 | The Bullroarer - Friday 30th November 2007 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Australia, The Place to Be: Part 3b |  |
User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
GAIA Host Collective
Phil,
There are some very serious people who disagree completely about the food-mile concept.
Why do you say these guys are wrong?
I don;t understand those guys - they are objecting to locally grown food as if it is some kind of sacrifice. Sure, if there is nobody around where you live that knows how to grow vegetables or raise livestock then you have no choice but to depend on other countries for your food. Or, if you eat Mcnuggets you won't be able to tell the difference of how the "chickens" were raised.
But, I personally find the tomatoes and other products i can get at my locally-grown farmers market to have much better flavor than the store bought stuff (which often has no flavor). You can even get tomatoes out of season (hot house) at the farmers market but they aren't as good.
So for me, it is about quality as well as being more locally self-sufficient and secure.
Dinopello,
The idea is that if you grow your food locally, you actually use significantly more energy/resources.
Plus that it makes you poorer.
I haven't seen any compelling proof of that, but I will not pass judgment on that aspect.
My point was that I eat better food by eating locally grown/raised food and I get to know the farmers and learn from them which is an added benefit. There are many meanings of being "poorer".
Well, the kind of poor we talk about here is the 'less money' kind of poor.
I see. Around here, we include happiness, friendship, education, security and health etc as important things you can be poor in as well.
Fair enough. But how about: not enough to eat?
You cannot expect the world to localize and still have enough to eat. That is a very unrealistic assumption.
So yes, I agree it is important to know your neighbor, but I would suggest it is slightly more important to eat.
As a token, be it incomplete, of proof: all present day localized societies are dirt poor.
At least, that's how we around here think about it.
That would be covered under "health" -LOL!
Yes, this the the key -energy/climate cataclysm. Present day energy conditions are not like they were 100 years ago and beyond and present day conditions are about to undergo accelerating change. It's a matter of what systems are most robust under these changing conditions. Fortunately for me, the more robust arrangement of reasonably scaled systems (locally scaled in terms of just about everything - food, goods, retail, education, governance etc) yields what I consider a better quality of life as well due to what I value.
Yeah - add me to the list of people who think trying to stop trade in food is basically a bad idea (mitigated only by the fact that there is no chance whatsoever of it being adopted at scale, so if a few folks want to do it, it's harmless enough).
Who is trying to stop trade in food ?
I guess I can come out and say I have never understood relocalization either.
I think most people have very little clue how much more efficient mass production methods are. It's cheaper because it's more efficient. Doing things locally will be less efficient and more expensive. The only advantage of local production would be redundancy, but this is a cost people are unlikely to want to pay for.
Specialization and trade arise naturally from economies of scale. Let's say you have Village A and B, and both are capable of pots and baskets. It becomes more efficient for Village A to produce only pots, and B to produce baskets, and then trade.
We have developed that over thousands of years, it's now impossible for it to be unwound to any meaningful level.
It's definately one of those things that some people don't get at all. Some people put *everything* on the cheapest price (and typically, larger consumption) and don't consider any other factors. These people will never understand why I would eat a burger at a local restaurant while they eat more for less at McDonalds. They won't understand why I enjoy locally grown airloom tomoatoes and fresh herbs grown by me while they eat at McDonalds for cheaper. I could go on about how some don't understand why I prefer smaller, local schools rather than more 'efficient' mega-schools, or mega-stores, mega-supermarkets because I like to know my kid's teachers, the shopkeepers and butchers. It makes me feel better. And some can never understand that.
So basically it's a lifestyle choice. I can understand that, I just haven't seen it expressed like that. I got the impression there was more to it.
What more is there than lifestyle choice ?
The tricky part comes in when people who have made the poor choices begin to suffer the consequences, what burden will be forced onto those that have made wise choices.
Maybe "lifestyle choice" was the wrong expression. What I meant it that some people buy designer clothes because it make them feel better, i.e. it's an expression of personal freedom of little consequence.
However you are now apparently contradicting yourself, by saying it's also about sustainability. I would say that is a lot more than just "feeling good".
There is no contradiction. It is about both.
Just like I can decide not to smoke cigarettes and stay in shape because it makes me feel good. If you elect to smoke and be a couch potato, eventually you will suffer the consequences.
Everybody want to 'feel good' I think. It's about taste to some extent and some other thing that is harder to describe.
The taste aspect is simple - the locally grown vegetables and meats and dairy have better flavor. My local diner makes better hamburgers and omletts than McDonalds. Some people may not have a better choice than McDonalds or they may not care as long as it is cheaper and they get more.
Another aspect of feeling good is as I said, harder to describe. It has more to do with a sense of accomplishment, self sufficiency, security, and acknowledgement of the future.
Well you confuse me there because smokers say they smoke because it "makes them feel good". To be honest, introducing subjective judgements about taste and longevity is muddying the water and confusing the real issue.
Presumably, if local produce was less sustainable, you would not "feel good" about it. The fundamental point is that local production is considered more sustainable. All the other stuff you mention is window dressing designed to "sell" sustainability.
That's just it, and why the public process can be so confusing as well - people value different things on a whole range of issues. If this isn;t realized, then the whole discussion becomes muddied.
As to sustainability, some value the future (why I do not know, but I do) and therefore care about sustainability and think it's generally a good thing, while others put less value on future conditions and therefore are at least neutral on sustainability.
Those guys are serious alright: seriously confused. Or perhaps this is just another exercise in deliberate obfuscation in defense of the gods of economics. (Hint: when all the comments include epithets like "green zombies" and "moron" without any further explanation, you know you're dealing with a very opinionated bunch, not reasoned scientific discourse.)
Let's examine the three reasons given for the "absurdity" of relocalization:
Localization isn't just about the energy cost of food. It's also about being able to get food at all, particularly well after the peak, when you'd be happy to get anything to eat regardless of its energy inputs. But these are clearly True Believers in economics, so they wouldn't buy the premise of the non-availability of food due to peak oil in the first place, which makes their perspective seem rational. For them, peak oil is a non-issue, and globalization will go on forever, and it's always and only about the cost of production. Thus the completely nonsensical idea that someone would try to grow a wheat farm in Arizona, which no self-respecting Arizonan farmer would do.
Localization doesn't mean that everybody tries to do everything--that would be an idiotic reading (or perhaps a deliberate misreading) of the endeavor. In fact, it means trying to make do with what each locality can best produce, eating local foodstuffs in season, etc. In that sense, it's no different than what was typical of daily life only 50 years ago.
The first two statements are patent falsehoods, and the third is a canard (this is the first time I've seen localization and semiconductors used in the same context, for obvious reasons...nobody's trying to relocalize them). It would be far more accurate to say that our modern society, our lifestyles, and our lifespans all are a result of fantastically cheap energy than of the division of labor. And localization (again, nobody is talking about relocalizing "all production") does not "reverse the division of labor" in the slightest--it changes the location. Again, this looks like a deliberate misread to me. If it were about division of labor then it would be called "reunification" or something, not relocalization.
Actually, quite the opposite. When the loss of energy makes it difficult or impossible to ship foods hither and yon, only those with locally grown foods will not be facing starvation!
It's also strange to use the 19th century, in which transportation was largely done by animal power and most goods were only shipped short distances, as a proof of their point, right after implying that fuel for long-distance transport would never be an issue. If they believe that foods will always be transportable, then surely localization poses no threat to starvation due to local climate factors?
In short, I find it hard to regard the Cafe Hayek gang as serious observers. Looks to me like they just have an ideological axe to grind in defending BAU.
-C
Energy analyst, blogger, journalist www.getreallist.com
ya, what he said
Richard,
Why these guys are wrong goes back to the joke someone posted on TOD recently about two neoliberal economists who accidentally lock themselves in a pitch-dark basement. As they begin to grow hungry, both smile, confident that their hunger (demand!) will create sandwiches. Or, to paraphrase another quip seen here on TOD, anyone who thinks infinite resources can be extracted from a finite planet must be either a madman, an economist - or a rightwing blogger.
Adam Smith's quaint "invisible hand", the theory of comparative advantage and the power of scaling touted over at Cafe Hayek and Coyote work only in a world where resources are infinite. As the voracious appetite of American consumers - and increasingly the 2.3 billion Chinese and Indian consumers who wish to emulate our wasteful lifestyle - deplete oil, water and topsoil, globalization begins to sink beneath the weight of its naive belief in exponential growth without exponential consequences.
Cheers,
FTR
I wouldn't write off the invisible hand just yet.
While the infinite resources crowd are deluded, so is the idea that markets can't allocate scarce resources - that is their only function (though they can be manipulated of course, and the the allocation is rarely "fair").
I think the outcome of peak oil (from a rational markets point of view) is that we develop substitutes as energy prices climb. This means some filthy fossil fuel alternatives (tar sands, coal to liquids, maybe shale oil if it can ever acheieve a positive EROEI), another energy source with many drawbacks (nuclear) and a raft of renewable energy alternatives...
Its not growth that is the problem, its unsustainable growth.
The market will eventually figure out that the key to achieving "growth" when resource extraction limits are reached is creating closed loop industrial systems...
I don't underestimate the value of free markets in allocating resources efficiently. I just worry about social inertia and the ability of those who benefit most from it (oil company CEOs pulling down $400 million annually, for example, and the massive PR operations they have at their disposal) to obfuscate the risks associated with overconsumption as we hurdle toward various economic and environmental tipping points. Whether the invisible hand succeeds in creating closed-loop industrial systems before its perfectly rational allocation to filthy fossil fuels flips the switch on catastrophic climate change will be an interesting question.
In that light, localization seems perfectly benign to me - a prudent attempt to anticipate what products will be available when resource depletion begins to choke off access to far-flung markets. Also a welcome antidote to the plague of cornucopians appearing daily on CNBC. Of course, my admiration for the concept hasn't stopped me from enjoying produce from Argentina this winter while I can still afford it. It's hard to argue with the invisible hand when it's cradling a mound of succulent blueberries . . .
Mmmm, blueberries :-)
I don't have a problem with relocalisation per se - it has many benefits other than economic ones, as discussed elsewhere in the thread.
I'm just saying (irrational market fundamentalists and corrupt giant organisations notwithstanding) that markets aren't the problem - they will deal with fuel scarcity in their usual way and its best to try and work out how to make this process as smooth and positive as possible rather than imagining that free market economics will just disappear shortly after the peak - as they probably won't.
That "usual way" won't go far. I expect market forces to weed out unnecessary transports first. A lot of the same food is transported in opposing directions, and studies have been done in Europe on this waste.
But when the crunch time comes, that is when physical shortages at filling stations appear and oil production decline rates approach 4% pa as calculated in "Did Katrina Hide the Real Peak in World Oil Production? And Other Oil Supply Insights"
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3052
market forces will no longer work as a substitute for oil cannot be mobilized in the required quantities, especially not under the prevailing PO denial mode which makes preparations for PO impossible. Those from the anti-food-mile web sites can make as many model calculations on how to bring sheep from NZ to UK as they like if the fuel isn't there those transports won't happen. Only when shortages start will we realize where oil is really needed. Governments will have to step in and first allocate fuel supplies to essential services: police, army and emergency vehicles, fire brigades, maintenance trucks for energy supply systems, diesel locos and buses, essential food transport, etc. Only the rest of oil supplies will be available on the "free" market.
Car pooling will also help us for some time until fuel rationing will be necessary, together with price control, for equity and inflation reasons.
The only market which will work then will be the black market.
But back to the food mile:
"The well-travelled yogurt pot"
http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/pdf/wtpp01.1.pdf
The market-dictated post-PO UPS/Fedex delivery vehicle?;-)
http://www.pedicab.com/pedicabs_pickup.html
I actually owned a couple of this company's passenger models for a time. Had so much fun it should have been illegal, but we weren't far enough down the PO slope to make it more than a rather expensive hobby.
FTR
Hi Matt,
You're assuming we can't come up with substitutes for oil (electric transport, more efficient vehicles, some biofuels, some dirty fuels) as we pass the peak, which isn't a view I share (although I try to consider all likely scenarios).
You're also assuming governments would have to dictate quotas and rationing - whereas an alternative is to just raise fuel taxes so the government can outbid the private sector when it needs to (this is a still a market mechanism from my point of view - taxes exist, whether the hard core Libertarians like it or not).
I doubt price controls are likely to occur - they just don't work.
Big Gav,
I agree completely that price controls don't work, but I can envision them being implemented anyway by a desperate incumbent facing re-election. Think Nixon.
Rationing also may have to happen. I wouldn't be happy about it, but if that's the only way to assure that gas gets to farm machinery and freight haulers rather than soccer-mom SUVs, then so be it. I have grown accustomed to eating.
Cheers,
FTR
Rider,
Why would the invisible hand not work for depleting oil resources? It even worked when we didn't use oil at all.
I guess it all boils down to the following question:
Richard,
I wish I knew! Combined with drought - which took down the Mayans and Anasazis - it could be somewhere north of 60 mbpd.
Cheers,
FTR
These very serious people are the so called Austrian school of economics. They believe that private enterprise is always good and that government intervention is always bad. I do not want to get into a discourse here about the merits or otherwise of the free market. Just to place my own views on record, I personally am a free market person, though I am concerned that there has been significant market failure, which the Austrian School seem unable to grasp. This market failure encompasses oil, natural gas and climate change.
Austrian school economists are not able to accept or understand peak oil. They believe price, on its own, will solve our energy dilemma. What they fail to comprehend, even though the maths is so simple, is the combination of field decline rates and the laws of theremodynamics. It really just requires an open mind free of market dogma. Ask any of them why the price of oil is up by a factor of 10 in 10 years and they have no answers.
Their point is that the market must be left to make these decisions. Our point is that the market will not make these decisions in time and things are going to get very difficult. Some are even concerned about mass starvation. I personally tend to fall in the latter camp. My own "solution" is an across the board switch to the taxation of energy instead of labour on a scale sufficient to price in the true scarcity value of energy and the externality cost of CO2. This would very rapidly change behaviour, giving us years more to sort out these problems.
Unfortunately, like lemmings dashing for the cliff, we seem doomed to crash and burn.
Hi SailDog,
I was wondering if you have put down your thoughts on how all this might pan out in the next couple of decades? (I have and would like to "compare notes"... :o)
Regards, Nick.
In defence of lemmings, they don't run off cliffs, nor commit mass suicide of any sort. That is a myth created by Disney film makers.