Greendex Calculator nonsense

I just came across National Geographic's Greendex Calculator, and was about to take the survey, but when I saw the first question, I didn't bother:

1. How often, if at all, do you consume each of the following types of food and beverages?
a) Imported foods
b) Locally grown foods (e.g. from your province/state or region)

How can they be so ignorant?

As The Economist wrote in 2006:

...it turns out that the apparently straightforward approach of minimising the “food miles” associated with your weekly groceries does not, in fact, always result in the smallest possible environmental impact.

The article also notes, "There is a strand of protectionism and anti-globalisation in much local-food advocacy...." Maybe the National Geographic has an anti-globalisation agenda?

And in 2011, Steve Sexton wrote at Freakonomics that in a locavore system, farmed acreage, fertilizer use, fuel use, and chemical demand would all actually increase:

The land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy habitat and worsen environmental pollution.

It’s not even clear local production reduces carbon emissions from transportation. The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser estimates that carbon emissions from transportation don’t decline in a locavore future because local farms reduce population density as potential homes are displaced by community gardens. Less-dense cities mean more driving and more carbon emissions. Transportation only accounts for 11 percent of the carbon embodied in food anyway, according to a 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon; 83 percent comes from production.

It's not just the economists who argue this. Sarah DeWeerdt of the Worldwatch Institute wrote in 2009:

[A] broader, more comprehensive picture of all the tradeoffs in the food system requires tracking greenhouse gas emissions through all phases of a food's production, transport, and consumption. And life-cycle analysis (LCA), a research method that provides precisely this "cradle-to-grave" perspective, reveals that food miles represent a relatively small slice of the greenhouse-gas pie.

In a paper published last year, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, of Carnegie Mellon University, wove together data from a variety of U.S. government sources into a comprehensive life-cycle analysis of the average American diet. According to their calculations, final delivery from producer or processor to the point of retail sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions. Final delivery accounts for only about a quarter of the total miles, and 40 percent of the transport-related emissions, in the food supply chain as a whole. That's because there are also "upstream" miles and emissions associated with things like transport of fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed. Overall, transport accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's emissions.

By contrast, Weber and Matthews found, agricultural production accounts for the bulk of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions: 83 percent of emissions occur before food even leaves the farm gate. A recent life-cycle analysis of the U.K. food system, by Tara Garnett, yielded similar results. In her study, transport accounted for about a tenth of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural production accounted for half. Garnett says the same general patterns likely also hold for Europe as a whole.

Making yourself look good

Greg Gutfeld

dismisses liberalism as “romantic notions that are false, based on the idea of making yourself look good to other people. That’s why most men—Bill Clinton is a good example—are liberal, because they need to get laid. If you look at most left-wing guys, they’ve made a deal with the devil. They don’t really believe that shit—they’re going against their own innate nature, because liberalism is anti-man. If you believe that peace and love work, you’re not a man, because this world works on war. The only people who respect you are people who are scared of you—and that’s why Reagan was a great President. And the idea that you can negotiate with people who want you dead is a complete lie. That’s why the left is the most self-absorbed, vanity-driven enterprise. These are people who would rather feel good about themselves at a cocktail party that actually protect people’s lives. If you’re at a party and you say, ‘The war on terror is the most important thing in the world’—you won’t get a nod. But if you say, ‘Global warming is the biggest threat,’ you will get laid.”

Politically Correct Lexicon

The authorities cited are:

• Rinku Sen, a 40-year-old South Asian woman, the publisher of Colorlines, a national magazine of race and politics
• Tracy Baim, a 44-year-old white lesbian and the executive editor of Windy City Times, a Chicago-based gay weekly
• Lott Hill, a 36-year-old white gay male who works at Center for Teaching Excellence at Columbia College in Chicago

Some highlights:

African American: In 1988 Jesse Jackson encouraged people to adopt this term over the then-used “black.” As he saw it, the words acknowledged black America’s ties to Africa. “African American,” says Hill, is now “used more by non-African-American people, who cling to it because they are unsure what word to use.” Sen says, “African American” is favored by “highly educated people who are not black. Whether one uses ‘black’ or ‘African American’ indicates how strong your social relations are with those communities.” And Chris Raab, founder of Afro-Netizen, says, “People who are politically correct chose to use African American, but I don’t recall any mass of black folks demanding the use of African American.”

Asian: The correct term to use for anyone of Asian ancestry. When accuracy is desired, nationality of origin is appended to “American,” as in “Korean American.” Sen, who describes herself as South Asian or Indian American, says that there is “some push around not conflating everybody into Asian. This is mostly an issue among new immigrants. If there hasn’t been time for a generation, it seems to be hard to move those folks to the Asian category.”

Brown: A general term for people who are not white. Colorlines uses “brown” in a casual or playful way. “We might have a headline ‘Brown People to the Back’ in a story about restaurant hierarchy,” Sen says. Sometimes used to refer to Latinos, as in the “black-brown” coalition that helped elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago in 1983.

Chicano: Correct term for people of Mexican ancestry, popularized during the civil rights movement. “We use it to refer to U.S.-born people of Mexican descent,” says Sen. “Mexican American is the more distant, politer thing to say.”

Gay: The word used to refer to males and, inclusively, to the whole gender-bent community. “College-age people are more likely to refer to themselves as queer,” say Hill. “People out of college are more likely to refer to themselves as gay.”

GLBT: Shorthand for GLBTQ2IA.

GLBTQ2IA: The acronym for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Allies. “This is coming from the youth movement, the college campuses, it has not seeped into the whole community at this point,” says Baim, who at the Windy City Times uses GLBT, an acronym the New York Times has not yet seen fit to print.

Hispanic: “We never use Hispanic,” says Sen. “It privileges the European roots of the identity of Mexicans born in the United States.” Hispanic, however, is the preferred term of people in the Southwest whose families are [descendants] of Spanish colonists.

Indian: The preferred term for Native Americans. “Indians either use their specific tribal name or use Indian,” says Sen. “You use the qualifier American when you need to distinguish from Indian Indians.”

Latino: (Capital “L,” with “a” or “o” at the end used to connote gender.) Politically correct term for those from Spanish or Portuguese speaking cultures. “We use it instead of Hispanic when we want to refer to many different national groups where there has been an indigenous-European mix,” says Sen.

Native American: Some Indians object to the term, seeing it as a way to linguistically eradicate “Indian” and thus the history of their oppression by whites. “I almost always hear Native American, and in the more enlightened conversations there is usually ‘indigenous’ thrown in there somewhere,” says Lott. Sen says, “Native American seems to be a more distant construction, developed by academics.”