A Waste of Good Food

For those who missed it, there is an excellent article by Andrew Martin in the May 18 New York Times on how U.S. consumers, supermarkets, and the food distribution system waste food (about 1 pound per day per person). The photo above, which accompanies the article, gives readers a feel for the scale of the waste.

The demand for grain for biofuels, it appears, is only one among many reasons for increases in the cost of food. Food waste, which occurs quite literally at every stage from field to grocery store to plate, is also a major culprit.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste.

This is an old study, but according to Andrew Martin an update is under way. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded in a study that

Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.

The problem for the planet, it appears, is not just what we eat, but what we don't eat.

Biofuels Revisited

A little over 18 months ago I posted a critique of President Bush's State of the Union message and its emphasis on increased use of biofuels, particularly ethanol. Unfortunately, the posting lumped ethanol with biofuels made from wood. This was incorrect, as commentator sverdalov reminded me:

Please do not insult those working on the development of wood to biofuels (ethanol is the presidents favorite, not theirs) or their choosen feedstock. Wood is a renewable resource when managed properly as the US forest products industry has learned to do. High yields (measures in tons/acre/year) can be achieved with a great deal of success. Also, the use of wood does help with global warming, as the net CO2 to atmosphere is 0, as the trees will regrow, recapturing the CO2. Further, since non-fuel products are likely, some of the carbon captured would be in the form of products (such as plastics) to be sold to the consumer. This would aid in decreasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

I stand corrected on the use of wood for biofuels. The larger point, made in this and other postings, is that biofuels will not spare us from the need to become less dependent on the private automobile and improve our public transit. Private cars are the least efficient way to move people, no matter how they are fueled. We have to do better at providing alternatives.

I am grateful to sverdalov for this correction.

Afterword, July 28, 2008: Commentator Marshall Massey reminds me that trees are a precious resource and not to be used lightly to create products like biofuels which, at bottom, only facilitate inefficient transportation like the private car. He is correct. If this contradicts what I said earlier in this posting, so be it. I believe, with Emerson, that the search for perfect consistency is "the hobgoblin of little minds" and can often impede the search for truth.

In my reading, sverdalov was defending wood-based biofuels and criticizing me for lumping them with corn-based ethanol. His critique was correct to that extent, and I still accept it. The larger question is whether we should be expending effort and money on biofuels at all. sverdalov's original comment did not directly address this policy question. I agree that wood-based biofuels are different from and less harmful than biofuels based on food crops.

On the larger question of substituting biofuels for gasoline, I was not explicit enough. Our problem is not how to fuel our cars; it is how to use them less, or not at all, and still retain that freedom of movement which is one of the hallmarks of a free society. A change in the fuel mix does not and cannot address that problem. Creator Spirit, come.

(See the related article, Requiem for the Car Industry, for one possible scenario on the fate of the private car.)

Biofuels—A Greater Hazard Than We Thought

Biofuels from corn and other crops, which were supposed to be the silver bullet that would fuel cars without affecting climate change, are actually a worse source of greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, according to a report in the New York Times. Two recent studies published in the journal Science looked at the overall greenhouse gas effect of biofuels—including emissions from the production process, the consequences of land clearance to grow crops for use as fuel, and other factors. They concluded that production and burning of fossil fuels was less harmful to the earth's climate than production and burning of biomass fuels.

These two studies add to the already-strong case against increasing our use of biofuels. In addition to their overall effect on the environment, fuels derived from food crops have raised the price of food and hurt farmers in some developing countries. (See the summary in a recent issue of Sojourners.) And their other environmental and social effects—particularly destruction of forests which are the homes of many plant and animal species, including humans—hardly bear thinking about.

Biofuels have long been promoted as one answer to many problems, not just climate change. But on closer inspection, their virtues turn out to be far less than their supporters claim.

• Supporters claim that biofuels could replace some fossil fuels and lessen the West's strategic dependence on oil from the Middle East and Russia. The problem is that biofuels could not replace enough fossil fuels to make a difference unless we devoted an indefensible (and dangerous) amount of arable land to their production.
• Biofuels could theoretically be less expensive and have more stable prices than fossil fuels. But market forces would operate on biofuels as much as on fossil fuels. As demand for ethanol rises, and more and more land is devoted to its production, either food or fuel prices—and probably both—are bound to rise.
• And, of course, there is the claim that biofuels could help to save the planet. The science is now showing that this claim is unfounded.

In the end, the claims for biofuels seem at least poorly supported. The truth is that we cannot grow enough biomass crops to fuel the world's transportation fleet. An increased emphasis on biofuels, as in recent action by Congress mandating their greater use, is no substitute for finding ways to get from place to place more efficiently. One can't, for example, make a private automobile more efficient than a train simply by changing its fuel. Gallon for gallon, the train will always use fuel more efficiently.

We cannot just slot in biomass fuels and keep driving everywhere. In the long run, the planet will not support it.

Ethanol and Absurdity

One doesn't expect creative policy from a Bush Administration that gave us the Iraq War and the military "surge." But the President's energy proposals, made last night in the State of the Union speech, have reached a new creative low. After all the hoopla about initiatives, his actual proposals were simply recycled nostrums that he has proposed before—albeit with minor differences. Last January we were exhorted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by switching to more economical vehicles and biofuels. This year we are supposed to reduce our gasoline consumption by twenty percent over the next ten years. We will do this by switching to more economical vehicles and biofuels. This time the government will help by making fuel economy requirements a bit more stringent. And it will itself move toward more economical vehicles and biofuels.

Proposals that made little sense last January make even less sense this year. Even on their face they are inadequate. If we merely cut our gasoline consumption by twenty percent over the next ten years, this will not make us energy-independent because there is not enough oil in U.S. territory to supply what we will still be using. Conservation at this level would barely make a dent in our dependence on foreign oil. And a twenty-percent cut in gasoline consumption will do virtually nothing about climate change. For that, the cuts must be far more stringent, and they must include all fossil fuel usage, not just gasoline usage. Mr. Bush's conservation proposal would make us feel as if we were achieving real economies without actually requiring us to do anything meaningful.

Even the ethanol numbers don't add up. The boom in ethanol is good for corn growers and possibly for the American waistline because corn refined into fuel will not be refined into fructose and added to the food supply. But even a mainstream economist like Robert J. Samuelson argues that we just cannot grow enough biological material—corn, switchgrass, wood chips (wood chips?), whatever—to feed our cars.

I emphasize wood chips above because plans to use them reveal the absurdity of plans for a mass switch to ethanol. At the moment, most wood chips used for biofuels are sawmill waste that we would generate anyway and are recycling. But if we switch to ethanol on a large scale, we may find ourselves needing additional sources of wood chips. As we have done with corn, we may be tempted to create wood to use as chips for fuel.

We can't, of course, create wood. Unlike money, wood chips grow on trees. They don't just appear magically out of nowhere. Trees, even those planted for harvest like Christmas trees, take time to grow. Big old trees, the most abundant source for wood chips, take years, sometimes hundreds of years, to grow. How far will be be prepared to go just to keep our cars running? Are we to strip our old-growth forests just so we can continue to drive everywhere? Substitute trees for food crops so we can do our banking from our cars? And how will cutting down trees to fuel our cars help to reduce global warming?

The answer to the last question is simple: It won't. Using trees to fuel our cars can only increase deforestation. That is a step toward, not away from, global warming.

This is not policymaking at all. It is, like the military surge, an attempt to distract us from the real problem, which in this case is our dependence, not on foreign oil, but on the private car. No one ever got elected by telling the people that they should take the bus or the train—or walk. But somebody must begin to do so. Obviously, Mr. Bush is not that person.