"Carbon Footprint". A new feature on some British food labels is a "carbon imprint" count, so that people who believe in man-made "global warming" can comparison shop and alter their consumption patterns to produce less carbon dioxide, on the premise that by doing so they can contribute to solving the problem of climate change. The carbon count is calculated from questionable approximations of how much fossil fuel is burned to grow the crops, transport the foodstocks, process them, package them, transport them to the store, and dispose of the packaging. Consumers would then have to add some amount for how much fuel they personally used to get to and from the store.
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The ultimate object of this educational endeavor, however, is not to allow people better to choose whether to buy potato chips or a mango drink (two sample products discussed in a report on ABC News today), but to bludgeon them into consuming less, period. In short, in order to live in a future of "global warming", we must not live well.
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If consuming mangos requires that we spend money on transporting mangos thousands of miles, we should just not consume mangos. What, pray, would that do to mango growers in the Third World?
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If to grow mangos in Britain, farmers would have to heat greenhouses, and they can't do that from hydro, solar, wind, wave, tidal, or other clean energy sources, they would have to burn fossil fuels. So I guess Brits will just have to give up mangos altogether and forever. Because to consume mangos is EVIL. None of us has the right to 'damage the planet' for our own needless preference for carbon-expensive foods or goods.
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What about all those manufactured goods shipped thousands of miles from China? Maybe they are dollar-cheap. But what if they are carbon-expensive?
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Who is going to do this calculus? Is voluntary reduction of the "carbon footprint" today to become compulsory tomorrow? If it can't be grown locally — in one's actual backyard, preferably, with the lowest of low-tech (hand tools and, for fertilizer, manure, perhaps human) — will we just have to give it up, forever? Are we to have envirotyranny, enforced by Carbon Police? Are we to do away with our TV's and microwaves and cars and computers and CD-players and MP3 players and every other device that generates 'needless' CO₂? Forget about vacationing in Europe, touring China, seeing the Taj Mahal. Stay home, you selfish bastards! You're killing the planet!
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No, actually, it is not the First World that is killing the planet, if anyone is. The reality is that the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a function of emissions and absorptions. If one goes up but not the other, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere changes. The obvious solution to the 'problem' of "man-made global warming" is to increase absorption to offset any increase in emissions. How would we do that? Plant trees, water lilies, water hyacinths, and other greenery, outdoors and in. Use algae to scrub generation-station and other industrial emissions. Reduce toxins and silt outflows that kill phytoplankton in the oceans, rivers, and lakes.
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The First World is already doing some of that but should do much more of it, not (just) to reduce carbon dioxide levels. For one thing, plants absorb more than just carbon dioxide. To combat "heat islands", such as parking lots, for instance, we can plant trees in multiple shade islands in the blacktop, which would also shade cars and keep them from achieving meat-roasting temperatures while we're at work or in the store. We might lose some parking spaces per acre, but parking lots would be far more pleasant, cars would be cooler, the whole area would be cooler, and you might even be able to find your car more easily by remembering what the tree near it looked like. Interestingly, deciduous trees would automatically allow more sunlite thru in colder months, when we might want heat islands.
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There are good reasons not to pollute, but carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a natural, biodegradable substance that plants need to create biomass, and biomass removes CO₂ long-term, as much as a thousand years if tied up in the wood of a Giant Sequoia, or for millions of years if formed into a clamshell, snail shell, the exoskeleton of tiny zooplankton, and coral reefs. If chemical poisons kill the phytoplankton on which zooplankton, corals, and everything higher in the oceans' food chain depend, we can indeed suffer rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, as we can if the world's coral reefs are killed by pesticide runoff and silt from hillsides exposed to the rain by slash-and-burn agriculture in the Third World.
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So if we can't reduce emissions, we can certainly curb environmental toxins, silt, slash-and-burn agriculture, and, most fundamentally, fueling all the world's problems, population. Absent putting the brakes on population growth, nothing else matters.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,780 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:55 AM