4 ms·

It's not cutting the climate-change impact of food. It's cutting the climate-change impact of food miles. As you say, overall it's making things worse, e.g. i

It's not cutting the climate-change impact of food. It's cutting the climate-change impact of food miles. As you say, overall it's making things worse, e.g. increasing the climate-change impact of every other delivery but food.

nostrebored 4y ago
But this is fundamentally flaws analysis. Lack of economies of scale mean you have to analyze the production of food bottoms-up. What's the cost of getting the resources needed to each of these individual farms and to support the life of people there? The thing people don't realize is that industrial farming is actually extremely carbon-emission efficient. Even your food coming from a container ship from halfway around the world, transported via freight, and driven last mile in a semi is less carbon intensive than getting a delivery from a local (XX miles away) farm. This seems to be trivially true as well for an entire city of inefficient farms with any expectation of modern amenities.
- beembeem 4y ago
  Composting and rain water harvesting give you much of what you need. Not much is needed from far away.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
- eecc 4y ago
  Uh, what? Please substantiate, I don’t buy such statements at face value
belligeront 4y ago
It's people that have the highest impact milage. We can pack food tightly into a truck and they don't mind waiting when the packing takes some time. We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks, so reducing their miles traveled has a much bigger effect (and if the distances are shorter they can also walk/bike/bus instead of single occupancy vehicle).
- stouset 4y ago
  Regardless, the relative price of food is usually a reasonable proxy for the amount of energy that went into its production. If the food from the urban farm is more expensive than equivalent food from an industrial farm, it probably took more energy to produce (and consequently probably released more greenhouse gases during its production).
  - fold3 4y ago
    I find your message confusing, when you say price, do you talk about final retail price or production cost? (fruits and vegetable are high margin products in food distribution) When you talk about energy, do you take into account human labour? Natural ressources are considered free in our current economic system, that is why it is cheaper to grow food by damaging the amazonian forest with nasty coal/oil fed machine rather than doing local permaculture with more human beings and passive tools.
    - stouset 4y ago
      Note that I said “equivalent food”. And I also only spoke of energy, not other forms of damage to the environment.
- beaconstudios 4y ago
  > We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks We basically can, with decent urban transit and rail services.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    How many pounds of people can fit in a bus? How many pounds of potatoes? People need vastly more room than produce.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Maximum tractor-trailer weight in the US is 80,000 lb, with typical weight closer to 44,000 lb. Dry weight is about 32,000 lb, for a maximum payload of 48,000 lb. An articulated bus has a curb weight of about 35,000 lb and a capacity of up to 92 passengers. At 177 lb each, that's a gross weight of 51,284 lb. (net: 16,284 lb of passengers). I'd presume a potato's density is close to that of water. As such, capacity is actually mass rather than volume-constrained --- you'd be unable to fill a truck to its volumetric carrying capacity before exceeding gross vehicle weight limits. Many grocery products have much lower density: chips, bread, paper products, etc. I still tend to agree it makes more sense to move goods than people, but the differential may not be quite as great as you might think.
sandworm101 4y ago
Food-miles sound good, but the reality of modern shipping is that it takes far less energy to move food than grow it. The carbon/energy cost of bringing a plant product from a hot country to a cold country is far less than the energy needed to grow that product in a cold country. That's why nobody grows bananas in new york. We could, but the cost/energy to do so is hugely more than the energy to ship bananas from place where they grow easily. If we want to address global climate change, then we need to look into minimizing total energy put into things like food. Often that will mean growing things where they can grow most easily, with the least amount of energy. A banana brought thousands of miles by very efficient transport is more sustainable than grown in an ill-suited climate through the application of energy-expensive heat/light etc. Distance is not everything.
- uoaei 4y ago
  In-built into this comment is the implicit entitlement of the globalist consumer: that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Reducing food-miles by feeding people locally-first would drop food-miles drastically, possibly more than other proposals thus far. Minimizing total energy is indeed the name of the game. To do that, we have to recognize that we may have over-extended a little bit as a civilization, and to pull back on some of the more hubristic enterprises like bananas in Maine or avocados in Sweden during winter in the Northern hemisphere. We can still have those things, but at a minimum the costs for the consumer should reflect the costs of transportation, including costs normally externalized (excluded) from supply chain analyses.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Interesting you should mention that, this was actually the dinner table subject a few days ago when I explained to my kids that what they think is 'normal' has only been the case for a couple of decades at best and that in the not so very distant past winter meant that you were not going to have a whole lot of fresh stuff. They found it quite incredible that you would not be able to buy apples or bananas year round.

nostrebored 4y ago

But this is fundamentally flaws analysis. Lack of economies of scale mean you have to analyze the production of food bottoms-up. What's the cost of getting the resources needed to each of these individual farms and to support the life of people there? The thing people don't realize is that industrial farming is actually extremely carbon-emission efficient. Even your food coming from a container ship from halfway around the world, transported via freight, and driven last mile in a semi is less carbon intensive than getting a delivery from a local (XX miles away) farm. This seems to be trivially true as well for an entire city of inefficient farms with any expectation of modern amenities.

beembeem 4y ago
Composting and rain water harvesting give you much of what you need. Not much is needed from far away.
- beebeepka 4y ago
eecc 4y ago
Uh, what? Please substantiate, I don’t buy such statements at face value

belligeront 4y ago

It's people that have the highest impact milage. We can pack food tightly into a truck and they don't mind waiting when the packing takes some time. We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks, so reducing their miles traveled has a much bigger effect (and if the distances are shorter they can also walk/bike/bus instead of single occupancy vehicle).

stouset 4y ago
Regardless, the relative price of food is usually a reasonable proxy for the amount of energy that went into its production. If the food from the urban farm is more expensive than equivalent food from an industrial farm, it probably took more energy to produce (and consequently probably released more greenhouse gases during its production).
- fold3 4y ago
  I find your message confusing, when you say price, do you talk about final retail price or production cost? (fruits and vegetable are high margin products in food distribution) When you talk about energy, do you take into account human labour? Natural ressources are considered free in our current economic system, that is why it is cheaper to grow food by damaging the amazonian forest with nasty coal/oil fed machine rather than doing local permaculture with more human beings and passive tools.
  - stouset 4y ago
    Note that I said “equivalent food”. And I also only spoke of energy, not other forms of damage to the environment.
beaconstudios 4y ago
> We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks We basically can, with decent urban transit and rail services.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  How many pounds of people can fit in a bus? How many pounds of potatoes? People need vastly more room than produce.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Maximum tractor-trailer weight in the US is 80,000 lb, with typical weight closer to 44,000 lb. Dry weight is about 32,000 lb, for a maximum payload of 48,000 lb. An articulated bus has a curb weight of about 35,000 lb and a capacity of up to 92 passengers. At 177 lb each, that's a gross weight of 51,284 lb. (net: 16,284 lb of passengers). I'd presume a potato's density is close to that of water. As such, capacity is actually mass rather than volume-constrained --- you'd be unable to fill a truck to its volumetric carrying capacity before exceeding gross vehicle weight limits. Many grocery products have much lower density: chips, bread, paper products, etc. I still tend to agree it makes more sense to move goods than people, but the differential may not be quite as great as you might think.

sandworm101 4y ago

Food-miles sound good, but the reality of modern shipping is that it takes far less energy to move food than grow it. The carbon/energy cost of bringing a plant product from a hot country to a cold country is far less than the energy needed to grow that product in a cold country. That's why nobody grows bananas in new york. We could, but the cost/energy to do so is hugely more than the energy to ship bananas from place where they grow easily. If we want to address global climate change, then we need to look into minimizing total energy put into things like food. Often that will mean growing things where they can grow most easily, with the least amount of energy. A banana brought thousands of miles by very efficient transport is more sustainable than grown in an ill-suited climate through the application of energy-expensive heat/light etc. Distance is not everything.

uoaei 4y ago
In-built into this comment is the implicit entitlement of the globalist consumer: that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Reducing food-miles by feeding people locally-first would drop food-miles drastically, possibly more than other proposals thus far. Minimizing total energy is indeed the name of the game. To do that, we have to recognize that we may have over-extended a little bit as a civilization, and to pull back on some of the more hubristic enterprises like bananas in Maine or avocados in Sweden during winter in the Northern hemisphere. We can still have those things, but at a minimum the costs for the consumer should reflect the costs of transportation, including costs normally externalized (excluded) from supply chain analyses.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Interesting you should mention that, this was actually the dinner table subject a few days ago when I explained to my kids that what they think is 'normal' has only been the case for a couple of decades at best and that in the not so very distant past winter meant that you were not going to have a whole lot of fresh stuff. They found it quite incredible that you would not be able to buy apples or bananas year round.