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How much greenhouse gas comes from food?
Michael Bomford, Energy Farms Network
How much does our food system contribute to greenhouse gas emissions?
Perhaps the most widely-circulated estimate comes from Michael Pollan’s open letter to the presidential candidates, published in the New York Times last October under the title Farmer in Chief. As soon as the letter was published it started spreading through email and the blogosphere. At least four of the conferences I have attended since then have included it among the conference handouts. Here’s what it said:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.
That’s a lot of energy and greenhouse gas. But are Pollan’s numbers credible?
I don’t think so.
[Understandable technical analysis]
… My estimate is about half of Pollan’s. If the food system really used 19% of the energy consumed in the U.S. — as Pollan says — then every calorie we consume would take about 15 calories to get to our plate (let Google do the math). That’s twice as much as the University of Michigan estimate, and 50% more than Pollan himself claims later in the same paragraph:
… If food system energy use makes up ~9% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural practices not associated with energy use make up ~6%, then the food system is responsible for about 15% of emissions. That’s a far cry from 37%, but it’s still a lot of greenhouse gas.
… My rough approaches to estimating US food system energy and greenhouse gas emissions suggest that the food system accounts for about 9% of US energy use and 15% of greenhouse gas emissions.
I agree wholeheartedly with Pollan’s message that our energy-intensive food system needs to be restructured, but I think that his numbers are off by a factor of two or more.
(16 April 2009)
Jason Bradford recommends Bomford’s blog Energy Farms Network.
Michael Bomford is a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He was co-author of the Post Carbon report: The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon Food System.
Michael Bomford is a research scientist and extension specialist at Kentucky State University, and an adjunct faculty member in the University of Kentucky Department of Horticulture. His work focuses on organic and sustainable agriculture systems suitable for adoption by small farms operating with limited resources.
Marijuana Advocates Point to Signs of Change
Jesse McKinley, The New York Times
… For Mr. Nadelmann and others like him, the signs of change are everywhere, from the nation’s statehouses – where more than a dozen legislatures have taken up measures to allow some medical use of marijuana or some easing of penalties for recreational use – to its swimming pools, where an admission of marijuana use by the Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was largely forgiven with a shrug.
Long stigmatized as political poison, the marijuana movement has found new allies in prominent politicians, including Representatives Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, who co-wrote a bill last year to decrease federal penalties for possession and to give medical users new protections.
The bill failed, but with the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed, a concept that has intrigued even such ideologically opposed pundits as Glenn Beck of Fox News and Jack Cafferty of CNN.
(20 April 2009)
Skeptical article from the Los Angeles Times: Marijuana valuations in California are hallucinations. I don’t think either article deals with the staggering costs in law enforcement, incarceration and corruption. -BA
Just $6bn Will Save a Generation From Starvation, Says UN
Geoffrey Lean, Independent/UK
G8 agriculture ministers try to halt ‘spiral of hunger’ created by drought, falling prices and credit crunch
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Agriculture ministers from the world’s richest countries are holding an unprecedented meeting this weekend as the United Nations warns that hunger threatens to “spiral out of control” in the wake of the financial crisis.
The three-day meeting, which opened in Italy yesterday, will address a growing food crisis as harvests threaten to slump at a time when record numbers of people are already hungry. Crops are being hit by a combination of bad weather, falling food prices and farmers’ being refused credit to buy seeds and fertilisers.
It is the first time that the agriculture ministers of the G8 leading economies have held such a meeting, and they have invited their counterparts from China, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Egypt to join them in Treviso “to work out a common route to lead us out of the crisis and respond to the world food emergency”.
(19 April 2009)
