Global Warming Primer

Long article on carbon footprints:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_specter

We all consume electricity generated by burning fossil fuels; most people rely on petroleum for transportation and heat. Emissions from those activities are not hard to quantify. Watching a plasma television for three hours every day contributes two hundred and fifty kilograms of carbon to the atmosphere each year; an LCD television is responsible for less than half that number. Yet the calculations required to assess the full environmental impact of how we live can be dazzlingly complex. To sum them up on a label will not be easy. Should the carbon label on a jar of peanut butter include the emissions caused by the fertilizer, calcium, and potassium applied to the original crop of peanuts? What about the energy used to boil the peanuts once they have been harvested, or to mold the jar and print the labels?

My thesis has always been that price is a simply a measure of carbon footprint. A good or service is just some representation of a particular way that the universe has been ordered, a way that entropy has been removed from a system. Order is the only thing that has any intrinsic value. Even raw materials have no intrinsic value. They only have value as they are ordered. Gold in a mountain is worthless to me. It is not until it is mined, smelted, and transported to me do I care anything about it. Everything of value is simply a measure of order. A car orders my universe by taking the myriad of vectors that my body could move on and moves me in a ordered direction of my choosing. So all value is a measure of order. So, price is simply a measure of order. Well, the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of the universe is increasing and the only way to decrease the entropy of a closed system is to add energy to the system. So, price is simply a measure of how much energy has been added to the system. Now I know that the burning of carbon fuels is only one way that energy is added to the system. Others include the a masseuse eating an apple that has captured the sun's energy and then her metabolic process turning that energy into useable energy for her muscle cells which, in turn burn that energy in ordering my universe with a back massage. That said, every form of energy can be traded for burned-carbon-generated energy and thus through the huge web that we call, the global economy, eventually the trade that will be to obtain some order will be for carbon-fuels. Thus, if you want to know what the carbon footprint of any good or service is, simply look at the price. Your carbon footprint is equal to your consumption. CarbonFootprint=Consumption. Simple math.

"I wonder. You can feel very good about the organic potatoes you buy from a farm near your home, but half the emissions—and half the footprint—from those potatoes could come from the energy you use to cook them. If you leave the lid off, boil them at a high heat, and then mash your potatoes, from a carbon standpoint you might as well drive to McDonald’s and spend your money buying an order of French fries."

Simple math. Is it cheaper to buy McDonald's fries or make mash potatoes? The answer will tell you the most environmentally friendly thing to do.

Paying attention to the emissions associated with what we eat makes obvious sense. It is certainly hard to justify importing bottled water from France, Finland, or Fiji to a place like New York, which has perhaps the cleanest tap water of any major American city. Yet, according to one recent study, factories throughout the world are burning eighteen million barrels of oil and consuming forty-one billion gallons of fresh water every day, solely to make bottled water that most people in the U.S. don’t need.

Yeah, but so what? If that money is not spent on bottled water that was bottled by the hands of the indigenous people of…wherever, that money would be spent on a flat-screen TV which consumes electricity for the next 10 years. Or the talk about buying local, organic food instead of food shipped from thousands of miles away via airplane. But, what difference does that make? The cost of the local produce is more expensive. That money goes to local Farmer Bob who takes the money and buys an iPod and a computer which burn a lot of electricity. All you can do to lower your carbon footprint is to not spend. It doesn't matter how you spend. Either earn less, or earn and take the money out of circulation by cashing it and lighting the cash on fire.

In his speech last year, Sir Terry Leahy promised to limit to less than one per cent the products that Tesco imports by air. In the United States, many similar efforts are under way.

I don't know why food has become the target of the "Buy Local" campaign. Why don't we say the same thing about TV's or socks or cars or whatever? Why does the carbon matter so much on food but not on a TV?

The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. "In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity," Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2.

Keeps making my point. How do you know what apples are the most environmentally friendly? Price.

Nonetheless, the carbon footprint of the roses from Holland—which are almost always grown in a heated greenhouse—was six times the footprint of those shipped from Kenya.

Duh. If Kenyan roses can compete economically with Dutch roses, it's because they cost less energy to produce them.
Solution. Totally agree with this point:

"This is the greatest remaining opportunity we have to help address global warming," Niles told me. "It’s a no-brainer. People are paying money to go in and destroy those forests. We just have to pay more to prevent that from happening."

We can't change the demand side. If we use less carbon-fuels, developing countries like China and India will only use more. So we have to do it on the supply side. We need more forests (let's pay Brazil and Indonesia not to chop and burn theirs down) and we need new technologies like carbon sequestering, etc. We can work to take carbon out of the air. Working to stop putting carbon into the air is fruitless.