Comments on: Food Miles Stupidity

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:49:42 +0000

This viewpoint is accurate, but only of the media and corporate reactions to food miles. The debate has always been much more nuanced among the academics who developed the food miles concept initially – linking the distance food has travelled to whether itâ€™s in season, how long it has been stored, and the social conditions of those involved in its production, distribution and retail.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 14:50:32 +0000

I have been a submarine electrician and spent HOURS on top of station lead acid batteries. anyone that believes there is a chance of using battery / generators / motor setups on cars with NO COST, needs to buy a bridge. buy your hobby car, if you must, but for the love of god, let the free market dictate efficiencies – along with the LAWS of physics. If you don’t understand what an electron is, or use emotion to argue facts, stay home and quiet.

By: Nate

Nate — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:05:09 +0000

As another poster said. Gasoline engines are far less efficient than the steam turbines used at your local power plant. You are essentially comparing prices after those somewhat minor efficiency losses at the plant to prices before those efficiency losses in an ICE(internal combustion engine), further enhancing the disparity, or in this case making it seems as if both systems have a similar cost.

I would also like to point out that 30% is a generous number for an ICE. It may be 30%-35% efficient when run at a constant rpm, but in the modern car with the revs climbing and dropping continually and the amount of energy wasted in braking, efficiencies are rarely more than 20%.

An electric car which can easily convert 90% of that energy from the power plant into useful motion, and recapture that energy stored in movement with regenerative braking can attain 200+ mpg when looking at only the btu content of the supply fuel(in many cases coal or natural gas).

By: Yeti

Yeti — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:43:05 +0000

Re Gas VS Electric (or whatever) cars – it’s not just the cost of gas vs. the kw-hrs. Consider for example who “owns the well”. I suspect it’s better to produce electricity or H2 or whatever in the US than to send hundreds of billions of $$$ to people that basically want to kill us.

By: David B

David B — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 16:53:58 +0000

It's unfortunate that the idiotarians have picked up on locality as their current bugaboo. There are some nice advantages to getting more things from local producers - resistance to global disruptions, more sensitivity to local tastes, etc.

I've noticed that tomatoes grown in Pennsylvania often taste better in DC than the ones grown in parts unknown - perhaps its less refrigeration? I don't know, but there does seem to be a quality difference, and I don't mind paying a little more for higher quality.

Of course, I think this is the market system at work, and thank God everyone's got choices in the matter...

By: ben

ben — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 21:53:36 +0000

Does anyone even know what this crap means? You gotta love technocratic statists -- they just never give up. Every one of them thinks they are smarter than the the sum of billions of individual minds working together of their own free will to create our current world production patterns.

Absolutely. So blind to their own arrogance. It blows me away that such utter stupidity can persist.

Great post.

By: Sue

Sue — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:37:33 +0000

Thanks for sharing your story of your trip! Love the photos too!

By: Tore Fossum

Tore Fossum — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 02:28:49 +0000

Regarding the equivalency of powering a car from the electric grid versus from gasoline: electric power conversion is about 90% efficient in converting electric energy into motive power. Relatively little is lost as heat. Gasoline piston engines convert about 30 to 35 % of the energy content of gasoline into motive power. The rest is lost as heat. So the electric car wins by a factor of 2 or more.

However, before the electricists declare victory, w must also calculate the energy resources needed to create the batteries.

By: Miklos Hollender

Miklos Hollender — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:04:57 +0000

Good point, mate, but I’d put more emphasis in why does it happen this way. The thing is, the economy is composed of processes that have an efficiency less than 100%. It means we put a bunch of energy in but it won’t be all used for generating output. That part of it which is not used for generating output is released as heat, light, chemicals etc. Every kind of waste is a sign of the inefficiency of the process. We use part of the input the produce the desired output and part of it to produce the undesired byproducts such as CO2. The input costs money. Therefore every pound of CO2 produced means dollars wasted, because it’s inefficient use of the inputs. Not only we don’t like the CO2 released into the athmosphere, we are spending good money on producing it. It not just happens to be produced – we could quantify how painfully much dollars worth of fuel we use for nothing useful but producing CO2 every time we drive somewhere. Therefore reducing waste means saving inputs or generating more outputs. Which means the price system usually does a good job of finding the least wasteful means of production.

By: markm

markm — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 22:07:08 +0000

Perhaps with "buy locally", the greenies are preparing for the collapse of civilation, which their policies will cause, and the resulting complete disappearance from the urban markets of New Zealand lamb, Argentine beef, Idaho potatoes, etc. What they don't realize is that if they get what they want, they won't be buying food from those "local" farmers, either:

#1, if the gasoline deliveries stop, 50 miles or so to the farm won't be "local" anymore. That's a couple of days each way by horse-drawn wagon, but since there aren't enough horses anymore, it'll be a whole lot longer for most people.

#2, the farmers won't have gasoline to plow their fields, run their harvesters, and take their crops to market, either. (I've got some Amish friends that wouldn't be terribly inconvenienced, but the five miles over to their farm would be an all-day trip on foot.)

#3, Except for the Amish, farmers buy cheap food from around the world rather than trying to make a diet out of the one or two crops most of them specialize in. If they can't do that anymore, they will no longer be interested in trading their crops for pieces of printed paper from suburbanites. (Assuming the suburbanites got those pieces of paper from the ATM while it was still working...) They'll keep their food for their families, and only trade for different varieties of food, seed, and other necessities. A carton of toilet paper will be more valuable than a carton of money.

#4, if those suburbanites get to thinking they might take what they need, who's got the guns?

So, for their own protection, we've got to stop these "green" soccer moms, etc., from getting the economically disastrous policies they're asking for...