ColbyCosh.com

The carbon footprint of red meat production dwarfs the carbon footprint of transporting said red meat to the table. And somehow that's an argument against buying local produce? Well spun!

This has always been nonsense. I've been writing snarky comments in various places pointing this out for years now. But it will never make a dent in the "local food movement" as long as it is trendy, and it won't matter once it stops being trendy.

I do wish people would get the idea that you have to measure the cost of all the inputs to arrive at the true cost of any item, produce or otherwise- intuition is useless for this assessment. I won't turn blue in the lips over it though, unless I'm provided with some nitrous oxide set aside expressly for that purpose by the nature Gods, locally sourced, and ecologically offset.

The carbon footprint of red meat production dwarfs the carbon footprint of transporting said red meat to the table. And somehow that's an argument against buying local produce? Well spun!

The argument against buying local produce is that in working your ass off to reduce the 11% of the average diet's impact created by transport, you could easily raise the impact of the other 89%. Meanwhile, the most success you could possibly have would be to eliminate that 11%—to wit, a fraction of a fraction of one's overall footprint.

Cutting down on red meat is merely suggested by the study's authors as a potentially more efficient alternative for the carbon-conscious. They're in the Green Design department at Carnegie-Mellon, I don't think they're trying to "spin" anyone.

It is good news that the general level of public concern regarding anthropogenic climate change, and possibly sustainability issues in general, is sufficient to justify life-cycle research.

An optimist might see this as evidence that both the alarmists and the rejectionists are losing ground to rational pragmatists.

This study isn't saying that local production is undesirable - it's simply pointing out that the emissions from transporting livestock are negligible relative to the "footprint" of production. You're not going to magically raise your gross GHGs by moving livestock production closer to home.

What this paper is suggesting, more than anything, is that we should reduce beef production if we aim to do anything at all, because shortening the supply chain won't accomplish much of anything.