I suppose I'm obligated to say something about the much-ballyhooed cover story in the current New York Times Magazine by the Mighty Mustache of Understanding.
I can't really see what all the fuss is about. It's basically the Mustache's last four or five columns, stitched together. There's nothing to say about this that wasn't said about them.
Naturally, Jim Kunstler will heap scorn on Friedman for stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that everything's going completely to hell any day now. Naturally, energy wonks will kvetch about Mustachian delusions with regard to ethanol and nuclear power. Naturally, the placemaking contingent will deplore the lack of even one mention of public transit. Naturally, the localization contingent will roll their eyes at the notion that globalization is a permanent new economic condition rather than a tenuous and soon-to-collapse side effect of cheap fossil fuels. Naturally, the irked-by-false-balance contingent (er, me) will grit their teeth at the way the Mustache blithely dismisses all the presidential candidates, when obviously some of them have energy plans much better than others, and the quality of energy plans lines up quite nicely with party affiliation.
There's something to all these critiques, but on balance I think the piece is a laudable contribution to the public dialogue. I'm guessing more than half the people who encounter it won't read past the first page or two, and that's where the essential point is made: addressing climate and energy is the central charge of our generation. Green can unite parties and generations. Green is macho and apple pie and puppies and red white and blue and all the rest.
Of those who do read on, very few will be sensitive to the details. In the end, we just need the caveman-esque "Green is good" message to spread. Nobody is more effective at framing that message, and nobody has a wider reach with both the public and (for reasons that continue to mystify) political and financial elites, than the Mustache. So more power to him.
Climate psychology in cartoons: clues for solving the messaging mystery
Children and riot police face off in Canadian “Moms” video
Comments
View as Flat
GreenEngineer Posted 3:10 am
17 Apr 2007
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Jason D Scorse Posted 3:41 am
17 Apr 2007
Friedman's cheerleading for the Iraq War, his subsequent rationalizations, and his despicable take on the "Arab street" as requiring strong-arm tactics and massive violence to keep them in line are unforgivable. Friedman is a hack, plain and simple, whose analysis is often sub-par and his undeserved ego bigger than his mustache.
That being said, I agree with the "green is good" mantra and even better the "green is the new red, white, and blue".
But that being said, the belief that somehow energy security and combating global warming are the same thing is a dangerous fallacy; one that we all need to pay special attention to.
J.S.
I teach environmental economics and blog at http://www.voicesofreason.info. I am a proud liberal, who stands on the shoulders of giants.
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zacaroni Posted 5:25 am
17 Apr 2007
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Gar Lipow Posted 6:51 am
17 Apr 2007
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GreyFlcn Posted 7:19 am
17 Apr 2007
I do like his video.
Nice little succinct concepts put out.
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=46dd3d6fde496927d1d ...
My favorite being that there's no way in hell carbon sequestration will be adopted by developing countries.
You have to develop green technologies which are more cost effective than coal.
And the way to get that to happen is by government leadership in America.
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randino Posted 7:57 am
17 Apr 2007
One thing that annoys me about the mustache is his use of the term "life style" as if America has one unitary life style, like back in the good old days of Leave it to Beaver (a white bread, family comedy of the 1950s for you young'uns). In reality there are dozens, maybe hundreds of life styles in the US, and all of them have their pluses and minuses when it comes to trashing the planet.
Another thing that causes me to wince is the mustache's almost child like worship of free market economics, circa the 1990s. I think the mustache is the last true Neo-Liberal, and he will probably be dated within a few years by his faithfulness to the Market God.
The mustache wants change, but I think he will only back change that prevents change. Real change that would take us off our current suicidal path, would challenge ideologies, interests, politics, and yes, life styles, that would send the mustache into apoplexy.
At the same time I do not judge people like the mustache by my standards, I judge them by the world they inhabit, and with that caveat I think the mustache has served a useful purpose. Let us remember to keep our own counsel at the same time.
Randy Cunningham
Randy Cunningham
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David Roberts Posted 8:00 am
17 Apr 2007
www.grist.org
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Bart Anderson Posted 8:42 am
17 Apr 2007
The question is: do we stay in a little in-group, talking to ourselves -- or do we start making connections with others?
The first rule of practical politics is that to accomplish anything, you have to form alliances. This means working with people who have a different set of ideas than you.
Productive: Emphasizing points of agreeement. Encouraging others as they make progress towards a deeper understanding. Finding projects in which you can work together. Identifying specific areas of disagreement
Counter-productive: Personal attacks Making fun of physical characteristics Moralism and self-righteousness Demanding 100% agreement.
The point is not to prove oneself right and the other person wrong, but to build a movement. As we learn more about the problems of climate and energy, all of our ideas are going to evolve. You, me, Friedman. No one knows it all right now.
Friedman is definitely further along than almost all Republican and Democratic politicians, farther along than 95% of the American public.
That he is speaking out from a bully pulpit is all to the good. It's an opportunity to build a deeper understanding of energy and the environment.
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:55 pm
17 Apr 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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step back Posted 8:27 pm
17 Apr 2007
So if the Mustache starts pumping up the patriotic pulse with his new tag line: Green is the new Red White & Blue, we should follow his cue and embrace it. Never mind all his other politcal follies. The Mustache has been to Peru. He has seen the receding glaciers as clearly as some of us see our receding hairlines. He gets it. So don't knock the Resonant Writer at the NYT when he comes bearing gifts. Accept them with open arms and say, "Thank You Mr. Friedman."
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odograph Posted 11:37 pm
17 Apr 2007
A small farmer bringing vegetables to market in an old pickup truck might move a ton of goods 10 miles on a gallon of fuel. If that.
One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 59 miles by tractor-trailer.
One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 202 miles by rail.
One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 515 miles by inland barge.
One gallon of fuel moves a ton of goods 1,043 miles by container ship.
So, as a rational engineer I'm not going to make a blanket globalize or localize argument ... but I'm going to ask anyone who does to show me their numbers.
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:09 am
18 Apr 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:17 am
18 Apr 2007
I wonder how those numbers shift for food that has to be refrigerated. I suspect that local suddenly becomes a whole lot more important, from an energy point of view with fresh/perishable foods. Never mind nutrition and taste.
But, yeah, grain and such should be grown where it makes ecological sense to do so and moved to market in bulk.
There's another aspect to the concept of local food that isn't often explicitly addressed: Many conventional foods, especially processed ones, make multiple trips from farm, to processing center, to factory, distribution center, and back to the consumer. I have, no kidding, in California bought a bottle of crushed garlic that was grown in California, processed in Florida, and then shipped back to the store in California. That's just dumb. Buying local doesn't always have equal impact, depending on the food involved, but it is an effective means of boycotting the infrastructure that incorporates so much senseless extra shipping.
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:00 am
18 Apr 2007
Back in the 60s even a professor emiritus could get some just by walking in a few protest marches.
These days, Lipitor swigging "wild hogs" such as Friedmann attach themselves to the Green label in the hopes of rubbing up against some young thing at a Step It Up rally.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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odograph Posted 7:00 am
18 Apr 2007
http://www.arc.gov/index.do?nodeId=2571
for large ships:
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/info/estimatesoffu ...
I thought you'd just trust me ;-0
On processed foods I have another amazing number: there are only 224 upstream "energy" calories in a bag of potato chips:
http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/03/carbon-footprint ...
(see also comments)
For me that is a big deal. I had thought that packaged chips would be a worst-case for the multiplier of upstream energy to food content (sometimes quoted as many fuel calories required for one food calorie). Here, it looks like the energy inputs are pretty carefully managed.
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GreenEngineer Posted 9:28 am
18 Apr 2007
The input:food calorie ratio for those chips is in fact shockingly low, almost certainly less than 1:1. Of course, as you point out in the referenced thread, they are fried food in a bag of mostly air: in other words, a very energy dense material.
Michael Pollan has pointed out that our system of subsidized corn production has resulted in a situation in which the cheapest food calories are the most processed and least healthy. I fear that the same may turn out to be true of food energy footprints: The least healthy (calorie rich, nutrient poor, high fat foods) foods, being the most energy dense, are the lowest footprint. Certainly the input:food calorie ratio would be much worse for a conventionally-grown tomato than for a bag of these chips.
One component that the analysis omits is wastage: obviously not all of the bags of chips that get produced, get eaten. Some go stale, some get crushed, etc. Still, that factor probably isn't more than ~10%, so it wouldn't really change the story.
It would be fascinating to look at a table of these sorts of studies that address a variety of foods from many sources. I'd be really curious to know how much embodied energy is present in a variety of staple foods (corn vs. potatoes vs. wheat, etc). It would be interesting to see how the transportation/distribution component varies for, say, canned tomato sauce.
I also wonder how much of Walker's favorable figures are a result of their apparent interest in controlling their footprint. A less-conscientious company might well use alot more carbon to produce an equivalent product. Or not.
The unfortunate thing is,
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GreenEngineer Posted 9:33 am
18 Apr 2007
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odograph Posted 11:47 pm
18 Apr 2007
And they have less motivation than "consumers" for conspicuous consumption.
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:23 am
19 Apr 2007
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odograph Posted 3:31 am
19 Apr 2007
and of course walmart's drive to lowering shipping costs by increasing truck-trailer mpg is well known.
the common (gross) measure of course is "energy intensity." GDP per energy consumed.
energy intensity for the industrial sector has declined pretty steadily since the early 90's
http://intensityindicators.pnl.gov/total_industrial.stm
but commercial buildings have only started their real down-trend since about 2000. not coincidently that's when we saw energy prices increase:
http://intensityindicators.pnl.gov/delivered_commercial.s ...
interestingly the residential sector has been on a long intensity decline, a lot trend of higher efficiency:
http://intensityindicators.pnl.gov/delivered_residential. ...
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gmunger Posted 3:36 am
19 Apr 2007
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odograph Posted 3:49 am
19 Apr 2007
But ... if you aren't near a container port, might you be near a rail line?
I mean, the contrast to a blithe "100 mile diet" should be obvious. That guy in the pick-up might very easily burn 10 gallons to bring his ton (or more likely less than a ton) in to town. The train would take a ton ... 2020 miles on the same 10 gallons?
BTW, on fork to field ... an interesting factoid popped up at the excellent Fat Knowledge:
"Turns out a bag of potato chips has a carbon footprint of 75g, while a newspaper comes in at 174g."
http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/04/carbon-labeling. ...
So sometimes it's not the chips, it's the paper you are reading with them!
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gmunger Posted 4:43 am
19 Apr 2007
Sure. And from the rail yard, the container is offloaded onto a semi-truck, which takes the container to a "centralized" warehouse. From there, the container is off-loaded with forklifts, then reloaded onto another truck, which then drives all over town delivering to every retail outlet.
This doesn't mention all the transport that has occurred beginning at the field. Trucked from field to processor/exporter. Maybe more trucks, trains, cargo ships in between.
You acknowledge my field to fork metaphor as simply metaphor, and then ignore its truth. Tell the whole story.
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odograph Posted 5:55 am
19 Apr 2007
But I don't assume without evidence that it must tip the way you think it does.
I mean, do YOU have field to for numbers?
Or are you simply assuming them first, and then assuming that they prove your point second?
(It is not true that trains would uniformly require further "pick-up truck" stages further than farmer's market. Indeed, in the case of supermarkets, it is train and then 50+ ton-mile-per-gallon trucks making the delivery.)
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odograph Posted 6:15 am
19 Apr 2007
"So, as a rational engineer I'm not going to make a blanket globalize or localize argument ... but I'm going to ask anyone who does to show me their numbers."
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gmunger Posted 6:35 am
19 Apr 2007
Yeah, you're right, I'm talking through my nose. I have no hard data. Simply well-informed intuition. Which is far from infallible. But often surprisingly accurate.
Your point about efficiency of transport method is well-taken. But it is only one factor in a complicated mosaic of options.
If we're talking about a stable (as in doesn't spoil) staple item that is not producible in the home region of the fork-wielder, I'll buy into some of what you're selling. For me in the northern Rockies, rice is probably a good example.
But I still believe that by and large, fresh, minimally processed, locally produced food is what is best for farmers, fork-wielders, and their communities.
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odograph Posted 7:07 am
19 Apr 2007
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