In a part of the new Seminar About Long Term Thinking, “Deep Optimism,” Matt Ridley talks about the ethics of buying local. Apparently, the amount of fuel used to ship an object to a store in the US from a factory in China is on average ten times smaller than the fuel you use to drive to the store to buy it. There are other factors in the ethics of buying local, of course, but it may be that how you get to the store is a more important decision than how far away the object you want was made or grown. It makes me wonder where buying mail-order falls in terms of fuel efficiency. Will we see Amazon asking us to buy from them to protect the planet?
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April 8, 2011 at 11:06 pm
I love Matt Ridley. His book “The Rational Optimist” was my favorite read last year. Lots of eco-myth-busting along similar lines to Bjorn Lomborg.
April 10, 2011 at 11:04 am
wow. is that true even if the thing has to be refrigerated or frozen for the whole journey from china?
April 10, 2011 at 12:11 pm
I have no idea, Maya. He didn’t go into it in much detail. Maybe it depends on how much AC you use when you drive…
April 22, 2011 at 10:33 pm
This doesn’t seem all that surprising if you consider that you are moving a few thousand pounds of metal to the grocery store and back to transport a small fraction of that weight worth of food.
The ratio of food to vehicle would be much better for a truck, train, or boat full of food.