John Wayne Toilet Paper

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

Andrew Klavan explains why the Americans in Afghanistan call their bathroom tissue John Wayne Toilet Paper:

Corruption’s the problem here. It’s endemic. Money — a lot of it our money — gets passed from contractor to contractor, with each one taking a taste until there’s little left for the actual work. Witness the police compound where we stayed, a three-sided rectangle of one-story barracks made of corrugated tin and concrete. Two hundred fifty grand was allocated for this dump — a quarter mil! By the time that money was passed from cousin to brother to friend and handed down to the contractor who finally slapped the structure up, there was only $40,000 left. The compound was built so shoddily that one side of it had collapsed under last winter’s snows and now lay in a tangle of lumber and tin. There was no running water, no electricity but what a portable generator provided. The toilets were Turkish-style — position your feet and squat over the hole — and equipped with what they call “John Wayne toilet paper” because it’s rough and tough and don’t take shit off nobody.

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Footballers fall prey to fatal disease

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Neurologist Adriano Chio’s research shows that professional footballers in Italy are seven times more likely to develop motor neurone disease — also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS):

Raffaele Guariniello, a magistrate from Turin, enlisted Chio to do an epidemiological survey after his own investigation into a high incidence of cancer and heart problems in Italy’s premier league exposed the presence of an even more sinister scourge among the ranks of the retired players.

He discovered that 41 of them had suffered lingering deaths since 1973 from MND, which destroys the body’s motor nerves, eventually resulting in paralysis. Among the victims were Gianluca Signorini, a former captain of Genoa, who died in 2002 at the age of 42, and Adriano Lombardi, a former Como midfielder who died last year, aged 62.

Having survived with the disease for more than 40 years, Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist, is a rare exception: most patients die within five years of their diagnosis. According to Paul Wicks, a British expert on the condition, doctors cite it as “the one they would not want to get”.

Why Italian footballers should be so vulnerable is baffling the experts.

“Some say it could be due to doping, but if that’s the case then why aren’t other sports similarly affected?” said Paolo Zeppilli, the Italian national team’s doctor. Meanwhile, Guariniello said that inquiries had been made about cycling, basketball and volleyball, but in those sports “not a single case emerged”.

Other European countries, including Britain, are taking note. Spain says it knows of no cases among its footballers and French doctors also were unaware of any link between football and the disease, but note that mysterious “clusters” of sufferers have occurred at different times in different parts of the world.

“In Chicago 11 victims were found in the same building and we have never even begun to understand why,” said Vincent Meininger, one of France’s leading neurologists.

Wicks, a neuro-psychologist who runs PatientsLikeMe, an online support group for people suffering from a number of neurological conditions including MND and Parkinson’s disease, believes that there may be an “athletic gene” that makes people more vulnerable. He said an American study had found that a disproportionate number of sufferers had played sports at university level. “It is probably a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors,” he said.

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Let’s End Adolescence

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Newt Gingrich, writing in BusinessWeek, says, Let's End Adolescence:

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.

As he points out, adolescents used to be young adults:

Benjamin Franklin was an example of this kind of young adulthood. At age 13, Franklin finished school in Boston, was apprenticed to his brother, a printer and publisher, and moved immediately into adulthood.

John Quincy Adams attended Leiden University in Holland at 13 and at 14 was employed as secretary and interpreter by the American Ambassador to Russia. At 16 he was secretary to the U.S. delegation during the negotiations with Britain that ended the Revolution.

Daniel Boone got his first rifle at 12, was an expert hunter at 13, and at 15 made a yearlong trek through the wilderness to begin his career as America’s most famous explorer. The list goes on and on.

It is true that life expectancy was shorter in those days and the need to get on with being an adult could be argued. Nevertheless, early adulthood, early responsibility, and early achievement were the norm before the institution of adolescence emerged as a system for delaying adulthood and trapping young people into wasting years of their lives. To regain those benefits, we must develop accelerated learning systems that peg the rate of academic progress to the student’s pace and ability to absorb the material, making education more efficient.

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Mystery of lost US nuclear bomb

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear bombs crashed in Greenland, near the Thule airbase:

Eventually, a remarkable operation would unfold over the coming months to recover thousands of tiny pieces of debris scattered across the frozen bay, as well as to collect some 500 million gallons of ice, some of it containing radioactive debris.

This is where the mystery of the lost US nuclear bomb gets interesting:

The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons had detonated but without setting off the actual nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew.

The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been “destroyed”.
[...]
The [declassified documents obtained by the BBC under the US Freedom of Information Act] make clear that within weeks of the incident, investigators piecing together the fragments realised that only three of the weapons could be accounted for.

Even by the end of January, one document talks of a blackened section of ice which had re-frozen with shroud lines from a weapon parachute. “Speculate something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary,” the document reads, the primary or secondary referring to parts of the weapon.

By April, a decision had been taken to send a Star III submarine to the base to look for the lost bomb, which had the serial number 78252. (A similar submarine search off the coast of Spain two years earlier had led to another weapon being recovered.)

But the real purpose of this search was deliberately hidden from Danish officials.

One document from July reads: “Fact that this operation includes search for object or missing weapon part is to be treated as confidential NOFORN”, the last word meaning not to be disclosed to any foreign country.

“For discussion with Danes, this operation should be referred to as a survey repeat survey of bottom under impact point,” it continued.

But the underwater search was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the documents recount something approaching panic setting in.

As well as the fact they contained uranium and plutonium, the abandoned weapons parts were highly sensitive because of the way in which the design, shape and amount of uranium revealed classified elements of nuclear warhead design.

But eventually, the search was abandoned. Diagrams and notes included in the declassified documents make clear it was not possible to search the entire area where debris from the crash had spread.
[...]
The view was that no-one else would be able covertly to acquire the sensitive pieces and that the radioactive material would dissolve in such a large body of water, making it harmless.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

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Lawful Uncertainty

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Eliezer Yudkowsky shares an eye-opening passage from Rational Choice in an Uncertain World:

Many psychological experiments were conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s in which subjects were asked to predict the outcome of an event that had a random component but yet had base-rate predictability — for example, subjects were asked to predict whether the next card the experiment turned over would be red or blue in a context in which 70% of the cards were blue, but in which the sequence of red and blue cards was totally random.

In such a situation, the strategy that will yield the highest proportion of success is to predict the more common event. For example, if 70% of the cards are blue, then predicting blue on every trial yields a 70% success rate.

What subjects tended to do instead, however, was match probabilities — that is, predict the more probable event with the relative frequency with which it occurred. For example, subjects tended to predict 70% of the time that the blue card would occur and 30% of the time that the red card would occur. Such a strategy yields a 58% success rate, because the subjects are correct 70% of the time when the blue card occurs (which happens with probability .70) and 30% of the time when the red card occurs (which happens with probability .30); .70 * .70 + .30 * .30 = .58.
[...]
Despite feedback through a thousand trials, subjects cannot bring themselves to believe that the situation is one in which they cannot predict.

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Jumanji director Johnston does Captain America

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

I wasn’t sure what to think when I saw this — `Jumanji' director Johnston does `Captain America':

Joe Johnston, whose credits include “Jurassic Park III” and “Jumanji,” has been signed to direct the comic-book adaptation “The First Avenger: Captain America,” Marvel Studios announced Monday.

The movie is scheduled for release May 6, 2011, the same weekend that Marvel scored a blockbuster this year with “Iron Man,” starring Robert Downey Jr. “Iron Man 2″ comes out May 7, 2010.

This made me feel better though:

Johnston is directing “The Wolf Man,” an update of the horror classic starring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins that comes out in 2009. His other credits include “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “The Rocketeer” and “October Sky.”

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We’re all communists now

Monday, November 10th, 2008

We’re all communists now, Mencius Moldbug notes:

The normal American voter, today, is a communist. She is not a revolutionary communist. She is a status-quo communist. She thinks of America as a commune: a big Brook Farm, with Washington as mother and/or father, caring, sharing, providing, educating, punishing and guiding. She has stretched the mental modules which in a traditional human society would apply to her extended family, to cover the entire continent and probably the planet as well. Maybe she wants gays to be able to marry and maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she thinks taxes are too low, or too high. But that’s about the limit of her political imagination.

There is nothing surprising in this. Always and everywhere, communism is the last stage of democracy. What’s surprising is that it took 144 years for the New Deal to happen. This can be attributed to good fortune and bad organization. But happen it did, and it won’t un-happen.

Perhaps this is a tragedy. But it has its upside, which is that the US has somehow managed to pass from classical liberalism to sclerotic state socialism without stopping at Stalin. Or at Billy Ayers. The Lord looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

Monday, November 10th, 2008

I’ve commented before that the Hyperion Power Module — which promises clean, safe, affordable, reliable power — seems like just the ticket for powering one’s secret super-scientist laboratory — and any associated death-rays — in a remote, off-grid location.

Now The Observer writes that these mini nuclear plants might power 20,000 homes:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. ‘Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,’ said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. ‘They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.’

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. ‘It’s leapfrog technology,’ he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. ‘We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.’

The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. ‘They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,’ said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. ‘We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.’

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

‘You could never have a Chernobyl-type event – there are no moving parts,’ said Deal. ‘You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it’s too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.’

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

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The Humble .22

Monday, November 10th, 2008

A month ago I stumbled across a rifle enthusiast’s experiment, where he found that a standard velocity .22 long rifle round was far more accurate, with far greater penetration, than he realized.

As a small round, the .22 has a reputation for being blown around by wind and failing to penetrate heavy clothing. He wrapped a turkey in three layers of clothing, and he managed to hit it in 25-mph winds from 250 and 300 yards away. All of the rounds penetrated the three layers of clothing and the turkey, and some penetrated the additional six layers of clothing on the other side — where the three layers were doubled up.

A few years back, some gun enthusiasts on The High Road, a gun forum, shared their thoughts on the humble .22′s stopping power. Some, of course, joked that the .22 would just make the bad guy mad, but a few suggested that the .22 was no laughing matter — and it’s hard to ignore the fact that more people are killed with .22s than any other round, even if that’s simply because it’s so popular.

The .22 is a favorite for plinking, and one shooter noted that he can easily shoot all 10 rounds from his Browning Buckmark into a pie plate in a few seconds. That’s 10 40-grain pieces of lead (0.91 ounces) traveling at 1,200 feet per second:

Many claim this is lousy stopping power, but if you launch the same weight of lead at the same velocity from a shotgun, it suddenly becomes an excellent stopper.

Another shooter brought up Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate Reagan in 1981. He shot six rounds of .22 LR. One hit a secret service agent in the belly. Another hit a cop in the neck. One hit Jim Brady in the forehead. Two missed entirely. And the last one ricocheted and hit Reagan under the arm before puncturing his lung.

Everyone hit dropped — although Reagan assumed he’d simply been slammed into the car by his own secret service agents. He thought he’d broken a rib.

Another fellow, a police officer, had a few stories. The first involved a couple guys running away from a bar fight:

The two young guys being attacked fled out the door and into the street. The attackers chased after them. One of the young men being chased had a cheap little .22 RG revolver in the pocket. While running, he fired all six shots back at his pursuers. Three of the shots missed anything.

Three did not.

Shooting victim number 1: When we got there just a few minutes later, he was laying in a fetal position, with a bullet in the lower stomach area. He was unresponsive aside from whimpering in pain. Survived after 5 hours of emergency surgery.

Shooting victim number 2 was hit in the upper area of the shoulder, was sitting on his butt leaning back against the wall of a store, moaning that it hurts, he needs an ambulance. Was in a great deal of pain, was not walking around.

Shooting victim number 3 was standing around, macho posturing, with a bullet hole in his upper bicep of one arm. Saying how getting shot don’t bother him at all. As the EMT gently took his arm and turned it to check for a exit wound, Mr. Macho yelled “OOWW, don’t move it man!” So much for getting shot not bothering him. I guess it didn’t as long as that arm didn’t move.

His second story was from his own childhood, when an angry homeless man threatened his father:

When I was a kid, dad took us to the mountains for the weekend. It was common in the 1950′s for Washington D.C. people to escape the city heat by going to the mountains. We went to the Shenandoah National park usually, and rented a cabin. This time we didn’t make it all the way. We had stopped for lunch at a picnic ground just outside of Front Royal Virginia. A few other families were there, and mom had a packed basket. As we were settling in, three men came out of the woods. Rough, dirty, and looking less than upstanding. Two of them had a large sheath knife on a belt. They came up towards our table and asked dad if he had any beer money.

At this point dad had placed himself between us and the men. Dad often carried his old Colt Woodsman when traveling, and this was no exception. He’d had it since 1937, and it was part of him. It was tucked in back of his right hip, but forward, inside the waistband.

One of the men, maybe drunker or more brazen, I’ll never know, stepped closer and started cursing dad, calling him some pretty bad names because dad was not giving them a hand out, saying how he could afford a nice new Pontiac Star Chief, so he should be able to give them a few bucks. Again, dad politely told the men to leave. It was not to be.

The more abusive one took out his large sheath knife and threatened dad. Dad took out his Colt .22 and told the man to back away and leave us be. The man with the knife again cursed dad, telling him he didn’t have the guts to use that gun, and then he took a step towards dad, and dad shot him.

The man kind of hunched up and staggered a little, partly doubled over, then cursed and came at dad again in a lunge, and dad shot him two more times. The man fully doubled over, going to his knees for a moment, then falling over on his side and going fetal. He moaned loudly for a moment, then quieted down. After a moment all movement and moaning stopped. The man with the family at the next picnic table went down the road to a pay phone to call the police. The other two men had fled at the first shot, and were nowhere to be seen.

The police investigated, and dad was found to have acted in self defense. The other family as witnesses helped, as was the fact that the dead man was a known trouble maker with a record of assaults.

And, of course, the humble .22 is famously the round of professional assassins, whether for the Mob or Israeli intelligence. In that role, the .22 — shot from a “silenced” pistol, of course — supposedly has enough energy to enter the skull, but not enough to punch its way back out, so it bounces around inside.

It’s all about shot placement:

“A .22 through a tear duct is better than a .45 in the arm.”
— Jeff Cooper

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

Why do Americans die young?

Monday, November 10th, 2008

So why do Americans die younger than people living in most other developed democracies? Ronald Bailey tells us:

Well, there is the Michael Moore answer delivered in his “documentary” Sicko — it’s because we lack a benevolent government funded health care system. But life expectancy is not dependent on just medical care. For example, Texas A&M health economist Robert Ohsfeldt and health economics consultant John Schneider point out that deaths from accidents and homicides in America are much higher than in any other of the developed countries. Taking accidental deaths and homicides between 1980 and 1999 into account, they calculate that instead of being at near the bottom of the list of developed countries, U.S. life expectancy would actually rank at the top.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | No Comments »

In case you doubt that Billy Ayers is evil

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

In case you doubt that Billy Ayers is evil, Mencius Moldbug provides some evidence that he is truly evil:

In case you doubt that Billy Ayers is evil, I humbly submit this little reminiscence, which is almost brutally symbolic. Is America the trembling coed to be deflowered, under pain of racism, by Billy’s black roommate? Or is that a little heavy? It might be a little heavy, but there is also this story. If mass murder isn’t evil, I don’t know what is. Watch the video — it’s very convincing. And finally, you can read Billy’s little manifesto, Prairie Fire, which he and his friends so thoughtfully dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan. Prairie Fire practically oozes political murder. Nor, of course, did the man fail to practice what he preached.

And in case you doubt that Barack Obama, Ayers’ “neighbor” whose “kids went to the same school” (twenty years apart), is closely connected with Ayers, allow me to point out two things. One is this well-argued case, by a labor lawyer of all people, that Ayers and Obama probably had a mentor-protege relationship.

The other is the indisputable fact, which somehow managed to escape the notice of even Fox News, that Obama worked out of Ayers’ office. (To anyone who knows anything about the nonprofit world, the relationship between Obama’s Annenberg Challenge and Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop is obvious — the AC was a creature of the SSW, which was surely willing to spawn a shell organization for any big grant it reeled in. And for any Obamabots who may still be reading, yes, it was also able to find a token “Republican” or two to decorate the board.)

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Let G.M. go bankrupt

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

Philip Greenspun says, Let G.M. go bankrupt:

G.M. is in trouble, according to the latest news. The company has some contracts and other obligations that it can’t afford. What can the government do to help?

Answer: The government has already done everything that it needs to in order to help G.M. The government established bankruptcy courts so that a company like G.M. can go through a Chapter 11 reorganization. During the Chapter 11 process, a judge has the power to adjust the company’s obligations so that they can be paid from the company’s likely future revenue. Chapter 11 was designed specifically so that employees can keep their jobs, albeit possibly at lower salaries, while shareholders and creditors suffer and/or are wiped out.

The stockholders, creditors, and employees of G.M. do not deserve to be spared the pain of the recession. The rest of America will be taking pay cuts, losing jobs, giving discounts to customers, etc. What is special about G.M. that they should be able to live as though 2008 never happened?

[Note that the current market capitalization of G.M. is only about $2.8 billion (compare to over $100 billion for Google). The shareholders have already lost almost 100 percent of their investment. The world won't come to an end if these shareholders go from losing 95 percent to losing 100 percent. An evaporation of $2.8 billion will barely register compare to the losses that the S&P 500 holders suffer nearly every day.]

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Exactly how is President-elect Obama connected to evil?

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Exactly how is President-elect Obama connected to evil? Mencius Moldbug explains:

Well, first, um, he’s, um, how can I put this — a communist. With a small ‘c,’ as his friend Billy Ayers so nicely puts it.

I’m not even going to start to belabor this point. Arguing that Barack Obama is not a communist is like arguing that Mitt Romney is not a Mormon. Barack Obama is a communist by birth, breeding, education, and profession. His grandparents were communists, his parents were communists, his teachers were communists, his friends are communists, his colleagues are communists, he’s a communist. Duh.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the current euphemism for “communist” is “progressive.” This is not even a new usage. My father’s parents always called themselves “progressives,” for instance. In fact they were CPUSA members. (Before Grandma fell down the stairs at Juilliard and smashed her frontal lobe, one of the last messages she imparted to me was that Frank Rich writes a really great column.) “Progressive” is also all over the place in my ’80s Soviet Life magazines. And La Wik helpfully informs us that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is (a) the largest voting bloc of Democrats in the House, and (b) the affiliation of the Speaker. And now, of course, the President. Summary: the Cold War is over. Communism won.

The small ‘c’ is well-taken, of course. Obama’s faction is the disorganized, SDS, “Maoist,” or “New Left” wing of American communism. Ie, not the organized, CPUSA, “Stalinist” or “Old Left” wing — which both my grandparents and Obama’s first mentor Frank Marshall Davis were in, whose decline I think was as much cause as effect of the Soviet collapse, and whose remnants were really more for Hillary. And certainly not the defunct Trotskyite wing, whose carcass so weirdly morphed into “neoconservatism.”

The New Left once had a catchy name. It called itself the Movement. (Not to be confused with the clique of poets that gave us Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn.) The label is out of style, but perhaps it should be revived. The election of President Obama is the ceremonial culmination of the Movement’s march to power, and it’s only slightly less surprising than the sunrise. The likes of Billy Ayers were always the elite of their generation. Even as kids, they hardly lost a battle. Now they’re in their gray-headed patriarchal prime. Why shouldn’t they run the world?

Yes, folks, it’s true: we’re all communists now. Lawd a mercy. Did I mention that in the lives of those now living, communists murdered something like 100 million people? Now why did I have to mention that? Why is it that Schindler’s List got 37 Oscars, but Katyn can’t find a distributor?

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Michael Crichton, R.I.P.

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Ronald Bailey had long been annoyed by the Luddite and Frankensteinian themes of Michael Crichton‘s novels, but he got the opportunity to share those complaints with the author before his death:

Eventually, over drinks at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor a couple years ago, I got to tell him how I thought he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a kindly old paleontologist, using the miracle of biotechnology, conjures dinosaurs back into existence to delight the world’s children. Things go wrong only when a cadre of evil anti-biotechnologists led by Jeremy Rifkin break into the peaceful island zoo to kill the dinosaurs. This revised scenario would provide Crichton with all of the gunfire, gore, chase scenes, and satisfying explosions without the Luddite baggage of the original.

Crichton, slightly miffed at my presumption, asked why I preferred my alternative plot. I answered that I worried that his novels were helping to promote a technophobic attitude among the public that could unnecessarily slow the development of new technologies. He responded that I must be kidding. He doubted that anyone paid any attention to his novels other than to be momentarily entertained by them. I still think he was wrong. After all, two centuries later we’re still reading Mary Shelley’s thinly plotted potboiler and worrying about mad scientists.

Posted in Media, Policy, Science | No Comments »

The Food Miles Mistake

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Ronald Bailey looks at The Food Miles Mistake:

So just how much carbon dioxide is emitted by transporting food from farm to fork? Desrochers and Shimizu cite a comprehensive study done by the United Kingdom’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) which reported that 82 percent of food miles were generated within the U.K. Consumer shopping trips accounted for 48 percent and trucking for 31 percent of British food miles. Air freight amounted to less than 1 percent of food miles. In total, food transportation accounted for only 1.8 percent of Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions.

In the United States, a 2007 analysis found that transporting food from producers to retailers accounted for only 4 percent of greenhouse emissions related to food. According to a 2000 study, agriculture was responsible for 7.7 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In that study, food transport accounted for 14 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture, which means that food transport is responsible for about 1 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Food miles advocates fail to grasp the simple idea that food should be grown where it is most economically advantageous to do so. Relevant advantages consist of various combinations of soil, climate, labor, capital, and other factors. It is possible to grow bananas in Iceland, but Costa Rica really has the better climate for that activity. Transporting food is just one relatively small cost of providing modern consumers with their daily bread, meat, cheese, and veggies. Desrochers and Shimizu argue that concentrating agricultural production in the most favorable regions is the best way to minimize human impacts on the environment.

Local food production does not always produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the 2005 DEFRA study found that British tomato growers emit 2.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of tomatoes grown compared to 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of Spanish tomatoes. The difference is British tomatoes are produced in heated greenhouses. Another study found that cold storage of British apples produced more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples by sea to London. In addition, U.K. dairy farmers use twice as much energy to produce a metric ton of milk solids than do New Zealand farmers. Other researchers have determined that Kenyan cut rose growers emit 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12,000 roses compared to the 35 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by their Dutch competitors. Kenyan roses grow in sunny fields whereas Dutch roses grow in heated greenhouses.

(I’ve discussed the localvore’s dilemma before.)

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

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