banking.economics.sustainability and other shiny stuff
It’s straight out of 1950s science fiction: an entire country connected by food-transporting pipelines, sending baked beans and smoked kippers sailing between London and Liverpool at 60 miles per hour. And it’s arguably more sensible than what we’re already doing.
In the United Kingdom, 8 percent of all carbon dioxide mixed into the atmosphere comes from the diesel gas used to move around food trucks. That’s a ton of unnecessary pollution, particularly when you consider one estimate suggests only a small percentage of that gas is actually needed to move the food if things were run efficiently. That’s where Foodtubes enters the picture.
The brainchild of a British team of academics, engineers, and project planners, Foodtubes calls for the creation of high-speed food pipelines throughout the UK. Each major city and center food production would be linked with a pipeline, and the cities would also have their own internal pipelines to get the food to various different neighborhoods.
The food would sail along in small capsules at upwards of 60 miles per hour. As many as 900,000 capsules could be in circulation in the nearly 2,000 miles of pressurized pipe, all of which would be controlled by smart grids that would keep food from crashing into each other. To give some semblance of order, the capsules would generally be organized into little trains of about 300 linked capsules, each spaced about a meter apart.
Not sure if they’ve considered what they will do with all those suddenly future unemployed truck drivers though.
11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food — far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.
Here’s a letter to the New York Times:
Todd Tucker wants Uncle Sam to reject free trade in favor of “fair trade” (Letters, Nov. 22).
While every decent person applauds fairness and condemns unfairness, “fairness” is far too fuzzy a concept to guide public policy. To see why, imagine what the state of First Amendment law would be like were only a few words of that amendment changed to make its guiding principle fairness rather than freedom:
“Congress shall make no unfair law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the fair exercise thereof; or abridging the fairness of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people fairly to assemble, and to petition the Government fairly for a redress of grievances.”
Is there any doubt that replacing “free” with “fair” in this context would remove all teeth from the First Amendment? In the same way, a policy of fair trade rather than free trade would, in practice, be a policy of unfree – and, by the way, unfair – monopoly privileges for politically influential domestic producers.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Consider the idea of governmental regulation of the originality of music. Where states impose control and subjectively deemed the originality of music in order to maintain its sustainability. A concept which seems to also fit within the practice of pollution prevention or deforestation.
One can postulate that each new song harbors a point on a range that is between true originality or pure derivative. In today's music industry, it is not unusual to see major artists with dozen of songs of their albums that are plain derivatives of original titles or even of other derivatives. But why do artists produce derivative works in the first place?
The answer may be found in classical economic theory; when originality is abundant, it is harder to market and produce yet another new original song. "Song writers then become more tempted to develop and market recycled versions of old songs. " We therefore can infer that production of original music has decreased, thus rendering the supply as a finite resource, which leads to more and more artists shifting to producing more and more derivative art.
This then begets the question: So what happens when there is no more original music? Should we turn to explicit governmental regulation to sustain the production of original music? Looking over at other practices where the government has enacted laws to maintain a resource's sustainability. I presumed the government would impose, amongst other things, a levy in the form of taxation on derivative artists. This could even eventually be spilled over to film, paintings and books alike. What would a world like this look like? The answer can be found in this award winning short story.
Supporting my point, Hayek states:
Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation.
In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.
His position on the idea that one can indeed create a price mechanism to mitigate the increasing threat of climate change’s repercussions goes extremely contrary to the American right's opposition of carbon pricing. In a world where pollution is at the top of the political spectrum, I think we owe the world to come to a conclusion - that actions need to be taken.
Insofar as to the power the political elites are able to muster to move forward with planned undertakings, I am very sorry to say that the outlook is very much despairing and I have come to harbor a pessimistic view . It might just be plain ignorance or better said the industrial complex massive amounts of cash that they are willing to front delusively in the name of Hayek's sake.
To quote Peter Thiel: "In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics... The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it."
The next frontier on the global warming front is becoming less and less likely to be the so called cap and trade initiative. The bill died in the Senate recently and the cost of carbon emissions will remain steadily the same in the future. Not many options are left however to raise the cost of carbon emissions and experts are turning to alternatives and pointing towards the past to highlight where similar major initiatives were not left up to the market but materialized by government push.
...history shows that government-directed research can work. The Defense Department created the Internet, as part of a project to build a communications system safe from nuclear attack. The military helped make possible radar, microchips and modern aviation, too. The National Institutes of Health spawned the biotechnology industry. All those investments have turned into engines of job creation, even without any new tax on the technologies they replaced. “We didn’t tax typewriters to get the computer.
We didn’t tax telegraphs to get telephones,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., which is a sponsor of the proposal with A.E.I. and Brookings. “When you look at the history of technological innovation, you find that state investment is everywhere.”
In an attempt to even start by raising the price of fossil fuels, we are incapable of coming to a potential solution and, consequently, have come to looking to bypass the ordeal. In detail, no one is certain of the effectiveness of cap and trade and neither of the alternatives.
It all comes down to implementing all variants which can reduce green house gas emissions. Research, which can lead to an over-the-top wind mill or super photovoltaic materials, should also be employed. However, state participation is already sufficient - with a planned $4 billion budget in the United States alone. I would proposed a kind of diversification where green energy research can be subsidized by the government and, mainly, philanthropically whereby institutions undertake the initial research initiative due to the perputal rising cost of fossil fuel.
Locavores' main argument remain the fact that due to an exuberant amount of energy and costs that are entailed in transporting a tomato across the country, one is held morally to eat locally as it is an environmentally and sustainably sound way of reducing one's greenhouse gas foot print. Steven Landsburg mocks this kind of micro-mindedness as follows:
You should care about all those costs. And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? What useful tasks could those California workers perform if they weren’t busy growing tomatoes? What about the New York workers? What alternative uses were there for the fertilizers and the farming equipment — or better yet, the resources that went into producing those fertilizers and farming equipment — in each location?
In any case, misrepresentation of information is very much abundant when anyone is trying to advocate one's pride agenda. It is the nature of things. As demonstrated by the guy whom Landsburg ridicules:
It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.
The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far. A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy.
In all fairness, Budiansky, the guy quoted right above, maintains the argument that energy consumption should not be of paramount concern. It is rather the given set of values that the locavores choose to optimize. If they were to have chosen to advocate that families did not need a second or a third refrigerator neither a standalone freezer in their home nor a dishwasher, the locavores' argument could have well worth its case. It is a fine thing to eat locally but this is not a virtue in itself. Rather, when presented with the overall picture, the relative amount of energy spent on farming is of minute pertinence compared to our well-being and in the yield of the land.
Diplomatic Standards is an attempt at organizing the chaos of the current organic industry on a global scale and openly. We are an active community that believes that you should understand the importance of having an unclouded source of sustenance. You and I, together with anyone that believes in the quality of the food they eat, now have the opportunity to ensure that outcome.
We would like to issue a call out to anyone and any organization to come and actively participate and collaboratively work to implement a new global standard and enforcement apparatus that can ensure safety and compliance. Diplomatic Standard is a direct response to a current global organic industry that is full of ambiguity, fraud, turmoil and that maintains a closed system.
Where Diplomatic Standards fits
It is of no secret that current national standards were created as deliberate pure marketing efforts to expose the organic concept to consumers. Pressured by the major firms in the agricultural industry, many governments had since setup numerous apparatus towards the effort of promoting organic goods to farmers and consumers alike. It was also within the judgment of the consumer that these governmental frameworks would protect, enforce and uphold the true idea behind the term organic as it was understood and believed to be.
Regrettably, during the course of this remarkable growth of the industry globally, the organic image has unnecessarily immensely deteriorate and has prompted a need for a new approach. The idea of Diplomatic Standards is to use current technology to form a global, bottom-up, open standard where all parties can truly collaborate in reaching consensus and whose primary mission is for transparency and decentralization. Diplomatic Standards is positioned to place itself as the third choice within a two system framework that is currently composed of either conventional or organic foods.
Where within any system, the fundamental conflict exists where vendors by nature compete to capture the largest market share possible whereby raising costs vs. the market at large which seeks lower costs and freedom, Diplomatic Standards’ goal is to remove this conflict by empowering the individual with universal access to the standard’s process – made possible through modern technology.
Illustration: Darwinbell
Martin Angelov shared his funky concept for a new urban way of transportation dubbed “Kolelinia” with us . Kolelinia proposes that we ride our bicycles on a steel wire as a new type of bicycle lane. The idea was awarded first for the international “Line of Site” competition.
More about Kolelinia after the break.
“The first crazy idea which came to my mind was to make flying bicycle-lanes, using steel wire, something like ski lift but working on the opposite principle in which the wire is static and it doesn’t need electricity,” explained Angelov, who presented a more developed version of Kolelinia on Sofia’s TEDX conference a few days ago.
Working off the idea that transportation has to “not only be a transport, it has to be an experience,” Angelov has turned an initial idea into a developed possibility (especially with the addition of his safety features). Angelov’s ideas make us question whether it is possible to achieve a completely new level of transportation with minimum resources.
All images courtesy of Angelov.
