I noticed... Limes grown in ... Peru or Uruguay, packed in ... Europe (might have been Italy, but maybe Poland)... then shipped to someplace in the US, then driven to me. This was on a bottle of lime juice. That is all of ... $1? Yet... I'd need to buy dozens of limes just to squeeze enough juice to get half that small bottle.
That's all of $1 of realized cost. It's not accounting for negative externalities to the environment, depletion of non-renewable natural resources that future people may rely on, or poor living conditions/wage slavery/etc. Though some of that would certainly be offset by economies of scale so there's some number greater than $1 that would reflect the true "global cost" of doing that. It's just unknown and not measured.
And yet the vast majority of pollution will be created by somebody using their car to drive to the store and back when buying goods. This is even true for fruit that’s flown in.
Your statement is very interesting and thought provoking.
I'd like to know if it's true. It sounds like one of those things that are "to good to be true".
Is it possible that you're conflating the total of transportation pollution per capita with the part of it that has to do with driving to the grocery store for that?
Just napkin mathing it, it doesn't seem like it would be surprising in the least due to mass transport.
Take the cargo ship for instance. In looking up the numbers, a single large cargo ship can carry upwards of 20,000 20-foot long cargo containers each with a volume of ~1200 cubic feet. So that's 24 million cubic feet of storage. Break that down into pollution per item, it's going to be some value that's effectively zero.
And the same is going to be true for most other transportation and movement along the overall pipeline, which is all going to be done at a large scale to reduce costs. And then you enter the picture. You drive 15 miles there, and 15 miles back in your vehicle - to pick up 6 limes, a few sprigs of mint, and a bottle of rum. The cost of transport/mile/unit there is easily going to be orders of magnitude greater than any other part of the trip, and it's not hard to imagine it exceeds the entire cost of the rest combined.
15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far.
Also, I wasn't comparing the cost of shipping lime from south america to europe, but I was comparing it with the cost of shipping limie from south america to vietnam to do the packaging and then back to europe to do the consuming which is more than double the pollution. You need to unload the ships, move the trucks to the places where people do the packaging, move the goods back into a ship, unload the stuff again, drive it all the way to other warehouses etc etc
> 15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far.
When you think about it, most populated areas in the US are rural, sparsely populated areas. It may be 20 miles to the nearest store, and that store may only be a 7-11. I feel lucky to have found a nice spot in a rural area that is only 8 miles to the Walmart, and that really hurt recently with gas prices, still does.
But most population, isn't in rural areas. I've got a local specialty grocery store literally downstairs next to my condo, and a full grocery store three blocks away. "The average household traveled 3.79 miles to their primary grocery, even though the closest store was 2.14 miles way." (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/04/10/5-things-the-usda-lea...)
I think their point is not that there are people that far away from a store but that those folks generally make larger bulk purchases when they make the trip to and from the store.
People don't realize that bulk purchases require up front capital. Some people can't afford to buy more that what they need at the time, even if it'll cost more in the long run. This even includes things like the 24 or 36 pack of toilet paper
The closest grocery store to my house is an upscale store about 10 miles away. Next closest is the much cheaper Walmart which is about 12 miles away in a different direction.
I often have to make a 20 mile round trip just to get a gallon of milk.
A good rule of thumb is. If it's cheap, it didn't burn too much energy! A trip to the store is purely C02 expense of almost a dollar. A dollars worth of lime, probably has C02 expense in the range of almost 10 cents.
This is simply not true. Consumer transportation accounts for a tiny fraction of global energy use. This is a common tactic for blame shifting to excuse the complete lack of effort and egregious waste from the corporate and industrial sectors. Shame on you for blindly picking it up and retransmitting it.
You seem to be changing focus. Op is pointing out that 10k fruit transported has a very low amortized cost per piece, whereas driving to the store has a low number of goods to amortize over.
This was pointed out on a freakanomics episode.
Furthermore last I checked the academic analysis I could find found that Amazon prime delivery has smaller footprint than driving to the store unless you’re getting like 14 items at once for similar reasons.
It also completely discounts the policy decisions that lead to the car being driven. The driver didn't choose to defund public transportation and build widely spaced infrastructure that largely requires car travel.
The coastline paradox comes from the fact that the length of the coastline is literally undefinable; there's always a closer level of granularity you could use to get a longer coast.
For externalities, it seems like there fundamentally is a correct cost -- doing all the accounting might be a real pain though.
The coastline paradox is actually a great example.
You can never price in all externalities, but you sure as hell can improve your pricing of externalities from what it is (in the same way a 1km resolution of coastline is better than a 100,000km resolution)
I think you're right here, but what tends to get lost from those who stop at "Sounds like a problem for future taxpayers" is that those taxpayers might be them if they're young enough, but will certainly be their children and grandchildren and the other citizens of their country (and the Earth itself).
That’s an awful lot of long term thinking based on projections of future impacts that may never come true. Hard to pay attention to if you’re worried if you’re going to be solvent next quarter.
Right, which is why (and I think this would just naturally arrive via a filtering mechanism) this is such an insidious problem. It's going to happen, and it is happening, but humans aren't very good (not incapable) at such long-term thinking especially on a planetary scale. I live in Ohio, freak ice storms and power problems in Texas might as well be in Pakistan where they had that recent flooding (note I'm just using these as examples and not attributing them specifically to climate change although they may be related). As long as the mall is still open and I have a job it's like.. what climate change?
And then when you add in both reasonable and unreasonable disagreement, you just get stuck... and if the problem is real and is going to cause big problems, well you're really betting the farm that you'll be able to come up with a planetary level solution in short order or else you're just hopelessly stuck with whatever happens to you.
As I look at the situation what I see are a few scenarios:
1. It's not bad and there won't be any long term effects.
2. It's pretty bad but the long term effects won't be that bad.
3. It's very bad and the long term effects will be quite bad.
4. (some combination including small/medium impact, etc.).
The thing is that it doesn't really cost much to address 1. and 2. and we get some nice benefits anyway like lower levels of pollution, maintenance of resources like fisheries or forests or whatever. But if it's 3. and we don't do anything we are mega fucked or we will need a very lucky and well-timed solution. Elon said something to the effect of "let's not find out if we get lucky or find a solution" and to that I wholeheartedly agree.
The most likely scenario is one you’re not considering because you’re a pessimist: It’s very bad and the effects won’t be that bad because people will come up with solutions you can’t predict.
Like when we were supposed to run out of Europium, or the population was supposed to exceed the food supply, or any number of doomsday scenarios.
I’m not saying the climate/resource predictions aren’t true based on what we know, I’m saying they aren’t true based on what we don’t yet know.
It’s certainly possible you’re right, but you’re not giving any attention to the possibility that you’re wrong.
Eh I’m not really a pessimist so let’s go ahead and dismiss that.
What you’re saying here is that the most likely scenario is that we’ll have global climate change but the effects won’t be that bad because we’ll invent technology to address those effects.
Sure that’s certainly possible.
What I don’t understand is the desire to roll the dice that we will invent technology to mitigate the effects of climate change versus just not having climate change and thus not leaving to chance that we will create technology to mitigate these effects?
Certainly I think you’re overestimating that this is a pure technology problem to be solved versus a political and cultural problem of which technology is but just another actor on the stage.
You’re also discounting short and intermediate term instability which will lead to increased human suffering while we attempt to resolve political and cultural problems and invent new technology. How many future wars may be fought over resources because we said “eh someone will figure it out”? It’s a quasi-religious faith in technology as universal problem solver.
Alternatively we could just start working on the problem now and not explore a path that bets civilization for no real gain.
The reason you see the hesitation is because with current technology 'stopping climate change' will require massively disruptive measures, likely leading to rather extreme loss of life. Inventing something new seems a whole lot easier, and fits with the general human tendency to 'do more' to work ourselves out of a problem.
Every part of the worlds economy is currently dependent on fossil fuels. Global trade (aka China and the US's economy, and most others too), International and most Domestic Travel, National Energy Grids (including heating in cold countries and literally keeping the lights on for large swaths of the year), and every major Army, Navy, and Air Forces basic operations.
Some countries or regions in countries have made progress towards zero carbon on SOME of those fronts. NONE of them are not reliant on fossil fuels at least some part of the year for something critical. As in, people will die, sometimes a lot of people (10-100k+).
And that isn't counting things like nitrogen fertilizer production, which have knock on effects everywhere.
To 'stop' global warming, we'd need to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere essentially now, and start pulling CO2 out, correct?
So:
1) That currently is impossible for anyone to do without people dying.
2) It's likely to be a decade or more before the earliest adopters and wealthiest countries could get there (not counting Military, which is likely even longer - 50+ unless there is a major war first).
3) The BRICs on the list are relatively poor, and don't have as much ability to capitalize such a change. Most of the other countries struggle to keep their lights on as-is, with cheap oil. They aren't going to be able to capitalize converting their entire grid to solar, they can't even capitalize their current grid!
So, we essentially have two choices if we want to actually stop it now:
1) Figure out a way to fix our current situation, knowing that the majority of the worlds population isn't going to change what they are doing in time.
2) Go to war, and destroy anyone who won't stop doing what they're doing that causes CO2 release (and other GHG).
Which #2 would currently require even MORE expenditure of CO2 with current technology, assuming it's even winnable. China is a nuclear power after all, and the #1 global CO2 emitter (and one of the largest beneficiaries of global trade, which largely don't count in that number).
That's also of course putting aside ethical concerns about 'killing them to save them', and pre-emptive war to stop a problem that so far people are only feeling the barest twinge of issues from.
My gut feeling for what is going to happen is a lot of hand wringing, a lot of natural disasters that steadily build up pressure to actually do something, and a gradual transition and mitigation at great expense over a century+. This will likely completely screw the poor countries, and moderately screw the wealthy ones.
I think the issue boils down to known and controllable disruption (i.e. you are an active participant) or unknown and uncontrollable disruption in which you just receive whatever happens as it happens. The problem is nobody will vote for controllable disruption and many will actually vote to accelerate and grow the problem so we're stuck rolling the dice. Examples of this are things like municipalities, or counties, or states (in the US) banning construction of new wind turbines in their county (this happened in Ohio recently) and then funneling government money into subsidizing fracking or oil and gas production.
We're going to get these wars anyway because countries with a military will just start conflicts over resources and where nations break down many will just resort to anarchy and suffering there. We're already seeing this with Russia invading Ukraine where there are fascist goals but also geographic goals with control the fertile Donbas region and then also the subsequent usage of gas as a weapon against Europe. This is just the beginning.
It's hard to see how technology will solve this problem because it's a political and social problem and not a technology problem. No amount of carbon capture technology can build solar power in India while they're at war with China over water from the Himalayas ya know? No amount of technology can stop (at this time) Republican governments from banning EV installations or using government money to incentivize oil and gas industry development for donors.
Wars over resources are far different than a ‘war on global warming’, which is what I was referring to.
The technology would have to be similarly transformative as nitrogen fertilizer was - which is what avoided the whole Malthusian population trap in the first place.
We don’t know what we don’t know there, frankly, so hard to say if it exists or not.
Co2 capture and most GHG emissions though have a serious thermodynamic challenge which says ‘not easily’. Once the clock spring is unwound, it’s really hard to wind it back again.
That's like saying if I go and paint my house in leopard stripe paint that since my mortgage isn't going up the only cost to my net worth was the cost of the paint + labor.
If it doesn’t stop you from doing it and no one involved (including you) ever does any analysis resulting in a change in behavior - you’re basically correct, economically.
>I'd need to buy dozens of limes just to squeeze enough juice to get half that small bottle.
i know this is completly off-topic, but commercial lime juice is made by mulching whole limes finer and finer until they essentially liquefy, not squeezing the juice, so they get much higher yields.
In terms of carbon let's calculate that. Rotterdam to Shanghai is about 9000 km. The package is 250 g. Container ship transport is about 15 grams of carbon per kilometer per metric ton. So a total emission of 2.25 grams of carbon for the trip.
It costs about $600 to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere the hard way, rather than messing about with tree credits and other stuff that's too easy to game. So we'd want to add another $.001 to the price to account for the cost of the carbon involved in transporting it. Bulk container ships are very energy efficient compared to other sorts of transportation.
However, they do use bunker fuel and the above doesn't take account of all the sulfur and particulates that gets emitted.
> It costs about $600 to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere the hard way
I think I found the source you used to get that number[0] (or [1]) it says:
> Atmospheric carbon removal can be as simple (and relatively inexpensive) as planting trees. But to remove sufficient carbon to meet the target, new technologies will be needed. Some are currently being piloted, including potentially expensive and/or environmentally-invasive technologies. Costs are estimated to range up to $600 per tonne of sequestered CO2, although no one really knows for sure.
So I don't think we should be using hypothetical future tech (with a big question mark to boot) to put a dollar value on pollution emitted transporting goods today, particularly when it focuses on carbon and doesn't account for the other emissions.
Not OP, but it's pretty obvious. At $1-$2 (US) per cubic foot, 4-8 packages per cu. ft. is 20¢ apiece. A shipping container is about 2400 cu. ft., more for hi-cubes.
Pretty common to ship 20mt of metal in containers-we process $8B in raw commodities a year like this. Commodity traders don’t pay these prices to ship though, these are high value manufacturing (cpg, tech) prices. Commodity firms still ship enough volume to pay sub $2k a can.
containers vary a lot in their construction and materials, right? open-top railway car containers are not the same as common trans-continental containers, and refrigerated units are different again. All of those and more are in daily use in vast numbers, worldwide.
I believe that the trucking portion of handling the container has weight limits; the machinery that handles the loading and unloading have their weight limits; the ship and the way it is loaded from bow to stern has weight limits, and a container itself has weight limits. Somewhat analogous to freeway overpass heights, the tendency over time is that the various limits harmonize with each other and you get typical shipping practices.
A shipping container full of raw cotton is indeed quite different than one full of "iron ore" but actually, consumer electronics and various car parts, their load limits, are more commonly restricted in the way they are loaded and handled.
Even at current prices it adds perhaps 20 cents to the cost of a single, 250g package.
Considering it was less than 4 cents previously it made economic sense to ship it for packaging in a country with cheaper labour.