This is the second in a five-part editorial series (under the “Environmental Riposte” tag) commenting on Kevin Liblin’s recent series for the National Post (and syndicated in the Vancouver Sun). This second entry is in response to Feed the world: grow fish in Alberta’s badlands.

Since 2001, explains Dr. Savidov, lead plant physiologist and biochemist at this provincial crop diversification lab, he’s recycled the same water, over and over, through jumbo vats, throbbing with hundreds of tilapia fish, out to an adjacent water table as big as a small backyard, where grids of aquaponic crops nourish on nutrients from the composted fish waste, and then back to the fish, where it returns clean and oxygenated.

[snip]

While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.

That fish-land system in the first paragraph seems pretty organic. I’m not incredulous towards natural fertilizers and controlled water tables — I’m incredulous towards inefficient, chemical nitrogen delivery systems in the Mississippi watershed that lead to giant dead-zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.

But what if we tried 21st century organic farms like the one described in the quoted paragraph above? Why is the discussion limited to organic technologies from the 60s?

An hour or so up the road from Dr. Savidov’s laboratories, John Tremblay, president of Alternative Agriculture Technology, breeds shrimp in two huge tanks in a barn in the middle of cattle country. He’s just getting started. When he’s fully scaled up, he estimates an enclosed shrimp farm on an acre of land will produce 60,000 lbs of food yearly — a 30 times greater yield than a typical acre of soybeans. “We went from being labelled shrimp farmers to being sustainable food production specialists,” Mr. Tremblay says. “If a guy can grow shrimp in Alberta then we can do it almost anywhere.”

[snip]

While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What’s astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.

Groups complaining about fish farms, to my knowledge, aren’t complaining about land-tank based systems as Kevin implies with this line of reasoning. The problematic fish farms, as I understand the issue, are open-net farms in the ocean which generate considerable environmental and epidemiological externalities. The Friends of Clayoquot Sound, for example, aren’t against fish farms but rather want closed-tank over open-net operations.

“Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn’t a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There’s been no environmental catastrophes,” Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.

I had coffee with a nutritionist recently. One of the reasons people are removing wheat from their diets in favor of spelt and Canadian Red Wheat is that the monoculture we’re currently producing is undigestible for a surprising number of adults. It’s been engineered for grain size, pest and disease resistance, growth speed, etc., but not nutrition. People are getting sick.

Claiming that there haven’t been any environmental catastrophes is just wrong — it’s a belief predicated on the idea that we’re not currently in the middle of an environment catastrophe (again, like hypoxic dead zones).

This is the first in a five-part editorial series (under the “Environmental Riposte” tag) commenting on Kevin Liblin’s recent series for the National Post (and syndicated in the Vancouver Sun). This first entry is in response to Blue Bin Blues. Please help with my analysis, pro or con, as my environmental-fu is not strong.

Unfortunately, recycling plastic often doesn’t make much more sense. Germany has stockpiled millions of tonnes of recyclable plastics in rural fields, like above-ground dumps. “These cheap plastic bottles, it depends on the price of oil, but the market is not worth much,” says Daniel Benjamin, an economist at South Carolina’s Clemson University who studies recycling.

This degenerates into a peak oil argument. The tar sands, for example, occasionally become economically inviable for the same reason: when the price of oil is high, alternative forms are more attractive. As we run out of oil alternative sources of plastic will become economically viable.

Similarly, the argument that recycling programs are inefficient relies on the idea that they will never become efficient. Arguing against economies of scope and scale is an odd position for the National Post to take, especially given the later posts in this series where Kevin argues for economies of scale and scope in food production.

That’s why curbside recycling requires, wherever it’s implemented, millions of tax dollars to stay afloat: the inputs required are greater than the savings. Even in New York City, where area land is some of the most expensive on the continent, it costs $240 to deal with a ton of recyclables, compared to the $130 a ton of landfills, says Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at Washington’s Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This is why I like it when environmentalists try to put a price on the environment itself. The numbers Kevin cites ignore externalities — they’re based entirely on a failed market, one where landfill operators (in this case) free ride on future generations’ economic valuation of the environment. The $130 figure likely ignores an extra $110 in environmental costs, assuming the $240 figure is for neutral eco-cost recycling (which I doubt — $240 is probably low as well).

Often the effects of aggressive residential recycling programs harm environmental goals. Citywide blue box programs typically mean a whole new fleet of trucks: Calgary now has 64 more diesel-burning rigs retracing the same tracks its garbage trucks did just a few days earlier, roughly doubling carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.

Agreed — it’s too bad GM killed the electric car. If they hadn’t sabotaged science and their own markets to prop up the oil companies then we’d have low-emission trucks (and the money from bailing them out). Still, let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Electric trucks will come.

In 2002, two of Sweden’s leading environmental authorities argued that recycling’s benefits were usually undone by the resources required to collect and process it.

Agreed — centralized recycling is preferable to blue-box programs.

First, cities should drop the ridiculously high targets to recycle 70, 80 or 90% of waste. And instead, have homeowners bundle their paper, cardboard and aluminum — the worthwhile stuff — into special coloured bags alongside their regular trash pickup. Those bags can then be separated at the landfill, and the rest trashed.

Or, you know, we could use all these handy blue bins everyone has lying around…

Say you did want to correct the environmental and social problems of the agricultural industry. Rather than consuming for great justice, you might try some good old fashioned political action. But what exactly should you action for?

Waste

There is a lot of waste at every stage of the food chain from the farm to your house. Fixing this is a big campaign in Britain right now. Start an education campaign or get into some civil-disobedient dumpster diving.

Carbon

Buying local or organic is a lazy proxy for low carbon. European grocery stores have proper carbon labelling, which reveals the two biggest problems in agriculture: beef and air-freight. Nudge argues that mandatory labeling is a reasonable government intervention; mail your MP.

The last mile

Getting food from the grocery store to households is incredibly inefficient. Talk to your city council about zoning and property tax incentives to get a grocery store within 400 metres of every household. You can improve your own consumption by ordering online.

Pesticide and fertilizer

These are serious problems but organic isn’t a sustainable solution, genetic modification is. Lobby your MP for chemical labeling; organic certification is too broad of a brush.

Fair trade

Buying food from the under-developed world only helps them if the money doesn’t end up in the pockets of shareholders in the developed world. Why are so few products Fair Trade certified? Is Fair Trade the best solution? I’m not sure what the political action is in this case.

Andrew Potter gives a scathing criticism of both eating organic and eating local in Macleans. It turns out that the nutritional benefits of organic do not appear in laboratory tests. The economies of scale from industrialized farming make it better for the environment than either niche food (remember: your intuitions about environmental cost are wrong).

This makes it clear that the underlying reason people consume niche food is to be cool. And that doing so harms other people.

The only touted advantage he doesn’t address is “food security”. I’ve always taken it to be a kind of joke to refer to growing vegetables at city hall by the same term that serious people use to refer to anti-starvation measures. But if it’s the only area open for debate I guess I need to take another look at it…

This New Yorker book review of Superfreak-onomics implies that Levitt and Dubner show their true colours as right wingers, just like all economists, even renegades.* They downplay the seriousness of climate change and suggest geoengineering is a better solution than restricting carbon emissions. The review quotes Al Gore:

We are already involved in a massive, unplanned planetary experiment. We should not begin yet another planetary experiment in the hope that it will somehow magically cancel out the effects of the one we already have.

I agree with the criticism in the article right up until the end where she mentions that Freeman Dyson has proposed genetically engineering trees to grow on Mars. The value of running yet another planetary experiment on Earth is that we will learn how to terraform other planets!

I’ll trade a 20° Earth for a 28° Venus and a 7° Mars.

* Exception: Richard Thaler supports carbon taxes in Nudge.

As seen in the National Post, via Will: using more wood incentivizes the Forestry industry to plant more trees.

“We should grow more trees, and use more wood, in that order,” he says. Over the last century, despite harvesting billions worth of pulp and paper products, Canada’s forest cover has actually increased, according to OECD data. And foresters ensure that, unlike unmanaged forests, their trees don’t burn, reducing CO2 emitted by wild fires. Besides, when opponents of forestry, such as Greenpeace, dissuade consumers from using wood, they tacitly promote more harmful alternatives.

I haven’t checked the data or the bona fides of the OECD, and I know that there are hidden costs to having forests that never burn. Still, I often find that contrarian positions actually make the most sense (to me) — and I like being surrounded by wood.

One of the things BC should be doing is growing secondary wood industries. Shipping wood internationally and then importing foreign wood-goods is silly. I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a huge custom furniture business in BC. I think it’s mostly down to cost of living.

I haven’t read In Defense of Food, which I’m told has excellent arguments against organic.

The rich looked inside their food and didn’t like it, so they voted with their wallets to set up a parallel agriculture system: organic food. They could have lobbied the government to restrict pesticide use. Instead they said, “let the poor eat pesticide-contaminated, low-nutrition cake”.

The decision to check out of organic food is to choose consumption over collective action. Partially it’s just easier to set up another agriculture; partially it’s fun that buying expensive food can define your identity (literally, you are what you eat). It’s not just in a Rawlsian sense: it doesn’t make the poor better off.

If you had two companies selling food, they’d attempt to differentiate themselves in the market. One might start making higher quality food and the other might make lower cost food. That is precisely what has happened to the two whole markets in this case: 100-mile heritage biodynamic fair-trade vegetables vs This is Why You’re Fat. Buying organic food might actually cause non-organic food to get worse.

It’s also not just in a Kantian sense: The categorical imperative says that you should act as you wish everyone acted. If everyone tried to live off organic food, 2 billion people would die. (Kyla shared that article, which I’ve used twice, with me on Earth Day – yay!)

As The Rebel Sell discusses, protest has become (or always was?) a consumption pattern. In particular, boycotting and other abstinences are indistinguishable from positional goods. I receive social status when I don’t do certain things.

One of the most popular contemporary consumption patterns is to live a sustainable lifestyle. From recycling to gardening, these activities are obviously fashionable. The problem is that a few fashion-forward individuals are not enough to save the planet. In such a serious collective action problem, it is not enough to tell people that destroying the environment isn’t cool.

Most of the destruction is being done by corporations, which are not designed to follow individual fashion (although I gotta say, Starbucks is rocking those knee-high boots). People need to stop focusing identity-forming positional consumption, which separates people, and get together to change the system.

Even worse, environmentalists are against some of the very collective actions that have the most potential to save everything! I would happily campaign for intense urbanification and nuclear power, to name two.

Getting people to stop consuming stuff and start working together could require a complete overhaul of civil society, which is at least as daunting as reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels.

It looks cool. I want it.