Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World

April 26, 2008
From New York Times

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Box Fresh Organics, a popular British brand, advertises that 85 percent of its vegetables come from the British Midlands. But in winter, in its standard basket, only the potatoes and carrots are from Britain. The grapes are South African, the fennel is from Spain and the squash is Italian.

Today’s retailers could not survive if they failed to offer such variety, Mr. Moorehouse, the British food consultant, said.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “we’ve educated our customers to expect cheap food, that they can go to the market to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. All year. 24/7.”

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Kunstler: Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society

February 10, 2007
From AlterNet.org

This is an excellent opinion piece from earlier this year that I've had bookmarked but have only got around to reading now.

Kunstler lists several ways of life that will change in a post-oil / post-carbon society of limited energy. There is always Cold Fusion to come along and save our bacon. He doesn't specifically mention this though the premise of the article is that we have a limited amount of vast amounts of energy left, and given that the development of the science of developing things like Fusion requires VAST amounts of energy, we might not have time.

His list is made up of:

1. Cars are part of the problem - we shouldn't be trying to find alternate energies to run them;
   
2. We have to produce food differently - the current model relies on large input from fossil fuels including for fertilisers;
   
3. We have to change our town infrastructure since they are currently designed for large amounts of car transport;
   
4. We need to transport people and things differently items due to the high cost (in terms of Carbon cost aswell as energy);
   
5. Retail trade will change due to the cost of transporting items;
   
6. Local production will need to increase due to the great cost of transporting items;
   
7. Entertainment will need to come from local activities rather than distribution through the internet and airwaves since these will be less reliable as energy becomes more expensive;
   
8. The educational system will change due to there being less ability for people to go vast distances to centralised education centers (eg. big Universities);
   
9. The medical system will change due to less emphasis on self-interest medicine (cosmetic surgury);
   
10. Life will become local, much like how our (grand) parents (in the 40's) used to live.
    

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A new architecture for our environment

Read the article by George Monbiot that inspired this post.

This blog has talked about biofuels before. Not much, but it is an important environmental issue to consider.

The issues around Biofuels highlights why holistic plans are needed that address all aspects that are to be considered. In engineering practices, you ALWAYS gather all known requirements, known risks and known restrictions together (to some level) before making any plans. This Biofuels issue shows an idea has been taken and run with, without considering all requirements.

Engineering plans start by building an architecture that all sub-systems can exist within. The global environmental problems require a new architecture to be built around how our planet operates. We have a bit of time, but we should start now and use this time to get it RIGHT.

Take building a bridge. Some groups of people may want a giant 200 meter tall structure that has 8 lanes. The restriction may be that the geology on the banks will not support such a weight, with the geology only able to support 4 lanes. We have a similar restriction - we can't support the number of cars (and the population) we have at the current resource level consumption.

The architecture we need to build in this case will support all aspects of our environmental problems. I can suggest the following requirements and restrictions that will go towards forming our environmental architecture (and that impact on the choice of biofuels):

• Support for alternate fuels to reduce consumption of fossil fuels
  
• Reduce number of vehicles
  
• Increase transport by walking, cycling etc...
  
• Reduce deforestation
  
• Stop continued growth of world population
  
• Reduce species loss
  
• Reduce water usage
  
• Encourage local farming
  
• Reduce energy use
  
• Increase energy efficiency
  
• Happy and healthy citizens
  

The world cannot keep going at the current pace. And before mother nature bitch slaps us to the ground, we should consider all these requirements and more before building any solutions.

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The Independant's view on packaging

Campaign aims to reduce the mountains of waste

By Michael McCarthy, Martin Hickman and Geneviève Roberts
Published: 22 January 2007

The shrink-wrapped swede, bought from a London supermarket at the weekend, says it all. Why on earth add a skin to something that's got a tough enough skin of its own?

Wrapping that's entirely unnecessary is not confined to root vegetables: it's everywhere. And today The Independent launches a campaign to highlight how environmentally unfriendly, how problematic and - not least - how irritating the phenomenon of packaging and packaging waste has become.

We are asking readers to be at the forefront of it, to bring home to supermarkets and other major retailers how imperative is the need to slim down radically the avalanche of bags, trays, wrappers, boxes, parcels, cartons, cardboard, plastic, foil and clingfilm that is sweeping over our lives.

Packaging presents a problem for several reasons. Firstly, it uses up huge volumes of natural resources: oil for plastic trays, bags and wrappers; trees for paper, cartons, and cardboard; aluminium for tins and cans; glass for jars and bottles. About eight per cent of global oil production is used to make plastic, of which a quarter is thought to end up in packaging. Secondly, climate change is hastened by the greenhouse gas emissions from the energy used to make and transport the containers.

Thirdly, there is the problem of disposal. The packaging industry claims that, with the quadrupling of recycling rates in the past decade, 60 per cent of packaging is now recycled; but even so, it admits that five million tons of it is dumped in holes in the ground. The UK's landfill sites are filling up and finding new ones is a problem. In 2002, the Environment Agency warned that sites in the South-east would be full in seven years' time. New EU regulations require the UK to cut waste going to landfill by half by 2013, and to a quarter of the current level by 2020.

Fourthly, packaging itself is expensive and adds to retail prices. The Government's Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP) says that families spend £470 on packaging each year, one-sixth of their food budget.

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Food For Oil

This is an interesting blog article I read. It doesn't mention climate change once though does peak oil. It provides a picture of what we may be in for in coming years if the worst affects of climate change happen, pushed along by human nature's selfish reaction to being without.

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

One of the most striking and unambiguous conclusions one draws from economic history is that there has never been a famine in a working democracy. When famine strikes, it usually hits colonies and occupied territories (India, Ireland, Ukraine) or dictatorships (about half of Africa). Sometimes this is a deliberate and brutal attack on a population, using poverty and mass starvation as a weapon of war. Often, it is simply a case of mismanagement and clumsy prioritising. Even this never ever happens in a country where people have their say over who governs them and how, because people can be relied upon to feel pretty strongly about not starving to death. However much they may bicker over the political footballs of the day, there is always a broad consensus on the point of not starving, and any government that lets famine rear its ugly head is brought tumbling down before things get that far.

This point is often missed. Bad harvests, potato blight and other natural catastrophes can bring a famine on, but they are only ever the spark that lights the fire; the real issue being how the pile of petrol-soaked wood got there in the first place. Catastrophes can be dealt with and preventative measures can be put in place, but a government - no matter how benign it tries to be - more concerned with keeping itself in power than with listening to its people will often tragically neglect such measures. Take the example of India, which suffered horrible famines under the British Raj in the 19th century, but since becoming an independent democracy it has always managed to feed (most) of its people, even in the face of worse droughts and failed harvests.

Since this theory was elaborated by the economist Amartya Sen, no convincing counter-argument or counter-example has been found. It is now widely accepted as an iron law of econimcs: democracies do not let themselves starve.

The world, however, is not a democracy.

The arbitrary despotism of global institutions and the effect it has on the world is a topic worth exploring at length (cf Joseph Stiglitz, George Monbiot, the aforementioned Sen etc.). Suffice it to say that the world is ruled not by the will of the people, but by certain priveleged groups within certain priveleged nations. This is a recipe for famine, and we can already see some of the crucial ingredients coming together. Look at how the EU and the US routinely and deliberately undermine the agricultural economies of their poorer neighbours, protecting their markets from Third World products but dumping artificially underpriced products on Third World markets. Look how the IMF makes a point of interfering in the economic policies of countries in difficulty just because it can, to the extent that a government may be forced out of office due to unpopular economic policies but its successor will be powerless to change those policies (A striking example of this being Ecuador, which has gone through a ludicrous number of presidents in the last decade, all of whom have been forced from office on very similar grounds).

Despite all this, we have so far managed to produce enough food to feed the world, even if we haven’t been able to distribute it properly. We will not, however, able to do so for long. The kind of intense agriculture prevalent in the more successful producer companies either destroys its environment, requires a hell of a lot of oil (as fuel for heavy farming equipment or as a source of chemical fertilisers), or both.

Growing one crop in the same place for years almost always reduces the quality of the soil, and can in extreme cases turned fertile soil to desert. Crop rotation, on the other hand, takes time and impacts upon short-term profits, and as such is unacceptable under capitalism as we know it. The same applies to water (mis)management, and it is alarming to note that even as our population and food needs grow, so do our deserts.

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Livestock generate 18 percent of world's greenhouse gases

A new report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that domestic animals are a major source of greenhouse gases, producing 18% of the world's total - even more than transportation. Unless more sustainable techniques such as controlling soil erosion, providing animals with better diets, and using water more efficiently are adopted, the environmental impact of animal production will worsen, as world production of meat and dairy products is expected to double by 2050.

Source: Union of Concerned Scientists.
Read the report.

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New report: GM crops remain unsustainable and unviable

Commenting on a Friends of the Earth report out today on GM crops, Greens have reiterated their call for a robust and effective GM strategy in Scotland, and have criticised the repeated delays to the consultation that should precede that strategy.

According to the report out today:

• GM crops commercialised have on the whole increased rather than decreased pesticide use
  
• GM crops do not yield more than conventional varieties
  
• the environment has not benefited, and GM crops will become increasingly unsustainable over the medium to long term.
  

Mark Ruskell MSP, Green speaker on environment, has proposed a bill at Holyrood to make GM companies strictly liable for any economic damage as a result of contamination caused by GM crop trials and commercialisation.


Mr Ruskell said, "This report proves that GM crops are bad news for the environment and for farmers around the world. The lack of consumer demand sends a strong message to biotech companies that their attempts to foist GM onto an unwilling public have so far been fruitless.

"The Executive needs to recognise how crucial this issue is to the future of Scottish agriculture, and ensure a robust strategy is developed to protect our farmers from the financial ruin faced by their counterparts in Canada and the US who have suffered GM contamination of their crops. So far Labour and LibDem ministers have shirked from the tackling this problem but they urgently need to address this for the sake of our farmers, consumers and the environment."

The Executive has repeatedly delayed a crucial consultation on the threat of GM crops and in November 2006 announced that it will not take place until this summer, after the next election. Ministers were due to issue proposals on the "co-existence" of GM crops in summer 2005, and Greens argue that the delays indicates Labour and LibDems' fear of drawing attention to their support for GM crops.

Read the article.

Story also at EU Business .com.

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