I was wrong about sustainability. Well, sort of.

I’ve changed my mind about sustainability.  Well, sort of.    

Perhaps I’ve just been a bit curmudgeonly, but I’ve bristled at the often-used word “sustainability” in the context of food and agriculture. Sustainability seems to be one of those feel-good, vacuous buzz words that is thrown around to support whatever cause the wielder of the word wants to support.  In fact, in The Food Police, I wrote:

the sustainability movement largely represents an elitist attempt to ration scarce resources using social pressure, guilt, and regulation

On the one hand, it is hard to argue with the concept of sustainability.  Wikipedia simply says it is the “the capacity to endure” and to remain “productive over time.”

That doesn’t sound so problematic.  Who doesn’t want to endure and remain productive?

I’ve come to realize my problem is not with the concept of sustainability per se but rather with the way many people propose to achieve the outcome.

In food and agriculture, “sustainability” has come to be interpreted as synonymous with organic, “natural”, and local.  In this sort of vision, the way we endure and sustain our production over time is that we have a smaller population, we need to spend more time working the land, we need to spend more money on food, and we need to learn to like to eat different kinds of foods.  Maybe that kind of future sounds good to some folks, but for my taste, if that is the kind of future that will be sustained, count me out.  I suppose our cave-man forefathers could have carried on quite “sustainably” for a very long time, but their “sustainable” life is not one I’d prefer being born into.  This “natural” future is not the kind of future in which I want to live, and I think that is why I’ve been bothered by the word “sustainability.” 

The thing that is missing in the local, slow, organic vision of sustainability is any serious consideration of the role of scientific and technological advancement.  Sustainable doesn’t have to mean stagnant.  Rather, I posit that any future worth fighting for is one that is dynamic, innovative, and exciting; one in which there will be many fellow humans, with bountiful opportunities to eat and work as their hearts desire.  In all likelihood, there will be another billion people show up on this earth in the next 40 to 50 years, and if we are to “endure” and remain productive and prosperous, it will require advancements in food and agricultural technologies.      

We don’t have to take a step back to sustain our current living and eating standards.  We can continue to enjoy the wonderful abundance of food and even improve our living standards.  But technological optimism won’t cut it.  We actually have to invest in research and development.  We actually have to be willing to adopt new food and agricultural technologies.

I am a proponent of technological advancement in food and agriculture because it is the root underlying cause of our gains in prosperity.  That’s why I now am in favor of sustainability.  Because, as I see it, in an ideal future, they’re one in the same.             

Economic Effects of Environmental Regulation

Jeffry Dorfman, an agricultural economist at the University of Georgia, weighed in on Obama's proposed environmental regulations at Real Clear Markets.  After discussing the fact that the environmental effects are probably smaller and more nuanced than most people expect, the got to the economics of the issue:

First, rising energy prices. A fascinating part of the special-interest coalition that makes up the Democratic Party is how many of its groups have aims which are at odds with another coalition partner. Environmental groups advocate a set of policies that uniformly hurt poor people. Environmental protection is essentially a luxury good. If you have enough money to provide food, clothing, and shelter for your family, then you start to care about the environment.

Krugman and I can both afford to pay a little more on our electricity bill and when we fill up our gas tanks, but those higher energy costs are regressive. Poor people spend a higher percentage of their income on energy bills, so raising those costs in order to improve the environment means that the poor will feel more pain than those with higher incomes. If we were talking about tax policy, no liberal would forget to mention the poor and how the rich should carry more of the burden. Yet, somehow, on environmental policy most liberals favor policies which hurt the very people they normally want to help.

Then he gets into the broken-window fallacy - that somehow by forcing companies to invest in new equipment, everyone can be made better off.  

Now if we build a brand new power plant while continuing to operate all the ones we have, that can lead to economic growth because we are increasing the productive capacity of the economy. But shutting down a plant that is fine in every way except for producing emissions that worry some people is the same as when a natural disaster destroys property. Something that had value no longer exists. The idea that replacing the previous item leads to economic growth is one of the most basic fallacies in all of economics, known as the broken window fallacy.

The Eli Lehrer in the Weekly Standard also had an interesting response to Obama's proposed environmental regulations. Here is one snippet:

Indeed, if free-market conservatives really want evidence of climate change, they ought to look towards the insurance markets that would bear much of the cost of catastrophic climate change. All three of the major insurance modeling firms and every global insurance company incorporate human-caused climate change into their projections of current and future weather patterns. The big business that has the most to lose from climate change, and that would reap the biggest rewards if it were somehow solved tomorrow, has universally decided that climate change is a real problem. An insurance company that ignored climate change predictions could, in the short term, make a lot of money by underpricing its competition on a wide range of products. Not a single firm has done this.

and yet, Lehrer rightly says:

The scientific consensus that exists about the causes and effects of climate change can’t point to an optimal policy solution any more than improvements in heart surgery techniques can provide guidance on health care reform.

Environmental Working Group on Organic Impacts

The Environmental Working Group (EWG)​ lists on their web site a ranking of the relative environmental impact (measured in terms of greenhouse gas emissions) of different foods.  The table is based on life-cycle analysis (LCA) conducted by a company called Clean Metrics.

I'm not ​an expert on LCA and I haven't dug into the detail on how Clean Metrics conducted the analysis.  Thus, I won't comment for now on the relative ranking of the different foods and commodities.  

However, I find the labeling on the EWG's prominent graph highly misleading.  The reason is that the chart repeatedly says things like:​

choose organic; ​buy organic; avoid growth hormones

Here is the problem. The research doesn't actually support the claim that these urgings would actually lower greenhouse gas emissions.  In fact, by their own admission, the EWG reveals that:

The lifecycle assessments are based on conventional rather than pasture-based or organic systems of food production. . . we were unable to identify definitive studies and widely accepted methodologies assessing greenhouse gas emissions from pasture-raised, organic or other meat production systems. 

So, the analysis didn't actually study the greenhouse gas emissions of organics or pasture-raised!​

​Moreover, when we look at the words of the company (Clean Metrics) that conducted the study that forms the basis of the EWG chart, we see things like:

There is not a strong correlation between organic food production methods and lower carbon footprints.

and

On balance, grass-fed animal products from ruminants are likely to have higher carbon footprints compared to products from conventionally housed/fed animals.

​Also, when we look at the research on growth hormones, like in this Journal of Animal Science article, we find

Manure output increased by 1,799 × 10^3 t as a result of [growth -enhancing technologies - primarily growth hormones] withdrawal, with an increase in carbon emissions of 714,515 t/454 × 10^6 kg beef

and this article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science shows that the use of the growth hormone rBST in milk could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, the EWG may have other reasons for advising against consuming foods with growth hormones or advising to eat organic over conventional, but I find it misleading to make these claims in a prominent graph ranking foods by greenhouse gas emissions.

Food Fear Mongering

A colleague forwarded me this story from NBC news.​  It's really hard to know where to start in on all the misleading claims and innuendos.  There first couple paragraphs will give you a sense of the tone:

American eaters, let’s talk about the birds and the bees: The U.S. food supply – from chickens injected with arsenic to dying bee colonies – is under unprecedented siege from a blitz of man-made hazards, meaning some of your favorite treats someday may vanish from your plate, experts say.

Warmer and moister air ringing much of the planet – punctuated by droughts in other locales – is threatening the prime ingredients in many daily meals, including the maple syrup on your morning pancakes and the salmon on your evening grill as well as the wine in your glass and the chocolate on your dessert tray, according to four recent studies.

At the same time, an unappetizing bacterial outbreak in Florida citrus droves, largely affecting orange trees, is causing fruit to turn bitter. Elsewhere, unappealing fungi strains are curtailing certain coffee yields and devastating some banana plantations, researchers report.

​Strictly speaking, each of the above examples does indeed correspond to a real challenge faced in each of the above industries.  But, does it represent a "food supply under assault" as the title of the article suggests?  Are each of these the cause of global warming?  The author later blames problems on "mono-culture" agriculture but that doesn't fit well any of the commodities described above. 

Much of the paranoia seems to stem from an interview with one professor of public health at Johns Hopkins who is quoted as saying things like:​

We need to regard all of these (examples) as a very powerful motivator to try to work on the carbon emissions, to start pushing that parts per million of carbon dioxide back down

​and

“Maybe seeing this impact all this has on our ability to raise the food we depend on will get us to the tipping point of real policy change and real action,” Lawrence said. “I hope so.”

Another professor of environmental science is quoted as saying:

We’re in a situation where the food supply is more vulnerable than it has ever been

​Providing a few anecdotal stories does not constitute scientific evidence.  If we are indeed so vulnerable, why is it that crop prices in the US have come down off their highs a year or so ago.  If late corn planting were really a sign of disaster (as this article suggests), it would be reflected in high corn prices but that's not what we're seeing.    

Moreover, why didn't the author actually go to the data and look at per-capita food availability (which can be found here)​, which doesn't reveal any general lack of scarcity. Or, why didn't they turn to the research on the projected impacts of climate change on agricultural production, which suggests it may be beneficial for agriculture (for some counter evidence, see here).  Either way, yes climate change will likely hurt some regions and some commodities, but it will also help other regions and commodities.  Growing corn and melons in Canada will become much easier (and less costly) if it gets warmer there.  

Its this sort of fear mongering based on anecdotal evidence, rejection of modern technology, ​followed up by ill-advised (and under-researched) policy recommendations that largely motivated me to write the Food Police.

The Cost of Environmentalism

What is the impact of a ban on plastic bags used by grocery stores?  Unexpectedly, it is higher chances of foodborne illness.  Apparently carting around that same old bag back-and-forth to the grocery story also means carting around bacteria to-and-from the grocery store.