Even at current prices it adds perhaps 20 cents to the cost of a single, 250g package.
Considering it was less than 4 cents previously it made economic sense to ship it for packaging in a country with cheaper labour.
That's all of $1 of realized cost. It's not accounting for negative externalities to the environment, depletion of non-renewable natural resources that future people may rely on, or poor living conditions/wage slavery/etc. Though some of that would certainly be offset by economies of scale so there's some number greater than $1 that would reflect the true "global cost" of doing that. It's just unknown and not measured.
And then when you add in both reasonable and unreasonable disagreement, you just get stuck... and if the problem is real and is going to cause big problems, well you're really betting the farm that you'll be able to come up with a planetary level solution in short order or else you're just hopelessly stuck with whatever happens to you.
As I look at the situation what I see are a few scenarios:
1. It's not bad and there won't be any long term effects. 2. It's pretty bad but the long term effects won't be that bad. 3. It's very bad and the long term effects will be quite bad. 4. (some combination including small/medium impact, etc.).
The thing is that it doesn't really cost much to address 1. and 2. and we get some nice benefits anyway like lower levels of pollution, maintenance of resources like fisheries or forests or whatever. But if it's 3. and we don't do anything we are mega fucked or we will need a very lucky and well-timed solution. Elon said something to the effect of "let's not find out if we get lucky or find a solution" and to that I wholeheartedly agree.
Like when we were supposed to run out of Europium, or the population was supposed to exceed the food supply, or any number of doomsday scenarios.
I’m not saying the climate/resource predictions aren’t true based on what we know, I’m saying they aren’t true based on what we don’t yet know.
It’s certainly possible you’re right, but you’re not giving any attention to the possibility that you’re wrong.
What you’re saying here is that the most likely scenario is that we’ll have global climate change but the effects won’t be that bad because we’ll invent technology to address those effects.
Sure that’s certainly possible.
What I don’t understand is the desire to roll the dice that we will invent technology to mitigate the effects of climate change versus just not having climate change and thus not leaving to chance that we will create technology to mitigate these effects?
Certainly I think you’re overestimating that this is a pure technology problem to be solved versus a political and cultural problem of which technology is but just another actor on the stage.
You’re also discounting short and intermediate term instability which will lead to increased human suffering while we attempt to resolve political and cultural problems and invent new technology. How many future wars may be fought over resources because we said “eh someone will figure it out”? It’s a quasi-religious faith in technology as universal problem solver.
Alternatively we could just start working on the problem now and not explore a path that bets civilization for no real gain.
And for those of you who debate my conclusion up there about the impact, consider this breakdown [https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...] and;
Every part of the worlds economy is currently dependent on fossil fuels. Global trade (aka China and the US's economy, and most others too), International and most Domestic Travel, National Energy Grids (including heating in cold countries and literally keeping the lights on for large swaths of the year), and every major Army, Navy, and Air Forces basic operations.
Some countries or regions in countries have made progress towards zero carbon on SOME of those fronts. NONE of them are not reliant on fossil fuels at least some part of the year for something critical. As in, people will die, sometimes a lot of people (10-100k+).
And that isn't counting things like nitrogen fertilizer production, which have knock on effects everywhere.
To 'stop' global warming, we'd need to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere essentially now, and start pulling CO2 out, correct?
So: 1) That currently is impossible for anyone to do without people dying.
2) It's likely to be a decade or more before the earliest adopters and wealthiest countries could get there (not counting Military, which is likely even longer - 50+ unless there is a major war first).
3) The BRICs on the list are relatively poor, and don't have as much ability to capitalize such a change. Most of the other countries struggle to keep their lights on as-is, with cheap oil. They aren't going to be able to capitalize converting their entire grid to solar, they can't even capitalize their current grid!
So, we essentially have two choices if we want to actually stop it now:
1) Figure out a way to fix our current situation, knowing that the majority of the worlds population isn't going to change what they are doing in time.
2) Go to war, and destroy anyone who won't stop doing what they're doing that causes CO2 release (and other GHG).
Which #2 would currently require even MORE expenditure of CO2 with current technology, assuming it's even winnable. China is a nuclear power after all, and the #1 global CO2 emitter (and one of the largest beneficiaries of global trade, which largely don't count in that number).
That's also of course putting aside ethical concerns about 'killing them to save them', and pre-emptive war to stop a problem that so far people are only feeling the barest twinge of issues from.
My gut feeling for what is going to happen is a lot of hand wringing, a lot of natural disasters that steadily build up pressure to actually do something, and a gradual transition and mitigation at great expense over a century+. This will likely completely screw the poor countries, and moderately screw the wealthy ones.
We're going to get these wars anyway because countries with a military will just start conflicts over resources and where nations break down many will just resort to anarchy and suffering there. We're already seeing this with Russia invading Ukraine where there are fascist goals but also geographic goals with control the fertile Donbas region and then also the subsequent usage of gas as a weapon against Europe. This is just the beginning.
It's hard to see how technology will solve this problem because it's a political and social problem and not a technology problem. No amount of carbon capture technology can build solar power in India while they're at war with China over water from the Himalayas ya know? No amount of technology can stop (at this time) Republican governments from banning EV installations or using government money to incentivize oil and gas industry development for donors.
The technology would have to be similarly transformative as nitrogen fertilizer was - which is what avoided the whole Malthusian population trap in the first place.
We don’t know what we don’t know there, frankly, so hard to say if it exists or not.
Co2 capture and most GHG emissions though have a serious thermodynamic challenge which says ‘not easily’. Once the clock spring is unwound, it’s really hard to wind it back again.
Or do you mean all negative externalities? To me, that seems akin to the coastline paradox.
For externalities, it seems like there fundamentally is a correct cost -- doing all the accounting might be a real pain though.
You can never price in all externalities, but you sure as hell can improve your pricing of externalities from what it is (in the same way a 1km resolution of coastline is better than a 100,000km resolution)
We're only accounting for a very small percentage of externalities.
Let's not build up strawmen.
The building and refueling of gas stations.
Shipping replacement parts.
The trip to the store is not their only impact.
You’re cherry picking a stat that represents the smallest part you want to take responsibility for but demand for all of it as resource costs.
This was pointed out on a freakanomics episode.
Furthermore last I checked the academic analysis I could find found that Amazon prime delivery has smaller footprint than driving to the store unless you’re getting like 14 items at once for similar reasons.
I'd like to know if it's true. It sounds like one of those things that are "to good to be true".
Is it possible that you're conflating the total of transportation pollution per capita with the part of it that has to do with driving to the grocery store for that?
Take the cargo ship for instance. In looking up the numbers, a single large cargo ship can carry upwards of 20,000 20-foot long cargo containers each with a volume of ~1200 cubic feet. So that's 24 million cubic feet of storage. Break that down into pollution per item, it's going to be some value that's effectively zero.
And the same is going to be true for most other transportation and movement along the overall pipeline, which is all going to be done at a large scale to reduce costs. And then you enter the picture. You drive 15 miles there, and 15 miles back in your vehicle - to pick up 6 limes, a few sprigs of mint, and a bottle of rum. The cost of transport/mile/unit there is easily going to be orders of magnitude greater than any other part of the trip, and it's not hard to imagine it exceeds the entire cost of the rest combined.
Also, I wasn't comparing the cost of shipping lime from south america to europe, but I was comparing it with the cost of shipping limie from south america to vietnam to do the packaging and then back to europe to do the consuming which is more than double the pollution. You need to unload the ships, move the trucks to the places where people do the packaging, move the goods back into a ship, unload the stuff again, drive it all the way to other warehouses etc etc
When you think about it, most populated areas in the US are rural, sparsely populated areas. It may be 20 miles to the nearest store, and that store may only be a 7-11. I feel lucky to have found a nice spot in a rural area that is only 8 miles to the Walmart, and that really hurt recently with gas prices, still does.
But most population, isn't in rural areas. I've got a local specialty grocery store literally downstairs next to my condo, and a full grocery store three blocks away. "The average household traveled 3.79 miles to their primary grocery, even though the closest store was 2.14 miles way." (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/04/10/5-things-the-usda-lea...)
I often have to make a 20 mile round trip just to get a gallon of milk.
i know this is completly off-topic, but commercial lime juice is made by mulching whole limes finer and finer until they essentially liquefy, not squeezing the juice, so they get much higher yields.
Or to add industrial citric acid and water to a 2% of lime juice so you can sell it by 1$.
To me it isn't nearly as bad as the dark scenarios some conjured.
It costs about $600 to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere the hard way, rather than messing about with tree credits and other stuff that's too easy to game. So we'd want to add another $.001 to the price to account for the cost of the carbon involved in transporting it. Bulk container ships are very energy efficient compared to other sorts of transportation.
However, they do use bunker fuel and the above doesn't take account of all the sulfur and particulates that gets emitted.
I think I found the source you used to get that number[0] (or [1]) it says:
> Atmospheric carbon removal can be as simple (and relatively inexpensive) as planting trees. But to remove sufficient carbon to meet the target, new technologies will be needed. Some are currently being piloted, including potentially expensive and/or environmentally-invasive technologies. Costs are estimated to range up to $600 per tonne of sequestered CO2, although no one really knows for sure.
So I don't think we should be using hypothetical future tech (with a big question mark to boot) to put a dollar value on pollution emitted transporting goods today, particularly when it focuses on carbon and doesn't account for the other emissions.
[0] - https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-10-06-carbon-removal-will-cos...
[1] - could actually have been this one, which starts by describing it as $600/ton and later clarifies that this is using experimental tech: https://www.science.org/content/article/cost-plunges-capturi...
Can you share your math?
containers vary a lot in their construction and materials, right? open-top railway car containers are not the same as common trans-continental containers, and refrigerated units are different again. All of those and more are in daily use in vast numbers, worldwide.
A shipping container full of raw cotton is indeed quite different than one full of "iron ore" but actually, consumer electronics and various car parts, their load limits, are more commonly restricted in the way they are loaded and handled.
https://freightfinders.com/container-transport/40-feet-iso-c...
Assuming two trips the lengths of which are in the same order of magnitude as the one mentioned: $10 522 * 2 = $21 044.
That's $0.7869 per kg, so $0.1967 per 250g package. At $2k per container it's $0.0373.