A key chunk of his discussion:
We would not expect to have a beneficial overall effect on the environmental envelope if we all reverted to smelting our own steel in backyard furnaces, after the fashion of China's Great Leap Forward. Like the unfortunate Chinese peasants, we would go about it inefficiently, and squander a great many resources—and carbon emissions—on unusable, unsellable, or short-lived output.
Because large corporate businesses are obsessed with efficient use of inputs, for reasons having nothing to do with the environment, they must be presumed to start out with a huge environmental lead over the small producer. So why would we assume that things work any differently when it comes to food?
The new hordes of green-eating advocates are merely reviving an old and well-known problem in a new form. In the 1920s the economist Ludwig von Mises argued that rational economic production was impossible under socialism: denied the price signals that give social needs and preferences an implicit hand in every decision a capitalist enterpreneur makes, a state planner could never hope to predict demand and made informed choices. The debate over economic calculation carried on for decades, but in the end the collapse of the Soviet Union settled it to near-universal satisfaction...
De-linking household-type economic decisions (asparagus or beets?) from money considerations, and replacing them with an environmental standard of value, creates the same species of confusion. The problem of determining which bag of onions might involve the release of the least carbon would require the solving of a vast array of equations, too great for the human mind even to teach a computer to solve. Since every purchase made in a free economy is chiefly a purchase of many kinds of stored energy, it may even be that buying the cheapest food is the closest possible approximation humans can make to measuring their "environmental footprint" at the supermarket.
For those who assume Colby and I are just once again off our planet-hating rockers, Wired magazine agrees with you, but with a twist. I refer you to this month's Wired magazine, which has this heart-warming cover:
Now, Wired's article takes an approach that leads them to support buying locally (they either don't know or don't agree with the argument Colby put forward above), but even from that (mis-guided) perspective, I was amused to see that the verdict on organic food comes out the same as my never-ending grandpa Simpson-style ranting on the subject:
The path to virtue, we all know, begins with organics. Meat, milk, fruit, veggies—organic products are good for our bodies and good for the planet. Except when they're not good for the planet. Because while there may be sound health reasons to avoid eating pesticide-laden food, and perhaps personal arguments for favoring the organic-farmers' collective, the truth is that when it comes to greenhouse gases, organics can be part of the problem.
Take milk. Dairy cows raised on organic feed aren't pumped full of hormones. That means they produce less milk per Holstein—¯about 8 percent less than conventionally raised cattle. So it takes 25 organic cows to make as much milk as 23 industrial ones. More cows, more cow emissions. But that's just the beginning. A single organically raised cow puts out 16 percent more greenhouse gases than its counterpart. That double whammy—more cows and more emissions per cow—makes organic dairies a cog in the global warming machine.
How about that burger? Organic beef steers take longer to achieve slaughter weight, which gives them more time to emit polluting methane. And if you're eating hamburgers made from grass-fed cattle, don't award yourself any prizes just yet. While pastured beef offers some environmental benefit—these cows don't require carbon-intensive corn for feed, and the land they graze stores carbon more efficiently than land used for crops or left alone—they're burping up nearly twice as much methane as cattle fed grain diets, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. If you really want to adopt a climate-friendly diet, cut out meat entirely. Researchers at the University of Chicago showed that the meat-intensive diet of the average American generates 1.5 more tons of greenhouse gases per year than the diet of a vegetarian.
But even organic fruits and veggies are a mixed bushel: Organic fertilizers deliver lower-than-average yields, so those crops require more land per unit of food. And then there's the misplaced romanticism. Organic isn't just Farmer John; it's Big Ag. Plenty of pesticide-free foods are produced by industrial-scale farms and then shipped thousands of miles to their final destination. The result: refrigerator trucks belching carbon dioxide.
Organic produce can be good for the climate, but not if it's grown in energy-dependent hothouses and travels long distances to get to your fridge. What matters is eating food that's locally grown and in season. So skip the prewashed bag of organic greens trucked from two time zones away —¯ the real virtue may come from that conventionally farmed head of lettuce grown in the next county.
Whether you agree with me or are wrong on the issues, I highly recommend you check out the full Wired article, as it takes the all-too-rare approach of comparing reality to the desired outcome and chucking romantic ideals for what really makes a difference. If you really care about this stuff, then this is the kind of thinking you need to engage in, every day in every way.
Otherwise you are just helping make the problem much much worse while making yourself feel good and falsely green.
SUVs are cost-efficient for the manufacturers, in that they can squeeze a huge price tag onto a (price-relative) small package. They aren't by any reckoning better for the environment than a smaller car, however, since the annual demand for new automobiles doesn't change -- just the nature of the automobiles changes. More specifically, there's always X number of people per year who want to buy a vehicle, so why not make the majority of that X consist of lighter, smaller vehicles that are more efficient on fuel?
In a related rant, I'm seeing more and more Hummers pop up on our city streets every day. The other day, I came within an inch of keying one of them that was parked outside of a designated stall in a parking lot, partially straddling the line of the stall next to it, the stall next to it being a handicapped stall. Sadly, I'm not that malicious. =/ (I also took to heart your own rant about people keying "yuppie" vehicles.)