The reality of eating local

A new study at Carnagie Mellon raises questions about the “energy” impact of eating locally: Ezra Klein summarizes:

The line, then, is that the prudent environmentalist will eat local in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. Bananas shipped from Brazil can’t be good for the environment. But two Carnegie Mellon researchers recently broke down the carbon footprint of foods, and their findings were a bit surprising. 83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and seller (which is the part that eating local helps cut). Additionally, food shipped from far off may be better for the environment than food shipped within the country — ocean travel is much more efficient than trucking.

As Brad Plumer writes, the striking takeaway is that “on average, replacing just 21 percent of the red meat in the ‘typical’ diet with fish or chicken does as much, emissions-wise, as buying everything in that same diet locally.” That’s not, of course, an argument against eating locally. Taste, farming practices, sustainability, and much else point towards local consumption. But buying locally raised meats doesn’t get you off the environmental hook. If you’re worried about global warming, changing what you eat is far more important than monitoring where it’s produced.

Cause and effect

Great piece at Coyote Blog on the relationship of climate and industry to per capita energy consumption by state.

Only getting half of it

Michael at Balloon Juice talks about ANWR and why it won’t help reduce gas prices.

He’s right, it won’t make a large dent in the worldwide oil prices, but the larger issue is domestic production and reduced reliance on Middle Eastern sources, particularly in a strategic sense.

Hot and cold running glaciers

Curious.  I do remember the seventies…

Temperature variations

Interesting stuff at National Geographic:

Earth’s polar temperature has swung wildly—by as much as 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit)—over the last 800,000 years, an Antarctic ice core has revealed.

Appropriate pricing

Great piece at Coyote Blog on western water wars, and how appropriate pricing would go a long way toward fixing the shortages.

Look, the problem is not lack of water.  The problem is lack of market sanity.  Water in the west is regulated and sold in a hodge-podge of complex arrangements and negotiations.   The whole system is too complex to describe here, but at least one general conclusion can be safely drawn about the whole system:  Water is under-priced.

For reference, lets look at my home city.  If building cities in the desert is the new evil, then I live in that great Satan called Phoenix.  And while my electricity charges are enough to get my attention (higher efficiency AC: check; compact fluorescent bulbs: check; solar: still too expensive), my water bill seldom grabs my focus.