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I noticed... Limes grown in ... Peru or Uruguay, packed in ... Europe (might have been Italy, but maybe Poland)... then shipped to someplace in the US, then dri

I noticed... Limes grown in ... Peru or Uruguay, packed in ... Europe (might have been Italy, but maybe Poland)... then shipped to someplace in the US, then driven to me. This was on a bottle of lime juice. That is all of ... $1? Yet... I'd need to buy dozens of limes just to squeeze enough juice to get half that small bottle.

ericmay 4y ago
> That is all of ... $1? That's all of $1 of realized cost. It's not accounting for negative externalities to the environment, depletion of non-renewable natural resources that future people may rely on, or poor living conditions/wage slavery/etc. Though some of that would certainly be offset by economies of scale so there's some number greater than $1 that would reflect the true "global cost" of doing that. It's just unknown and not measured.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  And yet the vast majority of pollution will be created by somebody using their car to drive to the store and back when buying goods. This is even true for fruit that’s flown in.
  - more_corn 4y ago
    This is simply not true. Consumer transportation accounts for a tiny fraction of global energy use. This is a common tactic for blame shifting to excuse the complete lack of effort and egregious waste from the corporate and industrial sectors. Shame on you for blindly picking it up and retransmitting it.
    - evr1isnxprt 4y ago
      Shame on you for ignoring the industrial feedback loop that is required to make consumer vehicles. The building and refueling of gas stations. Shipping replacement parts. The trip to the store is not their only impact. You’re cherry picking a stat that represents the smallest part you want to take responsibility for but demand for all of it as resource costs.
    - therealdrag0 4y ago
      You seem to be changing focus. Op is pointing out that 10k fruit transported has a very low amortized cost per piece, whereas driving to the store has a low number of goods to amortize over. This was pointed out on a freakanomics episode. Furthermore last I checked the academic analysis I could find found that Amazon prime delivery has smaller footprint than driving to the store unless you’re getting like 14 items at once for similar reasons.
    - banannaise 4y ago
      It also completely discounts the policy decisions that lead to the car being driven. The driver didn't choose to defund public transportation and build widely spaced infrastructure that largely requires car travel.
  - ithkuil 4y ago
    Your statement is very interesting and thought provoking. I'd like to know if it's true. It sounds like one of those things that are "to good to be true". Is it possible that you're conflating the total of transportation pollution per capita with the part of it that has to do with driving to the grocery store for that?
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      Just napkin mathing it, it doesn't seem like it would be surprising in the least due to mass transport. Take the cargo ship for instance. In looking up the numbers, a single large cargo ship can carry upwards of 20,000 20-foot long cargo containers each with a volume of ~1200 cubic feet. So that's 24 million cubic feet of storage. Break that down into pollution per item, it's going to be some value that's effectively zero. And the same is going to be true for most other transportation and movement along the overall pipeline, which is all going to be done at a large scale to reduce costs. And then you enter the picture. You drive 15 miles there, and 15 miles back in your vehicle - to pick up 6 limes, a few sprigs of mint, and a bottle of rum. The cost of transport/mile/unit there is easily going to be orders of magnitude greater than any other part of the trip, and it's not hard to imagine it exceeds the entire cost of the rest combined.
      - ithkuil 4y ago
        15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far. Also, I wasn't comparing the cost of shipping lime from south america to europe, but I was comparing it with the cost of shipping limie from south america to vietnam to do the packaging and then back to europe to do the consuming which is more than double the pollution. You need to unload the ships, move the trucks to the places where people do the packaging, move the goods back into a ship, unload the stuff again, drive it all the way to other warehouses etc etc
        Maursault 4y ago
        > 15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far. When you think about it, most populated areas in the US are rural, sparsely populated areas. It may be 20 miles to the nearest store, and that store may only be a 7-11. I feel lucky to have found a nice spot in a rural area that is only 8 miles to the Walmart, and that really hurt recently with gas prices, still does.
- lazide 4y ago
  Since no one is making anyone pay those, those aren’t ‘real’ costs. I could throw a couple more on there too, doesn’t change the economics any.
  - mihaic 4y ago
    Most taxpayers in western countries will pay for those costs in the next decades.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Sounds like a problem for future taxpayers, not current economic actors (not advocating, just doing the math).
      - ericmay 4y ago
        I think you're right here, but what tends to get lost from those who stop at "Sounds like a problem for future taxpayers" is that those taxpayers might be them if they're young enough, but will certainly be their children and grandchildren and the other citizens of their country (and the Earth itself).
        lazide 4y ago
        That’s an awful lot of long term thinking based on projections of future impacts that may never come true. Hard to pay attention to if you’re worried if you’re going to be solvent next quarter.
        ericmay 4y ago
        Right, which is why (and I think this would just naturally arrive via a filtering mechanism) this is such an insidious problem. It's going to happen, and it is happening, but humans aren't very good (not incapable) at such long-term thinking especially on a planetary scale. I live in Ohio, freak ice storms and power problems in Texas might as well be in Pakistan where they had that recent flooding (note I'm just using these as examples and not attributing them specifically to climate change although they may be related). As long as the mall is still open and I have a job it's like.. what climate change? And then when you add in both reasonable and unreasonable disagreement, you just get stuck... and if the problem is real and is going to cause big problems, well you're really betting the farm that you'll be able to come up with a planetary level solution in short order or else you're just hopelessly stuck with whatever happens to you. As I look at the situation what I see are a few scenarios: 1. It's not bad and there won't be any long term effects. 2. It's pretty bad but the long term effects won't be that bad. 3. It's very bad and the long term effects will be quite bad. 4. (some combination including small/medium impact, etc.). The thing is that it doesn't really cost much to address 1. and 2. and we get some nice benefits anyway like lower levels of pollution, maintenance of resources like fisheries or forests or whatever. But if it's 3. and we don't do anything we are mega fucked or we will need a very lucky and well-timed solution. Elon said something to the effect of "let's not find out if we get lucky or find a solution" and to that I wholeheartedly agree.
- deelowe 4y ago
  Of course some of those externalities are factored in. This happens via regulation. Here's one recent example: https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry-begins-cleaning-up-its-dirty-fuels https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry... Or do you mean all negative externalities? To me, that seems akin to the coastline paradox.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    The coastline paradox comes from the fact that the length of the coastline is literally undefinable; there's always a closer level of granularity you could use to get a longer coast. For externalities, it seems like there fundamentally is a correct cost -- doing all the accounting might be a real pain though.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    The coastline paradox is actually a great example. You can never price in all externalities, but you sure as hell can improve your pricing of externalities from what it is (in the same way a 1km resolution of coastline is better than a 100,000km resolution)
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      Not really. One is kinda a fractal and one is kinda a converging geometrical series I believe?
      - RC_ITR 4y ago
        I would love for you to go one layer deeper on how pricing externalities is a converging geometric series.
  - oblio 4y ago
    He means the biggest ones. We're only accounting for a very small percentage of externalities. Let's not build up strawmen.
notatoad 4y ago
>I'd need to buy dozens of limes just to squeeze enough juice to get half that small bottle. i know this is completly off-topic, but commercial lime juice is made by mulching whole limes finer and finer until they essentially liquefy, not squeezing the juice, so they get much higher yields.
- jacobyoder 4y ago
  wow... didn't know that. thanks!
pvaldes 4y ago
> I'd need to buy dozens of limes Or to add industrial citric acid and water to a 2% of lime juice so you can sell it by 1$.

ericmay 4y ago

> That is all of ... $1? That's all of $1 of realized cost. It's not accounting for negative externalities to the environment, depletion of non-renewable natural resources that future people may rely on, or poor living conditions/wage slavery/etc. Though some of that would certainly be offset by economies of scale so there's some number greater than $1 that would reflect the true "global cost" of doing that. It's just unknown and not measured.

jupp0r 4y ago
And yet the vast majority of pollution will be created by somebody using their car to drive to the store and back when buying goods. This is even true for fruit that’s flown in.
- more_corn 4y ago
  This is simply not true. Consumer transportation accounts for a tiny fraction of global energy use. This is a common tactic for blame shifting to excuse the complete lack of effort and egregious waste from the corporate and industrial sectors. Shame on you for blindly picking it up and retransmitting it.
  - evr1isnxprt 4y ago
    Shame on you for ignoring the industrial feedback loop that is required to make consumer vehicles. The building and refueling of gas stations. Shipping replacement parts. The trip to the store is not their only impact. You’re cherry picking a stat that represents the smallest part you want to take responsibility for but demand for all of it as resource costs.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    You seem to be changing focus. Op is pointing out that 10k fruit transported has a very low amortized cost per piece, whereas driving to the store has a low number of goods to amortize over. This was pointed out on a freakanomics episode. Furthermore last I checked the academic analysis I could find found that Amazon prime delivery has smaller footprint than driving to the store unless you’re getting like 14 items at once for similar reasons.
  - banannaise 4y ago
    It also completely discounts the policy decisions that lead to the car being driven. The driver didn't choose to defund public transportation and build widely spaced infrastructure that largely requires car travel.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  Your statement is very interesting and thought provoking. I'd like to know if it's true. It sounds like one of those things that are "to good to be true". Is it possible that you're conflating the total of transportation pollution per capita with the part of it that has to do with driving to the grocery store for that?
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    Just napkin mathing it, it doesn't seem like it would be surprising in the least due to mass transport. Take the cargo ship for instance. In looking up the numbers, a single large cargo ship can carry upwards of 20,000 20-foot long cargo containers each with a volume of ~1200 cubic feet. So that's 24 million cubic feet of storage. Break that down into pollution per item, it's going to be some value that's effectively zero. And the same is going to be true for most other transportation and movement along the overall pipeline, which is all going to be done at a large scale to reduce costs. And then you enter the picture. You drive 15 miles there, and 15 miles back in your vehicle - to pick up 6 limes, a few sprigs of mint, and a bottle of rum. The cost of transport/mile/unit there is easily going to be orders of magnitude greater than any other part of the trip, and it's not hard to imagine it exceeds the entire cost of the rest combined.
    - ithkuil 4y ago
      15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far. Also, I wasn't comparing the cost of shipping lime from south america to europe, but I was comparing it with the cost of shipping limie from south america to vietnam to do the packaging and then back to europe to do the consuming which is more than double the pollution. You need to unload the ships, move the trucks to the places where people do the packaging, move the goods back into a ship, unload the stuff again, drive it all the way to other warehouses etc etc
      - Maursault 4y ago
        > 15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far. When you think about it, most populated areas in the US are rural, sparsely populated areas. It may be 20 miles to the nearest store, and that store may only be a 7-11. I feel lucky to have found a nice spot in a rural area that is only 8 miles to the Walmart, and that really hurt recently with gas prices, still does.
lazide 4y ago
Since no one is making anyone pay those, those aren’t ‘real’ costs. I could throw a couple more on there too, doesn’t change the economics any.
- mihaic 4y ago
  Most taxpayers in western countries will pay for those costs in the next decades.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Sounds like a problem for future taxpayers, not current economic actors (not advocating, just doing the math).
    - ericmay 4y ago
      I think you're right here, but what tends to get lost from those who stop at "Sounds like a problem for future taxpayers" is that those taxpayers might be them if they're young enough, but will certainly be their children and grandchildren and the other citizens of their country (and the Earth itself).
      - lazide 4y ago
        That’s an awful lot of long term thinking based on projections of future impacts that may never come true. Hard to pay attention to if you’re worried if you’re going to be solvent next quarter.
        ericmay 4y ago
        Right, which is why (and I think this would just naturally arrive via a filtering mechanism) this is such an insidious problem. It's going to happen, and it is happening, but humans aren't very good (not incapable) at such long-term thinking especially on a planetary scale. I live in Ohio, freak ice storms and power problems in Texas might as well be in Pakistan where they had that recent flooding (note I'm just using these as examples and not attributing them specifically to climate change although they may be related). As long as the mall is still open and I have a job it's like.. what climate change? And then when you add in both reasonable and unreasonable disagreement, you just get stuck... and if the problem is real and is going to cause big problems, well you're really betting the farm that you'll be able to come up with a planetary level solution in short order or else you're just hopelessly stuck with whatever happens to you. As I look at the situation what I see are a few scenarios: 1. It's not bad and there won't be any long term effects. 2. It's pretty bad but the long term effects won't be that bad. 3. It's very bad and the long term effects will be quite bad. 4. (some combination including small/medium impact, etc.). The thing is that it doesn't really cost much to address 1. and 2. and we get some nice benefits anyway like lower levels of pollution, maintenance of resources like fisheries or forests or whatever. But if it's 3. and we don't do anything we are mega fucked or we will need a very lucky and well-timed solution. Elon said something to the effect of "let's not find out if we get lucky or find a solution" and to that I wholeheartedly agree.
deelowe 4y ago
Of course some of those externalities are factored in. This happens via regulation. Here's one recent example: https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry-begins-cleaning-up-its-dirty-fuels https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry... Or do you mean all negative externalities? To me, that seems akin to the coastline paradox.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  The coastline paradox comes from the fact that the length of the coastline is literally undefinable; there's always a closer level of granularity you could use to get a longer coast. For externalities, it seems like there fundamentally is a correct cost -- doing all the accounting might be a real pain though.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  The coastline paradox is actually a great example. You can never price in all externalities, but you sure as hell can improve your pricing of externalities from what it is (in the same way a 1km resolution of coastline is better than a 100,000km resolution)
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Not really. One is kinda a fractal and one is kinda a converging geometrical series I believe?
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      I would love for you to go one layer deeper on how pricing externalities is a converging geometric series.
- oblio 4y ago
  He means the biggest ones. We're only accounting for a very small percentage of externalities. Let's not build up strawmen.

notatoad 4y ago

>I'd need to buy dozens of limes just to squeeze enough juice to get half that small bottle. i know this is completly off-topic, but commercial lime juice is made by mulching whole limes finer and finer until they essentially liquefy, not squeezing the juice, so they get much higher yields.

jacobyoder 4y ago
wow... didn't know that. thanks!

pvaldes 4y ago

> I'd need to buy dozens of limes Or to add industrial citric acid and water to a 2% of lime juice so you can sell it by 1$.