A lot of people, for one reason or another, want to cut down on their fossil fuel consumption. Let’s reduce the question to fossil fuels because that gives you a single metric: gallons of crude used to bring this product to you. Let’s also put to one side those who say that there’s no good reason to cut down on fossil fuels; at least some of the developed world’s population does want to use less oil.
But given a vast array of products, some of which advertise being “green” in one way or another, you don’t actually have a good way to know what’s the least oil-consuming shopping cart to bring home from the grocery store. Without knowledge, you can’t “shop green,” any more than you can save money without seeing any price tags. Using labels, news, and PR to inform you how to “shop green” may well be counterproductive. In an ideal world, you could actually get data about the energy expenditure of every consumer product, from bananas to boomboxes. Of course, to do that somebody would need to enforce disclosure requirements on manufacturers and that’s not going to happen (and maybe shouldn’t happen.)
At the very least, though, it would be a good project someday to make an incomplete estimate, based on what energy consumption data is available from manufacturers. And you might be able to get industry averages or back-of-the-envelope estimates for product categories (“Cabbage is better than lettuce by X gallons of oil per pound”)
But this is what frustrates me sometimes. I see people and institutions trying to change their buying habits altruistically (to use less oil or less sweatshop labor or something else) but they have no way to measure numerically how they’re doing at their goals, and they often don’t seem to care one bit. Why?!?! (Ok, signaling, but grrrrrr.)
Yeah, this is something I struggle with. My grandmother once made a huge effort to find these aluminum water bottles that were theoretically better for the environment and were made locally. Later on they turned out to be made in China, like everything else.
I’ve also been reading some stuff suggesting that driving a few extra miles to go to a remote but “local” farm ends up costing more oil, since the food produced overseas is shipped in huge bulk that works out to be more efficient.
Oil consumption isn’t the only thing that matters, but does make for a metric that should at least be possible to come up with.
I’ve been thinking about something like this.
A lot of people, for one reason or another, want to cut down on their fossil fuel consumption. Let’s reduce the question to fossil fuels because that gives you a single metric: gallons of crude used to bring this product to you. Let’s also put to one side those who say that there’s no good reason to cut down on fossil fuels; at least some of the developed world’s population does want to use less oil.
But given a vast array of products, some of which advertise being “green” in one way or another, you don’t actually have a good way to know what’s the least oil-consuming shopping cart to bring home from the grocery store. Without knowledge, you can’t “shop green,” any more than you can save money without seeing any price tags. Using labels, news, and PR to inform you how to “shop green” may well be counterproductive. In an ideal world, you could actually get data about the energy expenditure of every consumer product, from bananas to boomboxes. Of course, to do that somebody would need to enforce disclosure requirements on manufacturers and that’s not going to happen (and maybe shouldn’t happen.)
At the very least, though, it would be a good project someday to make an incomplete estimate, based on what energy consumption data is available from manufacturers. And you might be able to get industry averages or back-of-the-envelope estimates for product categories (“Cabbage is better than lettuce by X gallons of oil per pound”)
But this is what frustrates me sometimes. I see people and institutions trying to change their buying habits altruistically (to use less oil or less sweatshop labor or something else) but they have no way to measure numerically how they’re doing at their goals, and they often don’t seem to care one bit. Why?!?! (Ok, signaling, but grrrrrr.)
Yeah, this is something I struggle with. My grandmother once made a huge effort to find these aluminum water bottles that were theoretically better for the environment and were made locally. Later on they turned out to be made in China, like everything else.
I’ve also been reading some stuff suggesting that driving a few extra miles to go to a remote but “local” farm ends up costing more oil, since the food produced overseas is shipped in huge bulk that works out to be more efficient.
Oil consumption isn’t the only thing that matters, but does make for a metric that should at least be possible to come up with.