On Locavorism

I'm fascinated by food trends and issues of agricultural policy, and as someone who dreams of someday becoming a yeoman farmer himself, these are not purely abstract concerns.  The "locavore" movement is certainly good news to one who hopes to be able someday to market the produce of a small, diverse operation. So it's not with great enthusiasm that I agree with the analysis that several of the primary reasons people cite for buying local really don't add up, namely the environmental and food-security.  Here, a small local producer explains why the "buy local" food movement is just another sentimental feel-good trend, and why it would be an environmental disaster if it were actually embraced throughout the culture.

In short, the energy costs of agriculture and food shipment and processing are really quite small: we Americans use more energy powering our televisions than producing the food we eat. Without question the most significant environmental burden of our food production system is the sheer amount of land it takes up, so making a marginal reduction in the already-tiny transport costs at the expense of using more land is hardly a win for the environment.

Black Carbon

Black carbon. As opposed to what, diamonds? Anyway, I'm intrigued by this story that climate researchers have only recently begun to address the effects of "black carbon", i.e. soot, which darkens and warms the ground where it settles, particularly when it settles on otherwise reflective snow and ice. The study quoted suggests black carbon could be responsible for fully half of recorded Arctic warming in the last century. I have no doubt that this effect could be significant; I've seen it firsthand in the Cascades, the windward slopes of which are visibly besmirched with soot blown clear across the Pacific from China. It also seems like this could also help explain the discrepancy of glaciers and ice receding even in areas without measurable warming.

It does make one wonder exactly how the climate gurus are going to incorporate a vast and heretofore overlooked climate mechanism into their vaunted models. See, before they settle out of the atmosphere, particulate aerosols including soot also have a shielding effect that cools the Earth, though only temporarily, (as in the extreme case of the "year without a summer" that followed the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora). So this is me suspecting that precisely modeling the effect of airborne soot that shades the earth and seeds reflective clouds versus glacier-darkening soot that raises ground temperatures is probably a lot more difficult than they're going to make it seem.

That aside, it's a no-brainer that less soot would be a good thing. It's unhealthy and unsightly. I guess that's why nations tend to take care of their heavy soot problems as they get rich enough to afford to, with or without particularly environmentalist motives. Yet another argument that pressuring third-world countries into adopting misguided "green" policies would not only be profoundly immoral, it would also likely fail to achieve the intended "green" objectives.