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| The Trouble with Carbon |
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| Written by John Berthelsen | |
| Wednesday, 11 November 2009 | |
 photo: Norfolk Gallery In Europe and the United States, the "locavore" movement is gaining momentum, with a rising number of people refusing to eat anything that isn't grown within 100 miles of home. The idea is that locally-based food production will reduce the so-called carbon footprint and help to mitigate global warming. But will it? That 747 air freighter packed with produce will spew roughly one metric ton of carbon dioxide into the air for every 2,000 miles travelled, but the can of beans you get from Africa is likely to have a smaller carbon footprint than the drive you make to the supermarket to buy it. In particular, a New York writer named Colin Beavan has stirred international attention with his just released book, "No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process" (available through Amazon, US$16. 41). Beavan and his family tried to live in New York while seeking to reduce consumption to a bare minimum, including using no toilet paper and, among other things, not eating anything produced more than 250 miles from the city. The book has been widely praised. "We as individuals can take action to address important social problems. One person can make a difference," wrote Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat. Similar gushing abounds. But carbon warming as a component of food production is complicated. According to a study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, transportation from the farm to the supermarket accounts for just 4 percent of emissions related to food, and a minuscule amount of the total carbon footprint. Although the desire to buy local may be laudable, it may have little effect on carbon output. That organic farmer that the carbon-conscious urban customer would like to buy from is likely to haul his produce from his farm to the city in at least a pickup truck or something bigger. The average SUV emits roughly 1.5 pounds of carbon per mile travelled. The production of local food in cold climates, which may require fertilizer, fuel and heated greenhouses, is likely to create far more emissions than growing it in the tropics, where water and sunlight are plentiful. One study by Cranfield University in England, for instance, shows that the carbon cost of growing flowers in Kenya and flying them to the UK is perhaps a fifth of those grown in the Netherlands. Flowers are not food, of course. But one study cited by the Guardian in 2008 involved Kenyan green beans. Kenyan farmers do not use tractors. They use cattle manure as fertilizer, their irrigation systems are simply ditches flooding fields instead of fossil fuel-driven sprinklers, and water and sunlight are plentiful. Home-grown British beans are grown in fields sown with fossil-based fertilisers. They are ploughed by diesel-burning tractors. And, as the Guardian points out, produce grown in the developing world provides employment to legions of the poor. Gareth Thomas, England's Minister for Trade and Development, at a seminar on air freight in 2007, pointed out that driving 10 kilometers to shop in the UK emits more carbon than flying the pack of beans from Kenya. The Burlington & Northern Railway in the United States, in an advertisement, says it can move one imperial ton of freight 680 kilometers on a single gallon of fuel. The organic farmer in the San Francisco Bay area may be doing everything right, but moving his cabbages to a farmer's market in his pickup truck every Saturday will produce far more carbon per unit of produce than either the airfreight 747 from Kenya or the Burlington & Northern train. The Guardian study cites apples, which are harvested in England in September and October. Some are sold fresh but others are chilled and stored for as long as 10 months. The energy used to chill them overtakes the carbon cost of shipping them all the way from New Zealand. In the winter, the study points out, UK lettuce is grown in greenhouses or polyethylene tunnels that require heating. In winter, field-grown lettuce from, say, Spain produces far less carbon even if shipped to the UK. Are you cooking with gas or electricity? Electricity is likely to put far less carbon in the air because it is produced by a plant that may have carbon scrubbers. Natural gas gives off carbon in individual kitchens. Hong Kong, self-contained and isolated from China, is an excellent test case. The territory, with a population of 7.04 million, has characteristics that seemingly should make it one of the least carbon-friendly cities in the world. As much as HK$8,000 in food is imported each year per person including 7.5 million tons of tomatoes alone, for instance, or 7 million kilograms of salmon from Norway. But at 5.5 tons of carbon emissions per capita annually, Hong Kong ranks well behind Singapore, for instance, at 12.3 tons per person, a similar city in terms of function and lack of hinterland. If Hong Kong were a country it would rank 65th in terms of total carbon emissions, producing 37.411 million tons annually according to the UNDP, less than 0.1 percent of the global total – although that figure itself is in question. According to a report to the Hong Kong Legislative Council Panel on Environmental affairs on GHGs in June 2007, "The volume of GHG emissions totalled about 44.8 million tons of CO2-equivalent (CO2-e)2 in 2005, accounting for about 0.2 percent of global GHG emissions. Emissions per capita in Hong Kong, which were around 6.4 to 6.5 tons in recent years, are far lower than those recorded in most of the developed economies such as the United States, (about 24 tons), Canada (about 24 tons), Australia (about 27 tons), UK (about 11 tons), Japan (about 11 tons), European Union (about 9 tons) and Singapore (about 9 tons). Hong Kong's carbon intensity, as measured in terms of GHG emissions per unit of gross domestic product, was 27.6 kg per HK$1,000 of GDP in 2005 and was one of the lowest amongst developed economies," the panel found. But does it? Hong Kong is at the epicentre of some 60,000 companies owned by the territory's residents, kicking up enormous amounts of greenhouses gases in the Pearl River Delta. It all depends on who's measuring what – including the GHGs produced on an organically correct farm in, say, Northern California. Comments (3)
  written by John Francis Lee, November 12, 2009
written by Mamakthir, November 17, 2009
The five biggest Western multi-nationals are trying to corner the global food supply with their genetic foods even as local food movements have sprung up to support the green food.
written by Patrissimo, November 22, 2009
I find this article to be pretty shoddy.
"The average SUV emits roughly 1.5 pounds of carbon per mile travelled." Really? If a gallon of gasoline weighs a little over six pounds per gallon, and if an SUV emits 1.5 pounds of carbon per mile, the SUV must be getting less than 4 mpg. That's average? His other figures don't seem to add up either. I have to wonder why the author thinks that he can get away with this drivel.
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Mockingindian
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Neither the 747 nor the freight train delivers to the supermarket of course. The food is offloaded and reloaded into diesel road transport which then makes the same road trip the local farmer does.
Remember, this article was written by a man who wins prizes for writing articles he doesn't believe a word of, and brags about it..
And he thinks you're stupid enough, ready to grow fur and flippers, to believe this trash.