drilling in ANWR and other sensitive areas: sell extraction leases (for a bazillion dollars) and place environmental restrictions to protect the local environment that are so rigorous, and therefore expensive, that no oil company can sell it for less than triple the current global price of oil. Don't worry, oil company -- as global oil reserves dwindle, that oil will become more and more valuable, and can therefore be priced high enough to cover the high costs.

Eventually, it will make economic sense to drill.

You want hope? I got hope for you right here, baby!

I was speaking about green technology with a technically savvy friend the other day and he made a comment that gets right to the bottom line, "Electricity is so cheap that I just don't understand how green technologies will get going. Because they are so expensive to buy, it really isn't cheaper to install and use most of these technologies in your house or business." (paraphrased)

This is where we are now. Fossil fuels are very cheap and green technologies are expensive to install. How do we get to sustainability from here? There are two dynamics that offer the hope we need.

Reason for Hope #1
First, you need to understand the idea of economies of scale. Imagine building a car from near scratch in your garage -- you have to cut and shape metal and install and assemble and whatever else to build the car you will drive. Imagine the machinery and tools you will need. Imagine that you'll have to find a store that sells you the materials to make one engine, one transmission, etc. Now think of good old Henry Ford who showed us why its a good idea to make 1000 at a time instead one just one. That's economies of scale -- as systems are built to produce large quantities of a good, it get's cheaper and cheaper to produce them.

The way things are now, economies of scale have been hard at work making the use of fossil fuels cheaper for centuries. Business has invested uncountable tons of cash in learning how to get every penny it can out of fossil fuel which is part of why they are cheaper than green.

Green engineers and business people talk about the need to get "up to scale" on green technologies, which means we need to get to a point where we are making and using green technology at the scale necessary to get the costs down to comparable levels with the fossil fuels. That has been a hard row to hoe mainly because few with lots of money have wanted to invest it in technology that competes with higher value investments. (Food for thought: if you had invested billions in oil, would you want a green revolution before you got your payback on your investment?)

Now, with the economy faltering and the political cost of our addiction to oil is starting to be recognized and with our recent price shock of $4.00+ gasoline, we have some reason to hope that this is the time when the will exists to invest sufficiently in green technology.

Reason for Hope #2
The second dynamic that gives me hope is that wind & sunlight are free and they always will be. Free. As humans, we kind of act like things are free -- if we live near a forest we get the wood, if near a river we get the water -- but they really aren't. From the you-don't-know-what-you-got-til-its-gone file: it is when those resources get used up that we start to realize they actually had value. (Scary thought: Imagine how expensive water will be in 50 years. Imagine countries at war over access to water. It will happen.)

The world is going to run out of oil some day -- most experts think we are about half way through all of the oil on the planet -- and since oil will become increasingly expensive until its gone, renewable energy will become increasingly relatively cheap.

The magic of sustainability is that these things make good economic AND environmental sense. That is where we can find hope.


p.s. If you want to make a pretty small investment in green technology in a way that can really save your family or business money, install solar powered hot water heaters to supplement or replace your electrical unit. My tech savvy friend tells me that this is one application that truly pays for itself in less than 5 years.

$0.13 from every dollar you spend on gas goes straight to Osama Bin Laden!

Think about that for a minute.

OK, for the record, I don't know how exactly much of our money gets to bin Laden. I made up the 13 cents because I can't find that specific analysis. Its a useful placeholder though, because there is no doubt whatsoever that a huge amount of the money we pay for oil ends up in the control of terrorists and also undemocratic dictators like Hugo Chavez and Putin's Cabal.

Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat & Crowded breaks this down for us. A few highlights:

• Saudi Arabia is set to earn around $200 billion dollars in oil money in 2008, and Saudi interests have tens of millions of those dollars building thousands of mosques and hiring teachers to spread the most extreme form of anti-western Islam in Pakistand and Afghanistan.
• Iran, which is OPEC's 2nd largest oil producer aggressively finances terrorist groups including the Lebanese group Hezbollah. When Hezbollah launched war against Israel in 2006, Iran gave Hezbollah $3 billion-plus for payouts to Lebanese citizens during and after the conflict.
  
• Almost 50% of foreign insurgents in Iraq have been recruited by extremist Saudis and sent to join the battle carrying thousands of dollars to help finance operations.

There is more and I hope you remember that your pennies and dollars that go in your gas tank don't stop there. They go into the accounts of faceless corporations who have no qualms at handing them over to dictators who are exploiting the land and people who could benefit from an economy that does more than produce oil. Those dictators do many bad things with what is now their money, including paying people to kill themselves to take a few or a lot of Americans with them. Women around the world are being stoned to death and worse because dictators with lots of money tend to stay in power and tend to become increasingly intolerant. Children are denied education in anything but extreme Islam, which ensures they will never be able to progress economically and will therefore always be vulnerable to militant recruiters.

So, every time we fill our gas tanks, we should acknowledge to ourselves that in that act we are in fact sending some of our money to our enemies. Maybe if we remember that every time, we'll start deciding fuel efficiency really does matter even when the price of gas is relatively low.



p.s. Let me note from the "People are Stupid" file that in December '08 as gas prices dropped, Americans bought more trucks and SUVs than cars for the first time since February. Do these people really think prices won't go up again?