Thoughts For Our Time, No. 1: How d’you like them apples?!
The Set-Up
I meant to do a post about this a week ago, but I somehow didn’t get round to it, so I’m using a bit of me flexitime to get it done now, before I go and forget.
There’s a lot of talk being talked with regard to the environment, at the moment, and the fact it’s screwed and we’re in for a seriously crap time during the next century or so. This is all very depressing, and nobody’s doing much about it beyond saying “this is bad, but we’re going to try and sustain our current habits anyway,” which is tiresome.
About a week back, as I say, Ruth and I had a conversation about the way food gets ferried around the world, and then around the country, for no real reason. It’s all pretty stupid – take Rowse honey, for example, which comes
in many tasty varieties, all of them fairly goopy and in jars.
Rowse have a factory in Wallingford, roughly next door to the Habitat warehouse. From there, insofar as I can tell, the honey is put into jars, given labels and loaded onto a truck. The truck takes it to a distribution centre, where is is collected by various representatives of the supermarkets and other shops which stock the honey with a view to selling it on to such honey-seeking shoppers as come through their doors. The supermarkets drive it to their distribution centres, then load it onto trucks and deliver it on a store-by-store basis, with the end result that the particular jar of honey we’ve been following ends up on a shelf in Waitrose, Wallingford, approximately a quarter of a mile away from where it started out some days earlier.
This cannot, in a world containing inventions such as the Wheelbarrow ™ be a sensible use of resources. Nor can shipping apples from South Africa – prime temperate apple-growing climate – to the prime temperate apple-growing climate of the UK, over 6,000 miles away, be considered remotely sensible. Shipping pineapples and things which don’t grow well over here perhaps makes sense. Shipping apples? What the Hell for? So we can eat apples all year round, and strawberries even in the winter? That’s certainly a convincing “pro” for excusing global warming; I wonder why nobody thought of using it before…
The Hook:
Now I can’t arrange all of this by myself, you understand – I need help from things like the Government and people with money like the supermarkets, so I doubt it’ll ever really happen. However, I reckon the following plan might just work, if only people would back it, and that won’t happen if I don’t tell anyone about it.
What we need is proper information about how far food has travelled to get to where it is when we buy it. That’s the first hurdle. Now I reckon anything up to a hundred miles or so is fair enough, maybe two hundred and then you can cover Scotland without too much trouble.
So you’re now in a supermarket in which you have chiller cabinets where the milk bottles clearly state that some of the milk has travelled – not necessarily come from, mark you, but travelled (remember our jar of honey, from before? – to get there. Some of it, having gone about 70 miles, costs a reasonably typical 90 pee. Some of it, which has managed to go 215 miles costs, say, £1.50.
Yonder we have apples. Those from the orchard down the road are priced at whatever 50 pee a pound is in metric. The ones from South Africa cost about six times that.
…Interesting… Can you see what we’re doing here?
The Tale:
The plan is we slap a nominal tax on foodstuffs that travel more than a distance of, say, 200 miles (although we need to get some boffins in to work out what that precise distance is). The trick, however, isn’t to say “10 pee per mile after the first 200 miles,” but to grade the tax, based on the item in question.
- So for things like milk, which can be got, even in these Dairyman-shafting days, fairly locally, any tax of the sort is going to be about a penny per mile.
- For things like apples, which again, grow in the UK, but not in areas like the Highlands of Scotland, you get a tax of, say, five pence a mile.
- Apples from South Africa, and other locally-available produce that still gets shipped all over the world, take a high tax of fifty to seventy pence per mile after the first 200 miles, which rapidly prices them very highly, making them rare luxury items.
- Things like bananas, which come from a long way off but don’t grow well in the UK still get a fairly high tax – say thirty pence per additional mile – but aren’t priced as highly, because there isn’t a valid local alternative.
- The tax we’re now raking in from this lot can then get funnelled into things like research into bio-fuels, and more efficient forms of renewable energy, and so on. The precise details of that would need to be done by someone who understands such things better than I do, but the main point is there is now readily available funding with which to investigate alternatives to fossil fuels, and high-impact air travel, and so on. Half the problem at the moment is that people working on such things are having a devil of a time getting the money together: no longer. Hooray!
The Sting
What we now have is a system where it costs far more to buy South African apples than apples grown in Devon, for example. This discourages the consumers who blindly wander the supermarkets going “I need apples, here are apples, I will get them,” from buying those items which have a high-impact transit pattern above those who don’t – if it’s costing you an extra fiver to get apples from the other side of the world, you might just get Cox’s instead, no?
This is going to have three main effects:
- Demand for long-travelling food is going to drop, as prices rise. This is going to force down demand, making it less economical to have foods shipped a long way, and forcing suppliers to streamline distribution in order to keep things economical. (Time Rowse invested in a wheelbarrow, huh?)
- Demand for local food, in the manner of a see-saw, rises as distance food falls. Local produce sells better, which reduces the damage done by the large supermarket chains, and the mass-production style farming that’s been making life harder for everyone else – sure, the battery farm in Devon can knock out several million more eggs than the local Yorkshire farm, but by the time they’ve got up there, they cost twice as much… Farmers begin to get a better deal, and don’t get done over by the supermarkets any more – supermarket profit margins are dropping, but local grocers are doing better and better, meaning it’s time to cut out the middle man, forcing supermarkets to offer a better deal.
- Money rapidly becomes available for research into more eco-friendly approaches to everything – fossil fuel alternatives, better distribution networks, and so on. After a while, the money drops somewhat as people buy less of the high-tax, high-distance goods, but money is still coming in because of the token taxes on anything going more than the 200 miles – it’s not as much cash as before, but we’ve just built in a huge time-buying disincentive to long-distance haulage, so we’ve bought ourselves more time to develop the alternatives anyway (and this isn’t supposed to be happening as an alternative to proper funding, but in tandem with it).
So we end up with better distribution logistics, a return to the use of local produce and a boost to the rural economy, a reduction in the power of the big supermarkets to screw over the producers – and, incidentally, a reduction in their profit margins which might persuade them to cut costs by not triple-packing everything – and, because their money is now involved, greater awareness of things like how much impact a ship full of apples has on the environment.
Things which we can only get from abroad do cost more, but they’re only as cheap as they are because supermarkets keep prices artificially low anyway, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and things like South African Apples, for which we have frankly no need, cost far more than their intrinsic value, because, frankly, an apple from 6,000 miles away deserves to be treated like a luxury item that only a few people can afford, rather than the thing everyone munches during a coffee break. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Now I know the supply industry says things like “but we use huge cargo ships – it’s not like we fly the food half-way round the world!” but that, of itself, is not actually a justification: that’s saying “You should be grateful; we could put these babies on a ‘plane, and that’d really screw the icecaps!” and saying “I could be an even bigger bully than I am!” has never been that great as a justification for hitting someone.
I don’t think it’ll ever really happen, since it involves rich people offering to have less money, and there’s probably flaws in it that would need a lot of careful ironing out, but I do still think it’s a damn good idea, even if it’s not a blueprint, and I do believe good stuff could come of it, if only it got thought out properly, and implemented by people who didn’t just kowtow to the rich bastards…
…Ah well. When capitalism collapses, eh?
Comments
Perhaps. I’m still to see evidence that convinces me that humans can have a deliberate effect – positive or negative – on the global climate. I’m all for sustainable economies and reduction in wasted effort and beuraucracy, but this “humans cause global warming” stuff seems hysterical.
Four things:
Dan: please stop being scary
Do you realise how dangerous this complacent attitude is? What exactly would comprise “evidence that convinces you� Should we rely on whether or not a programmer from Wales is convinced or not to do something about global warming anyway?!? (I realise that sounds unnecessarily condescending—if it’s any conciliation, I wouldn’t trust those doing the climate physics option in their four-year Oxford physics degree either whom, incidentally, I’m not even as qualified as since I’m not doing it.)
I can show you a graph of carbon dioxide levels and temperature in the time since the industrial revolution. They’re both going up. Correlation? Yes. Cause and effect? You’re still welcome to doubt.
I can demonstrate through quantum physics that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is likely to cause global warming. You’ll still tell me that the warming could be part of a wider climatic cycle, though, and quite right too. There’s solar variation, ocean circulation, albedo changes and complex feedback loops based on all of the above and more to take into account. It’s a five-hundred variable chaotic differential equation disaster.
The evidence which convinces me is widespread consensus in the scientific community. People with far greater holistic understanding and far bigger supercomputers are telling me, with pretty much one voice, that there is a significant human-induced warming of the planet we’re sat on. This is what should convince you too.
These same people are telling us fairly unanimously that drastic action is required, now, or we’re screwed. How long exactly we’ve got and how screwed are open to question, but the short answer is not long and pretty screwed. That’s why your attitude isn’t that of harmless, healthy dissent, but one which is positively dangerous to the survival of the human race. Please lose it.
Battery farming
But the local Yorkshire battery farm is even cheaper…so, sadly, it’s a bit of a false promise to herald your plan as the end of battery farming.
Boffins
I would just like to draw attention to the fact that JTA is acknowledging us boffins. Woo. He doesn’t do that nearly enough and I thought it was worth emphasising that boffins are important. Though he could get an envelope and try some rudimentary economic calculations because it’s not that scary really.
The Honey Example
It may be more efficient to ferry a small number of jars of honey the long way round than to lug the same number of jars rattling around in the back of a half-empty van the shorter distance. There’s certainly an economic argument to this end, and there may even be an environmental one.
I admit that you recommend use of a wheelbarrow, but that’s only applicable in the tiny number of cases where the locations are actually that close together.
My point is that the whole thing is full of caveats and loopholes. The honey example is good and thought-provoking but may not stand up to scrutiny. That’s why we really need those boffins…
Nice idea but…
You’re levying a tax against imports and from what I remember that goes against ‘free trade’ and stirs up a whole wasps nest of international relations issues. Also there are already taxes levied against products based upon distance travelled; it’s called fuel duty. They have to factor the cost of the fuel in when calculating the sale price so why hit them twice? Why not hit them three or four times? Why not ban the products all together?
The main problem with your plan is dealing with international trade. If you can navigate a solution through those choppy waters then I’m sure there’ll be some other folks to come up with some other problems.
Just one thing:
Statto: please stop being condescending
Do you realise how dangerous this complacent attitude is?
Nope, but you don’t seem to be bringing up any evidence for it, either. You simultaneously argue that my opinion is positively dangerous to the survival of the human race and imply that a programmer from Wales‘s opinion on the matter doesn’t matter. Which is it? Is it dangerous, or inconsequential? You don’t seem to be able to make up your mind.
You’ve got some valid points: no, I don’t think my opinion should be used to dictate, for example, energy policy (although I maintain that I believe I’m right, I understand that my knowledge is not nearly complete in this area). Yes, I know that there are lots of people that say that “humans are causing global warming,” far more than to the contrary – so many more so, that, for example, any scientist who states a dissenting viewpoint has difficulty getting funding for their projects: science is ugly like that – nobody actually wants to pay to disprove things.
Your comments have only made me more militant in my beliefs: rather than taking them and investigating them or presenting me with rational arguments, you have snubbed me with the oft-made consensus argument and completely failed to communicate with me in a rational manner. I would argue that it is your attitude that is more dangerous: your appeals to authority and popularity demonstrate your difficulty with comprehending that you could be wrong.
After all, isn’t it “consensus” amongst most of the world that a deity exists? The “authority” here is not scientists but the so-called “spiritual leaders”? Would you call me dangerous and demand that I “lost my attitude” if I denied the existance of God? I doubt it. Somehow, then, you’re more fanatical about climate change than many evangelists are about religion.
I know I could be wrong. With the growing evidence, perhaps one day I will be proven wrong. In the meantime, I certainly promote an increase into studies into climate change. And in the interim, I’m also in favour of measures that have been demonstrated to be economically sound (e.g. clean-burning fuels, biofuels, etc.) being gradually integrated. I fully approve of rational behaviour in the light of the evidence that is starting to come to light.
What I don’t approve of is arrogance.
I was trying my very best not to be condescending. That’s why I qualified that computer programmer sentence so heavily with an explanation that neither I, nor indeed someone fairly well-qualified, is qualified enough to give an opinion on this.
It is. Mass public apathy, or worse, holding the mad belief that global warming just isn’t happening, is a huge hurdle to overcome since it is consumers that will be paying the necessary price for an environmentally-conscious economy, whether by saving energy directly, or in paying for (the inevitably) more expensive and scarce consumer goods. A bitter pill certainly won’t be swallowed if the public don’t think it’s necessary to swallow it. This could mean the end of the World . The potential consequences really do merit that apparent hyperbole.
Sorry for the incorrect emphasis. Your opinion, as a microcosm of public opinion, is vital as part of the fight against climate change. My condescending statement, if you’ll forgive being patronised further as I reiterate it, is that you are totally, completely unqualified to do anything apart from appeal to authority because the subject is so damn complicated.
This idea of a global warming conspiracy is another dangerous one. Which fat cat’s vested interest is being promoted by the sadistic scientists with their ideological cartel, exactly? The scientists doing this research and campaigning so vocally for it to be taken seriously are going to have their cushy, Western lifestyle, frequent short-haul holidays and strawberries even in the Winter hit just as hard by the 90% cut in emissions we are going to have to somehow make as the poor public they’re peddling it to. It’s an ugly truth.
As for who’d fund it, there are plenty of fat cats with vested interests more than willing to wade in with their profits reaped from oil companies and fund the voices to the contrary. Oil companies spent the whole 1970s funding think-tanks and scientists out to disprove or discredit global warming. They’re still at it now to a limited extent (this article, from a quick web search), though admittedly the slippery oil merchants have now changed their strategy to riding the climate change wave and rebranding themselves as all-green eco-warriors (this page, from an oil company chosen at random, being a good example).
As for nobody wanting to pay to disprove things, there are two points. Firstly, the philosophy of science point that the only real progress made in scientific fields is through precisely such disproof (Kuhn’s “scientific revolutions†or Popper’s insistence on counter-examples and negative theories being popular expressions of this notion). Hanging on to the status quo is in nobody’s intellectual interest. The fascinating frontiers of science are only laid bare when a people come along and rip it all to shreds (the heliocentric Universe, Newtonian mechanics, relativity, the quantum revolution…)
Secondly, a somewhat unconnected but hilariously expensive counter-example: the Large Hadron Collider currently being built at CERN is designed to disprove, or at the very least test the very boundaries of, the standard model, the most successful physical theory ever. Cost? A snip at US$8bn. It seems someone is willing to pay to disprove things…
The consensus argument is neither a snub to your intellect nor is it arrogant on my part. It is an admission by me that I am incapable of providing evidence which will satisfy you. In fact, nobody is probably capable of convincing you, because the number of caveats in any basic statement about the Earth’s climate and its likely behaviour means that you’d need a PhD at the very least before you understood enough about the subject that you could take them all into account and form a coherent opinion.
You can’t expect to understand something so hugely complicated. It is not arrogance but humility to defer to those with increased knowledge in this case.
This is not a cogent analogy. Religion is not the same as climate science.
* Spiritual leaders have not gone through an extremely difficult series of qualifications and published their findings in peer-reviewed journals to almost unanimous agreement from other people similarly qualified. There is nothing subjective about this. Someone proposes a theory, people test its validity. If it agrees with what we have seen over the last few hundred years given the measured conditions (so-called “backcastingâ€), then we consider trusting its predictions about the future. If it doesn’t work, the scientific community throw it out. God is not open to any such empirical testing.
* Whether or not you believe in God is not, in my opinion, all that dangerous. Realise that being a gun-toting religious extremist is not in the same category…I’d advise you just as strongly against taking military action for or against climate change. If you don’t believe in climate change and therefore don’t see the need to act, and other people share this attitude, the World, according to our best current estimates, will heat up by a few degrees. Droughts and famines in Africa will kill billions. Ecosystems will be devastated. Feedback loops could well mean that, having raised the temperature over a couple of degrees above pre-industrial levels, things may never stop. The Earth might well turn into a pressure cooker. Ignoring that possibility is arrogant and dangerous.
I’d still like an answer to my second sentence in my previous comment:
Also, have a read of this rather good, even-handed New Scientist article. Unless you think that the press is part of the conspiracy too?
Surely even if Global Warming isn’t the result of human actions, there’s still merit in the plan (assuming it could work with all the problems ironed out)? That way, if we can have an effect on it, there’s a good chance we do, and if it’s an inevitability that we can’t avoid, people get used to being unnable to afford or readily have foreign imports.
This brings me neatly-ish onto Matt’s point, where he argues (more or less) that since fuel duty exists, why make people pay more? I’d say it’s because people don’t register the impact of fuel duty. There’s no clear link, at the customer end of the equation, between the extra distance and the extra cost, because fuel taxes flat rate out better in bulk shipments than an actual tax per-item-per-mile would do. I think getting people to spot the link is probably half the battle-kerjiggy…
FWIW I think that global warming is going to happen anyway, we’re just speeding it up a little. These things go in cycles. That’s why we have ice ages.
And I’m not sure that using data that shows temperature has been going up since the industrial revolution is valid. After all, were we recording such data before the industrial revolution? Reliably?
JTA,
Yes, I agree with some of your proposals, but not others. There are conceivable benefits to them, aside from the ecological ones.
Stato,
“Evidence that convinces [me],” as a layperson, would consist of several well-argued cases for the problem, presented in a believable way which appears to be scientifically-founded and accurate, which appear to be significantly more reputable than similarly-argued points to the contrary. I’ve looked, and I’m still stuck in the middle, which leads me to accept the null hypothesis. I’m still looking, though.
I resent the fact that you think of me as some conspiracy-theorist, and that you seem to assume that I disbelieve that global warming exists. I fully believe that global warming is occuring (huge amount of hard-to-dispute evidence for it), and I even concede that humans are certainly having an impact on it. I dispute your position on two points: firstly, I am yet to be convinced by a study that indicates that humans can meaningfully affect climate change in such a way as to make any meaningful difference (I’m immediately discounting studies with bad arithmetic), and secondly: I do not see global warming as we are observing it as a significant threat to humans. By significant, I of course mean “worthy of attention over other causes.” On a use-of-resources scale, there are far more important concerns.
The Pacifist,
Absolutely: there’s reasonable evidence to suggest that this planet is an “ice planet” which happens to have warm spells from time to time as a result of solar activity (admittedly, many thousands of millennia long each). And yes, you’re right about the old data: we’ve made changes in the way we’ve measured world temperature over the last hundred years (including the methods used to measure sea temperatures, which are frequently used in modern reports on global warming without stating the margin of error), and when looking at the evidence we’re expected to believe the records over the last thousand years of human history (which seem mostly to be based on guesswork).
One day everything on the planet will die (well, not “one day” like a reverse creation story, but you get my point). But it’s a long way off and there’s a lot of things we can do on it in the meantime, so long as they don’t ban them all in an effort to keep the place habitable for an extra year or two.
Statto,
Followed your link now. Yes, I read that article last year.
http://www.pianoladynancy.com/something_nice.htm
I went to an Institute of Physics lecture about the sun recently, and solar activity has an amazingly close correlation with the temperature of the earth, much much closer than CO2 emissions (they do rise in general, but don’t follow the same fluctuations, whereas the solar graph follows each and every one). What the guy said was, of course CO2 is a greenhouse gas and is bad and should be reduced, but don’t ignore the effect of the sun when making calculations or predictions about climate change. It looks to me like the human impact is a tiny tiny increase on top of an unstoppable solar influence that is set to rise over the next 11 years. I’d love to find the graphs… Jimmy? I really think we should be paying close attention to climate change, but more effort should go into predicting its effects, so we can prepare for it, rather than attempting to prevent it.
Thanks Ruth for the nice flower, I think it looked like ice-cream when it span.
Dan:
Well, read some papers. There are hundreds of the things. Or, take the simple way out and believe all the clever people who’ve read the papers for you.
Would a properly statistically backed-up version of my sample argument above work? ie proof that CO2 is a greenhouse gas followed by a back-of-the-envelope calculation to suggest that humans are making a significant contribution to it?
No, I don’t. I assume that you don’t think human-induced excess global warming about which we can do anything is occurring…and I think that’s a fair summary of your position.
Pacifist:
As I said to Dan, that opinion isn’t “worth†anything because it would be refuted so strongly by such a huge body of evidence to the contrary. The scientists doing this research are aware that “things go in cycles†and take it into account in their models.
No, but we can record data now from ice cores/silt cores/tree rings and such from which we can infer climatic conditions pre-revolution.
Claire:
Does that surprise you? No quantity of CO2 emissions would cause excess global warming if someone switched the Sun off. The problem is that the fluctuations which are tied so closely to Solar output are being modulated over periods much longer than the 11-year sunspot cycle by the increased levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
Do you think it surprises the scientists? Climate physicists’ immensely complicated models don’t just neglect major factors for no reason. Any model which didn’t include solar forcing of the climate would be a crappy model indeed. The evidence is strongly in favour of human-increased global warming even once the Sun and its cycles have been taken into account. And, not meaning to be condescending again, but Solar output really is so obvious a variable not to neglect that I’m not really happy with the previous sentence because a climate model which didn’t have the Sun “taken into account†would be totally worthless.
I don’t agree with that, either. Firstly, predicting the events accurately enough on a local scale (down to which precise hundred square mile chunks of farmland will need irrigation or whatever) is more-or-less impossible. And secondly, you can’t prepare for the magnitude of effects expected if we continue this naïve industrialism: what research exactly do you think will provide food and drink for a planet with nine billion people and not enough farmland or fresh water to go round?
As I said to Dan, that opinion isn’t “worth†anything because it would be refuted so strongly by such a huge body of evidence to the contrary
I like yellow.
Prove it.
Maybe I should have been a bit more specific when I said the lecture was about the sun. I don’t think he meant that other scientists had “forgotten” about the sun entirely, but he did say that most models weren’t taking into account the effect he was describing, that is, the effect corona mass ejections are having on the Earth’s magnetic field. This is not about the sun heating the earth, but about magnetic field effects specifically. I do think it would be stupid to not take the sun into account, but this lecturer said that most models were not taking that particular effect into account, and I tend to accept what scientists tell me.
I don’t think you can predict local effects, and that’s not what I meant. I meant that more effort should go into modelling and predicting the changes, otherwise how can you hope to counteract something that is not well understood? I don’t think we have enough evidence to know where to make the push. If you’ve looked into any chaos theory you’ll know that you can effect a large change with a small difference, but knowing where to make that difference and what effect it will have is nearly impossible.
As far as “you can’t prepare for the magnitude of effects” — we have to, as best we can, because climate change _will_ happen. We may affect it, maybe if we’re lucky we’ll affect it in the direction we hope, but there is no chance of us preventing change altogether. Earth’s climate has always and will always change. Being prepared for climate change is very important. Trying to stop it from happening is futile. Changing our habits to environmentally friendly ones may be worth doing, but it has to be balanced against what other things are also worth doing.
That’s the best news I’ve heard in this entire thread!!
Here’s what the scientists are telling you:
There is a significant human contribution which is accelerating global warming which, if unabated, will have disastrous consequences for the environment. Reducing our emissions will, whilst not stabilising the Earth’s climate indefinitely, prevent disaster in the “short term†(ie next few centuries).
Again, I quite agree. It may be that the entire global warming phenomenon could be reversed by a meticulously-positioned flap of a butterfly wing, to take a clichéd example. However, as you say, predicting the effect of this butterfly wing is nigh-on impossible.
If you’ve looked into any chaos theory, you’ll know that you can effect a larger and far more predictable change with a large difference, like cutting our carbon emissions!
Absolutely. Again, listen to the boffins. You may recall the Stern report of a couple of weeks back (check out the executive summary). It came down unquestionably in favour of tackling climate change and its remit was almost entirely economic. We will pay, even from a cynical financial perspective, if we don’t do something now.
Assuming that some kind of preparation could prevent tragedy on the magnitude being widely predicted (billions of deaths from drought and famine being quite a hefty thing to offset, as I said before), then the Stern report again suggests that it’s not economic to tackle the massive disaster but instead it’s cheaper to stop it occurring by reducing our ecological footprint now.
The climate will change one day, and I’d never be foolhardy enough to suggest that it wouldn’t, but if we can save lives and hard cash by preventing the change we’re causing now, then we surely should do it.
Hello JTA, it is a very pretty idea, I too believe that value should be placed in a monetary fashion on privilages we have previously believed to be free and to be our right. I also believe that in a capitalist society this is the only way the public will learn to value their local and global environment. However there are, as above shows, many flaws, one of which being that if London were to stop all imports and live from the surrounding produce alone it would take all of england just to support London itself. I think raising the awareness of the public, so that local shops and local produce is at the top of their shopping list, is currently our best bet. However we can not exclude those that can not afford to pay or deny imports from beyond, on which we dependent, whether it be for apples or oil.