First my daughter Charlotte, then loyal reader and commenter Jeff Huggins. Both urged me to read “Big Foot“, Michael Specter‘s article in The New Yorker‘s upcoming March issue. Subtitled, ‘In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science‘, the article is a great summary of the challenges inherent to carbon labeling. Here are some highlights of the eight-page article, starting with an introduction featuring some commendable efforts from Tesco, the British retailing giant:
A little more than a year ago, Sir Terry Leahy, who is the chief executive of the Tesco chain of supermarkets, Britain’s largest retailer, delivered a speech to a group called the Forum for the Future, about the implications of climate change. Leahy had never before addressed the issue in public, but his remarks left little doubt that he recognized the magnitude of the problem. “I am not a scientist,” he said. “But I listen when the scientists say that, if we fail to mitigate climate change, the environmental, social, and economic consequences will be stark and severe. . . . There comes a moment when it is clear what you must do. I am determined that Tesco should be a leader in helping to create a low-carbon economy. In saying this, I do not underestimate the task. It is to take an economy where human comfort, activity, and growth are inextricably linked with emitting carbon and to transform it into one which can only thrive without depending on carbon. This is a monumental challenge. It requires a revolution in technology and a revolution in thinking. We are going to have to rethink the way we live and work.”
Tesco sells nearly a quarter of the groceries bought in the United Kingdom, it possesses a growing share of the markets in Asia and Europe, and late last year the chain opened its first stores in America. Few corporations could have a more visible-or forceful-impact on the lives of their customers. In his speech, Leahy, who is fifty-two, laid out a series of measures that he hoped would ignite “a revolution in green consumption.” He announced that Tesco would cut its energy use in half by 2010, drastically limit the number of products it transports by air, and place airplane symbols on the packaging of those which it does. More important, in an effort to help consumers understand the environmental impact of the choices they make every day, he told the forum that Tesco would develop a system of carbon labels and put them on each of its seventy thousand products.’
Sir Leahy is attempting to implement what I have been asking for on several occasions, a carbon label on each item, to let people know the real cost to the environment of that item. I appreciate Sir Leahy‘s efforts to bring some awareness and behavior changes in his customers. I can certainly attest to the power of ‘carbon consciousness‘. Even more effective than carbon labeling, would be a carbon tax, to be added to the normal price of the item, and based on the carbon cost of the item. But that should be a policy decision, not a matter for businesses like Tesco.
Michael Specter pays tribute to a bunch of corporate and institutional green do-gooders: Marks&Spencer, Kraft, Sara Lee, the Church of England, and yes, even Ford and General Motors . . . I am surprised no mention is made of Wal-Mart, but then, the article is heavily skewed towards a British crowd!
Measuring carbon footprint is very, very complex, and this is where good intentions, such as the Tesco initiative, can fall short:
‘The calculations required to assess the full environmental impact of how we live can be dazzlingly complex. To sum them up on a label will not be easy. Should the carbon label on a jar of peanut butter include the emissions caused by the fertilizer, calcium, and potassium applied to the original crop of peanuts? What about the energy used to boil the peanuts once they have been harvested, or to mold the jar and print the labels? Seen this way, carbon costs multiply rapidly.
John Murlis is the chief scientific adviser to the Carbon Neutral Company also served as the director of strategy and chief scientist for Britain’s Environment Agency. Murlis worries that in our collective rush to make choices that display personal virtue we may be losing sight of the larger problem. “Would a carbon label on every product help us?” he asked. “I wonder. You can feel very good about the organic potatoes you buy from a farm near your home, but half the emissions-and half the footprint-from those potatoes could come from the energy you use to cook them. If you leave the lid off, boil them at a high heat, and then mash your potatoes, from a carbon standpoint you might as well drive to McDonald’s and spend your money buying an order of French fries.”
Yet the relationship between food miles and their carbon footprint is not nearly as clear as it might seem. That is often true even when the environmental impact of shipping goods by air is taken into consideration. “People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told me. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby-well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.” Williams pointed out that when people talk about global warming they usually speak only about carbon dioxide. Making milk or meat contributes less CO2 to the atmosphere than building a house or making a washing machine. But the animals produce methane and nitrous oxide, and those are greenhouse gases, too. “This is not an equation like the number of calories or even the cost of a product,” he said. “There is no one number that works.”
My reaction to “Big Foot“: are we missing the boat in attempting to be too perfect? I come back to the idea of a carbon tax, on non essential products and services that are obvious polluters. It is unrealistic to think that a precise carbon-based pricing can be derived for each product ever produced. By the time we are done measuring, global warming will have become an unavoidable reality.
You can also hear Michael Specter on Fresh Air.
La Marguerite 
It is true that not everything grown or produced far away causes higher carbon emissions than things grown closer by. But it is true that while growth or production can be high or low in emissions, transport is always high in emissions.
Those defending the distant products against the “eat local” people ignore the fact that the “eat local” people also promote eating organic, in-season produce. Organic, in-season produce will cause less emissions than conventional, out-of-season products.
So, as anyone “eat local” person could tell us, eat local and organic and in-season produce, and you’ll be responsible for less emissions in total than those eating imported, conventionally-produced, out-of-season food.
It’s not unrealistic to think that a precise carbon-based price can be derived for each product. The way we do it is indirectly. We tax coal, oil, natural gas and timber according to their carbon content, and the costs of these will be passed onto the consumers of the final products.
Likewise, labelling for the carbon intensity of the product is not as difficult as they imagine, either. Like the nutrition information, they can present an average for that particular product. The reason they oppose it is the same reason that today companies in Australia are opposing the idea of “unit pricing” – that is, reducing prices on all products to so many dollars a pound or kilogram, so that you can compare the 680g tin with the 450g tin without a calculator. They oppose it because it means genuine competition on price and quality.
Companies are not accustomed to genuine competition on price and quality, but to competition on brands and image. They’re uncomfortable with competition on price because it reduces profits, and they don’t like competition on quality because so much of industrialised food and manufactured goods are really pretty crap.
There was similar opposition a few decades ago when it was regulated that nutrition information should be put on food labels. It wasn’t practical, it wouldn’t help, they said. Yet they did it and it turned out okay with no collapsed companies, etc.
That said, though precise carbon measurements are possible, I don’t think they’d be particularly useful. There comes a point where too much information overwhelms you and you can’t make a decision; too much information is like no information. We have to ask ourselves what our aim is in presenting carbon intensity information – is it really about consumer choice, or is our ultimate aim to reduce carbon emissions?
I think our ultimate aim must be to reduce emissions. Carbon intensity information could help in that, or it might not – after all, nutrition information has not prevented obesity. Better then to simply tax coal, oil, natural gas and timber, the costs will be passed onto the consumers who’ll tend to buy the cheapest and thus less carbon-intensive stuff, and companies will have an incentive to reduce their carbon intensity.
At the same time we’d need to have domestic and trade policies based on respecting human rights. Mexican enslaved farm workers, after all, are not very carbon-intensive.
Great post, Marguerite.
Aside from the substance of the article, I found several things about it interesting and “a good sign.”
First, as you suggest, the article was fairly in-depth.
Second, it was a strong endorsement of the need for a price or cost associated with carbon dioxide emissions.
Third, to me, it was helpful to understand some of the dynamics at play regarding the carbon footprint of foods.
Finally, (and this struck me as a good sign), although I’m not all that familiar with the reputation or positioning of The New Yorker (I just get it when I see an article that interests me), I took it as a very good sign that the magazine gave a headline and so much space to a very good article about the issue, and one that comes out strongly for a price/cost on carbon emissions.
That’s it for now. Happy Sunday. Cheers.
Well, Jeff, again thanks for pointing in the direction of the article. And, like you, I am always pleased to see good PR for the climate fight cause . . .
Kyle, I think your solution is brilliant. This is why we need a strong man at the top, who can bring all the necessary power groups to pass such a law. One thing we know, money talks. The only potential caveat would be that it would heavily discriminate against the poorest. But then, people with less money would end up becoming good green citizens, whether they want it or not. Not a small consolation.
I’m Jewish, I’m suspicious of “strong men” 😉
Indeed it’s a problem that almost all consumption taxes, whether “sales tax”, “liquor excise”, carbon tax or whatever, hit the poor hardest. That’s because so much of their spending is not discretionary. If I earn only $100 a week, I’ll be hard-pressed to spend less than 25% of it on food. But if I earn $1,000 a week, I can spend 25% on food, or only 2.5%, as I wish.
The way we handle this is again indirect. We have for example progressive income tax, so that the person on $100 pays no income tax, and the person on $1,000 pays (say) $300. This evens things out somewhat. Then we bring in minimum wages, and so on and so forth.
There is no single tax or rebate or regulation which will solve everything; we need packages of things.
In any case, the poor have proportionally less impact than the better-off. A welfare mother or hospitality worker is more likely to take the bus than drive an SUV, more likely to have basic grains and vegetables than meat, more likely to use the library than buy books, and so on, not because she cares about the environment but because she just can’t afford any other way of life.
Where the poor of the West do have a significant impact is in consumption of processed food (TV dinners, etc) and in buying cheap Chinese imports, and so on. But all those depend on cheap fossil fuels for their being cheap; so even without a carbon tax, as fossil fuels deplete, these products will rise in price and perhaps even disappear.
I’d argue that since a tax can start small, and its rise is plannable and thus predictable, whereas depletion may hit suddenly and its effects and timing are not predictable, having prices rise due to carbon tax is better than having them rise due to fossil fuel depletion. We can adjust to predictable things, but find it harder to adjust to surprises.
I agree with your last point. It goes back to managing expectations.
This whole discussion makes me want to delve more into the fascinating field of environmental economics . . .
you just gave me an idea for a new post, must write what i know best.
contrary to popular opinion, the poor pollute most by their very choices and also by their circumstance.
most cheap products are toxic and highly carbonic.
from poor maintenance to poor health, the laws of compensation in a world of poverty. money in the mud..
several reasons why they vehemently deny global warming .
several reasons why they will become believers .
Looking forward to your article! Maybe you can ping me.
[…] use of natural resources. Their point about the role of transportation in carbon footprint is also highly debated. I do support their point about limiting read meat and pushing a vegetarian […]