I noticed a page on the market's Web site that asks, "How Far Does Food Travel to Get to Your Plate?" Too far, it concludes. According to a 2001 study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, the average apple travels 1,555 miles to a Chicago terminal market where wholesalers sell produce to grocery stores. A San Francisco Farmers Market apple, on the other hand, only travels about 105 miles to the Ferry Plaza market building.

So less miles must mean easier on the environment. Well, there's more to it than that:

[So] how does that translate to carbon dioxide emissions? To find out, I crunched the numbers on five types of produce -- apples, oranges, lettuce, greens and squash -- with fuel efficiency estimates from the Environmental Protection Agency and Bay Area truck dealers. Factor in carbon emission figures from Argonne National Laboratory, and I had rough carbon footprints for each farmer and wholesaler.

Local farmers won one category, proving more carbon-friendly on squash. While farmers came from cities about an hour's drive from San Francisco, wholesalers had imported their squash through Arizona from Mexico. In these cases, the idea that more food miles equals more fossil fuels appeared to be true.

But wholesalers beat local farmers on the four other produce items, boasting fewer average carbon dioxide emissions per pound of apples, oranges, lettuce and greens. Apple distributors got almost all their apples from Washington's Yakima Valley, about 700 miles away. (Safeway's California stores get Granny Smith apples from Stockton during fall and winter, and from Washington the rest of the year.) While the two local apple farmers traveled one-tenth the distance, their loads averaged less than 700 pounds -- and generated six times more carbon dioxide per pound of apples than the semi-trailer trucks.

Basically, some of the efficiencies in large-scale production actually trump the closeness of local food. However, there may be a middle ground:

[A] regional system with some urban distribution centers produced less carbon dioxide than a purely local system. The local food movement may adopt a system where smaller growers deliver to larger growers, who then bring food into the city, Pirog says. The primary reason local food isn't as efficient is that small farmers "don't have the infrastructure in place like the big guys do," he says.

In her blog post, Isabel Reminds us that supporting local farmers is not all about carbon emissions, though:

Local farming builds community. Those small-time farmers yet unsophisticated in the means of transportation and year-round gardening will only learn how to efficiently grow and transport their food (albeit a short distance) if they are given a fair shot. According to the Environmental Working Group, The U.S. government--ie, taxpayers--gave "66% of crop subsidy benefits to 10% of the beneficiaries of those programs." More than likely, your backyard farmer was not one of them. If you want to help your neighbor more effectively run his business, support him. Furthermore, farmers markets are a glimpse at the good old days, when people gathered in town halls and communal spaces. They are your excuse to visit Main Street once a week to connect in real time with friends and neighbors--instead of staying home and staring into an anonymous online abyss.

A study by the Shelton Group, an advertising agency and market research company based in Knoxville, Tenn., that focuses on environmental products, showed that consumers surveyed in 2007 were between 22 and 55 percent less likely to buy a wide range of green products than in 2006. The slipping economy had an effect, but message overload appeared to be a major factor as well, said Suzanne C. Shelton, the company’s president.

“What we’ve been seeing in focus groups is a real green backlash,” Ms. Shelton said. Over the last six months, she added, when the agency screened environmentally themed advertisements, “we see over half the room roll their eyes: ‘Not another green message.’ ”

People are experiencing what is being called green fatigue from all competing ideas in the marketplace today:

An environmentally conscientious consumer is left to wonder: are low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs better than standard incandescents, even if they contain traces of mercury? Which salad is more earth-friendly, the one made with organic mixed greens trucked from thousands of miles away, or the one with lettuce raised on nearby industrial farms? Should they support nuclear power as a clean alternative to coal?

One consumer had this recent experience:

Eddie Stern, 38, a media strategist in Durango, Colo., said he recently “went nuts, just trying to buy a car” because of the “overload of info, from the news, from the Internet, from quote-unquote experts on the street.”

Every new tidbit of research seemed to contradict the last. Some environmentalists made the case for a new hybrid, others insisted that buying a used model with a standard engine would save the huge amounts of energy that go into manufacturing a new vehicle. Other environmentalists supported biodiesel, on the grounds that it means, essentially, growing gas. Others countered that biodiesel still pollutes.

Mr. Stern said he finally settled (after a coin flip) on what seemed like the ideal compromise, a used Ford Escape hybrid. Ideal, until his brother, who works in the solar-power industry, asked, “Where are you going to bury the battery?”

These are all valid questions, and like those from a recent post on my personal blog on the efficacy of carbon trading, raise concerns that profit is becoming the prime force driving the movement. Obviously, whatever choice Mr. Stern would have made benefitted a different sector of the economy. In other words, one of the reasons we have competing messages (and thus message overload) is that people want to sell us stuff. It is even more evidence that the market alone cannot be trusted to solve this problem. It is vital that an independent group with no prior agenda sort through the morass and prioritize for people what to do. It may be that all of Mr. Stern's options were essentially equivalent, so there was need for angst. Perhaps he could have made any of the choices and felt OK. But,such an entity would have to be truly independent. For example:

Leaders of Greenpeace ... decided to help its audience prioritize environmental concerns, said Kate Smolski, a senior legislative coordinator. So instead of asking people to juggle disparate concerns — including nuclear waste, coal pollution, deforestation and ocean wildlife endangerment — the group now tries to bundle them under the umbrella of climate change.

So now, when the group campaigns against nuclear energy, it labels reactors a “false solution” to global warming. When the group talks about deforestation, the focus is on its contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“It’s very helpful,” Ms. Smolski said, “to show that it’s all connected.”

Now, the problem here is that Greenpeace is a longstanding anti-nuclear activist organization that is viewed negatively by a large percentage of the population. While they no doubt have good advice to offer on some accounts, they certainly have a biased view on nuclear power, as evidenced by the quote above. Personally, I don't have enough information to make up my mind yet about nuclear power. What I do know is that a number of other environmental organizations are more open-minded, albeit not unequivocally. A truly independent agency would offer solutions that had widespread consensus rather than doing the non-profit equivalent of a big corporation—using the crisis to advance their own interests regardless of the actual facts.

Yet prominent environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are resisting the inclusion of offsets in the bills. "We feel that offsets are very suspect," says Shawnee Hoover, legislative director for Friends of the Earth. "The whole system is just rife with the potential for corruption."

Opponents cite the perverse incentives that have been created under Kyoto's CDM, which last year authorized hundreds of offset projects to be converted into $1.2-$1.8 billion worth of carbon credits. At the heart of their concerns is the question of whether these projects are "additional"—in other words, do they create new emissions reductions, or simply bankroll endeavors where carbon credits are incidental, yet profitable, byproducts? A 2006 United Nations investigation found that a third of CDM-approved offset projects in India would have happened even without Kyoto funding. In China, almost every new hydroelectric and natural-gas-fired power plant has applied for CDM money, casting doubt on whether they really require the offset revenue to be built. "It looks like the CDM is just turning into a production subsidy," says Stanford University climate policy expert Michael Wara, "and that's not a good way to spend our money."

It seems to be a clever idea to use market incentives to reduce carbon emissions. After, we live in a world where corporations do as they please unless they are restrained by the government. However, corporations are pretty good at preventing government from doing things they don't want or mitigating the true effects in some way. In this case, selling carbon offsets has created a very lucrative market. Thus, an opportunity arose for money to be made in one market while money was lost in another. However, the amount lost to the carbon buyers was not near as much as if they had been forced to clean up their acts. It was a compromise that managed to get a law passed in Europe regulating carbon trading. However, the results are questionable. Consider one out outcome of Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM):

In total, CDM-approved offsets have captured or destroyed the equivalent of 135 million tons of CO2 emissions worldwide, slightly more than the annual emissions of Pakistan. Yet an astounding 51 percent of those offsets have been generated by paying refrigerant manufacturers to incinerate HFC-23, an industrial byproduct and potent greenhouse gas, instead of spewing it into the atmosphere. The price of HFC-23 offsets can be worth more than twice the market price of the refrigerants themselves, which has had the unintended effect of encouraging refrigerant companies to produce (and then destroy) even more greenhouse gases in the name of eliminating them. The 43,000 tons of HFC-23 incinerated between 2003 and 2012 will generate $6 billion worth of carbon credits, but cost just $150 million to destroy, according to Wara. He describes the practice as "an excessive subsidy that represents a massive waste of resources."

Now, just because the system has been abused (and clearly massively so) does not mean it cannot be properly regulated. There are already agencies and mechanisms in place to prevent this type of thing from happening. John Bennett has an informative post on this subject on his Sustainable Savannah blog. This part seems to be the key:

If you are interested in purchasing carbon offsets to mitigate airline travel, car travel, all those burgers you’ve been eating, etc. make sure that the company you are purchasing them from VERIFIES and VALIDATES their greenhouse gas reduction projects using an independent standard (TerraPass uses the Voluntary Carbon Standard). Verification and Validation ensure that offsets are producing authentic benefits that are “additional” to business-as-usual activities, measurable, permanent and unique.

My sense is that this is potentially a viable approach, but the current system used in Europe has already been corrupted. That is probably the reason that while the EU claims to be on target for their emissions reductions goals, the details of their own report suggest it has little or nothing to do with carbon trading. As reported on the Breakthrough Blog (a site run by two progressive, environmentalists):

When you take out the UK and Germany, whose emissions decreased due to factors exogenous to Kyoto or EU climate and energy policies (UK emissions declined precipitously after Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners union in the 1980's and the UK switched over to North Sea natural gas. German emissions declined by similarly after reunification, when East German heavy industry collapsed), the remaining advanced developed economies in the EU (call them the EU 13) saw their emissions increase by almost 12 percent between 1990 and 2005. With full implementation of existing policies, projections for 2010 are in fact marginally worse among these nations, exceeding 1990 emissions by over 12 percent.

Even under the best case scenario in the report for EU 15 emissions, which projects an 11 percent reduction in GHG from 1990 levels, over 70 percent of that reduction can be accounted for solely by the reduction in actual emissions in the UK and Germany between 1990 and 2005 (put another way, the 8 percent reduction required by Kyoto can be almost entirely accounted for by the reduction in emissions in the UK and Germany since 1990).

The guys who run this site are not a couple  of hacks or trolls. They have written a best-selling book on the subject, which got rave reviews from major liberal and mainstream publications. Since the CDM does not seem to have accomplished much in its present form, it might be a mixed blessing that Lieberman-Warner failed (though I do love to see Lieberman, the arch-traitor, fail, that's for sure). So, what's to be done? Well, we are going to have to wait until the next administration. If Obama wins, and he is really a forward-thinking post-partisan who can effectively cut the power of big business in thwarting legislation, we may have a chance to do something innovative that really works. However, after reading this post by progressive economist Dean Baker over at Talking Points Memo about who Obama has chosen as his economic advisers, I think it's just as likely that it will be Business (with a capital B) as usual in D.C. come January, regardless of who takes the oath of office:

Like many progressives I was disappointed to hear the line-up for Obama's economic team going into the general election. The lead figure will be Jason Furman, who was the director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings. This project is the brainchild of Robert Rubin the leading light of the Wall Street Democrats. While my friends and fellow progressive economists, Jared Bernstein and Jamie Galbraith are on the team (I have also been contacted), it is clear who has the leading role.

I was disappointed by this line-up, but not surprised. After all, Senator Obama wants to be president.

...

When it comes to economic issues the tone this crew sets is decidedly more in line with Wall Street than Main Street. This can be seen on issue after issue.

Baker ends with a few words of hope and an important reminder:

However much we might like to see Senator Obama openly embrace a progressive economic agenda, that is not going to happen because of the current political realities. As the Internet and alternative media outlets grow, and the reach of the establishment media shrivels, there will be more room for progressive economics and progressive economists, but we aren't there yet.

Until then, we should keep our ammunition dry. Senator Obama's election can make an enormous difference in the political environment and the direction the country takes. But progressives must keep the pressure on. Senator Obama is an enormously talented political figure, but he alone is not going to bring about change. It takes a movement.

We have a lot of work left to do, and the election of a progressive president is just the beginning.

World oil production will start to fall sometime during this decade, never to rise again. In 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970's. Although Hubbert was widely criticized by some oil experts and economists, in 1971 Hubbert's prediction came true. The 100 year period when most of the world's oil is being discovered became known as "Hubbert's Peak". The peak stands in contrast to the hundreds of millions of years the oil deposits took to form. Hubbert's methods predict a peak in world oil production less than five years away.

Many books on this subject paint doom and gloom scenarios for which there is no solution, except to figure out how to survive in a world where cheap abundant energy of any kind is a thing of the past—in other words, a lifestyle more akin to 19th century agrarian societies than modern information economies. Perhaps the best known of such books is The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler. As the review from Publisher's Weekly states:

The indictment of suburbia and the car culture that the author presented in The Geography of Nowhere turns apocalyptic in this vigorous, if overwrought, jeremiad. Kunstler notes signs that global oil production has peaked and will soon dwindle, and argues in an eye-opening, although not entirely convincing, analysis that alternative energy sources cannot fill the gap, especially in transportation. The result will be a Dark Age in which "the center does not hold" and "all bets are off about civilization's future." Absent cheap oil, auto-dependent suburbs and big cities will collapse, along with industry and mechanized agriculture; serfdom and horse-drawn carts will stage a comeback; hunger will cause massive "die-back"; otherwise "impotent" governments will engineer "designer viruses" to cull the surplus population; and Asian pirates will plunder California. Kunstler takes a grim satisfaction in this prospect, which promises to settle his many grudges against modernity. A "dazed and crippled America," he hopes, will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism; strong bonds of social solidarity will be reforged; and our heedless, childish culture of consumerism will be forced to grow up. Kunstler's critique of contemporary society is caustic and scintillating as usual, but his prognostications strain credibility.

While Deffeyes is hardly a rosy optimist, he devotes much of his recent book to exploring realistic alternative energy options. Environmentalists will not necessarily be heartened by his presentation, though. Again, from Publisher's Weekly:

In this sobering, instructive and somewhat apocalyptic book, Deffeyes (Hubbert's Peak) paints a bleak picture of the future of fossil fuels and of what will happen to the world without them. Deffeyes bases his book on the work of M. King Hubbert, who mathematically determined that the world's oil supply would peak in 2000 and then drop steadily thereafter. Deffeyes tackles the mathematics of Hubbert's method and offers his own prediction (that the peak will occur at the end of 2005), but there is plenty here for those who aren't enamored with numbers, including a crash course in the slow evolution of oil. Oil and its related petroleum byproducts, Deffeyes points out, have changed the world economically, technologically and socially, and its absence could have a similarly massive, though negative, effect. Deffeyes predicts that famine, war and death will result from the shortages, but he does more than just sound the alarm: a large portion of the book is devoted to surveying the pros and cons of alternative resources like coal and hydrogen. Though Deffeyes offers only a few practical suggestions for the reader, most of which are obvious (i.e., get on a waitlist for a hybrid car), this is an earnestly written cautionary tale and a great resource for anyone looking to become energy literate.

Implicit in Deffeyes' thesis is that peak oil presents more of an immediate threat to the world than global warming and/or the risks inherent in using nuclear power. (Check out his blog for ongoing thoughts on this subject.) No doubt, some luddite environmentalists will be drawn to Kunstler's doomsday scenario, with the resultant return to a pre-technological, small-scale village lifestyle. I would caution anyone who has never worked hard manual labor to not over-romanticize this possibility. To paraphrase Hobbes, life for most people for most of history was nasty, brutish, and short. The picture Deffeyes paints and the possible solutions he offers present us with hard choices and the need for some serious reflection. Savannah is perhaps better poised to deal with the ramifications than many other cities are due to our warm climate, walkability, and year-round growing season. The question is whether the predictions of impending calamity are valid. If they are, then the time is now to start planning for how to deal with it.

For those concerned enough to research what to do next, there are a couple of more practical books out there:

• Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash
• Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World

...every morning, 76% of America's commuters drive, alone, an average of 25 minutes to their workplaces. Many of these people then proceed to e-mail or call people in other places. Indeed, about 40% of the U.S. workforce has jobs that, largely, do not need to be done from a central location. If the millions of Americans who never work from home, but could, stayed in their PJs, this would save a sizeable chunk of our oil imports from the Persian Gulf. "This takes windmills and all the other alternative fuels combined and tops them," says Kate Lister, founder of the telecommuting research company Undress4Success.

"Management still thinks people need to be in the office for eight hours a day in order to be productive," says Makower. "Anyone who works in an office eight hours knows that probably three hours and 45 minutes are spent being productive." (Are you reading this at work?)

Partly because people waste so much time commuting, and waste so much time at work while consuming electricity and office space, companies that have implemented telecommuting programs have seen economic benefits — rather than productivity losses — from this decision. A meta-analysis of 46 studies, published in the November Journal of Applied Psychology, found that telecommuting was associated with higher supervisor performance ratings, increased job satisfaction and a reduction in intent to leave the company.

What are the positive and negative consequences of telecommuting? How do these consequences come about? When are these consequences more or less potent? The authors answer these questions through construction of a theoretical framework and meta-analysis of 46 studies in natural settings involving 12,883 employees. Telecommuting had small but mainly beneficial effects on proximal outcomes, such as perceived autonomy and (lower) work–family conflict. Importantly, telecommuting had no generally detrimental effects on the quality of workplace relationships. Telecommuting also had beneficial effects on more distal outcomes, such as job satisfaction, performance, turnover intent, and role stress. These beneficial consequences appeared to be at least partially mediated by perceived autonomy. Also, high-intensity telecommuting (more than 2.5 days a week) accentuated telecommuting’s beneficial effects on work–family conflict but harmed relationships with coworkers. Results provide building blocks for a more complete theoretical and practical treatment of telecommuting.

Seeing as the typical U.S. household spends 18% of its income on driving costs– more, even, than it spends on food– telecommuting offers a viable way to offset the steep expenses of gas and automobile maintenance. One study reports that we could save about 1.35 billion gallons of fuel a year if everyone who was able to telecommute, did so just 1.6 days a week.

More and more green businesses are encouraging telecommuting and there are a great many reasons why. Telecommuting not only saves the earth by decreasing transportation-based greenhouse gases, but also provides employees a peaceful place to complete key projects without interruption. Productivity increases of up to 40 percent have been reported through telework programs. Not only does telework reduce transportation-based emissions, it also reduces total energy consumption at the work place. Smaller businesses can inhabit smaller premises by rotating telework days amongst employees.

Unlike previous spikes in food prices, caused by crop failures, Brown says the world is dealing with systemic changes now — rising demand in Asia, for instance, for more grain-intensive livestock. But he says the straw that broke the camel's back is the demand for biofuel.

"The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV tank with ethanol will feed one person for a year," Brown says. "And what we are seeing now is the emergence of direct competition between the 860 million people in the world who own automobiles and who want to maintain their mobility while the 2 billion poorest people in the world simply want to survive."

Interestingly, Georgia is one of the states pioneering a much more viable alternative:

 Wood waste from millions of acres of indigenous Georgia Pine will be the main source of biomass for a new cellulosic ethanol production facility in Treutlen County, Georgia. The plant, being built by Colorado-based Range Fuels, Inc., will use a two-step thermo-chemical conversion process to convert biomass into a synthetic gas and then gas to ethanol.

...

The company's proprietary technology -- known as the K2 system -- eliminates the use of enzymes, which have been an expensive component of traditional cellulosic ethanol production, and transforms otherwise useless products such as wood chips, agricultural wastes, grasses, and cornstalks as well as hog manure, municipal garbage, sawdust and paper pulp into ethanol through a thermo-chemical conversion process.

"Grasses are deceptively productive," says lead investigator Robert Jackson. "You don't see where all the carbon goes, so there is a misconception that woody species [such as trees and shrubs] store more carbon. That's just not the case." Grasses store vast amounts of carbon in their underground root mass.

Raising cattle on grass is one way to make it financially feasible to expand our native grasslands. Although cows generate their own greenhouse gasses, the net effect of raising ruminants on pasture is to slow global warming.

Yes, you read that right. Cattle raised on grass have a net negative effect on greenhouse gas emissions. This doesn't just lead to less emissions than before, it reduces the total emissions below zero. Now, granted, planting grasses and getting rid of cows would do even more, but let's be reasonable. That just ain't gonna happen. I suggest if you want to make the best compromise between your personal health and the health of the planet, eat only small amounts of beef and eat only grass-fed or wild animals. Some might consider this a sellout, but I am totally convinced by overwhelming evidence that I am not wrong on the health issue. The issue of sustainability is complex. It is not just about the environment. If we cannot get our healthcare system under control, we will have an unsustainable economy and everyone will suffer. The only way we are going to reduce healthcare costs is by changing our lifestyles. Eating right is an important component of being green, and simplistic analyses of the issues will not help us achieve the best solutions.