Half Changed World

Camping

We had a really nice weekend camping.  We went with several other families, so there were a total of five kids, with ours the youngest at five and eight, and the oldest being twelve.  We went out to Wolf Gap, which is right on the border between Virginia and West Virginia.

I was impressed at how well the boys did hiking, since last year they were pretty whiny on a much shorter hike.  There was one section where you really needed to climb up some rocks, and both boys made it with only a few helping hands.  (They needed a bit more assistance on the downhill there.)  D whined a fair bit on the way up, but then raced down ahead of us trying to keep up on the way down.  N was a trooper for most of the time, but was clearly wiped by the end.

Other than the hike, the boys mostly spent the time obsessively poking the fire.  There were enough adults there that we were able to take turns supervising them, and no one got set on fire.  The kids all thought we should have a fire going at all times, so we told them they were responsible for collecting enough firewood to make that happen, and the older kids even each took a turn with the saw.  The adults were able to actually have some conversations, as well as reading, and staring into the fire.  We all ate far too many roasted marshmallows.

This was car camping [e.g. we could drive right to the campsite, but we slept in tents, not the car] so we were able to bring a ridiculous amount of supplies.  We had folding chairs and tables, a two burner stove, big tents, beer and soda, barbecued chicken, watermelon, coffee w/ cream, you name it.  This is the sort of camping that I did with my family when I was growing up, but as an adult I somewhere along the way decided that I only wanted to do backcountry camping, where you only have what you're willing to carry.  That's obviously not going to happen with the boys until they're old enough to carry their own gear, but this weekend made me realize that it's some sort of stupid snobbery to think that car camping isn't worth doing.

The two burner stove that my friends brought is pretty much identical to the one my parents bought at Sears 40 years ago, and a quick online search shows that Coleman still makes pretty much the identical model.  I remembered that when I was little we were able to buy the fuel for the stove at gas stations, which makes me think that car camping must have been far more popular then than it is now.* We hypothesized that it's been driven out by the combination of:

• Camping as a cheap way to travel has been driven out by cheap motels and low-fare air travel.
• Those who do travel and camp mostly use RVs.  (When did RVs get popular?)
• Now that air conditioning is so ubiquitous, not to mention television and the internet, not so many people are interested in sitting in the woods and getting eaten by mosquitoes.  (My boys did complain about our not letting them bring their DSs.)
• Those who do still camp are more likely to be the hard core folks who want to backpack and not car camp.

*I'm not entirely sure that's true -- it looks like white gas was used for things other than just camping stoves and lanterns.

What do you think -- has car camping declined?  Will it make a comeback in the recession?  Do you do it?  What's the one piece of gear that you couldn't live without?

Ok, I found some statistics from the outdoor industry foundation.  I think this is the trade group of the people who sell gear.  It's a little hard to read, but I think they're saying that 49 million Americans went car camping at least once in 2004, down 18 percent from 1998, and 13 million Americans went backpacking at least once in 2004, down 23 percent from 1998.  If anyone can find longer-term trends, I'd love to see them.

Spot Shot

So, no sooner had I said that I wouldn't do reviews of cleaning products, then on the same day one of our foster kitties pissed where he shouldn't have and I got an email asking if I wanted to be on the MomCentral blog tour for Spot Shot, by the folks who make WD-40.  So here I am, eating my words.

So, the first question: does it work?  I was pretty impressed.  They sent with the sample a little square of carpet and tubes of chocolate syrup and ammonia that you can squeeze on to test it, but I tossed those and went for the real deal: the spot in N's room where he puked blackberries all over the place last summer.  I can still see where the stain is, but it's a lot better than it was before, and I'd tried a bunch of cleaners.  I didn't actually try it on the cat piss, because when we tried it in a corner, it looked like it was picking up the upholstery dye, and we didn't want to risk it.

The second question: is it really "environmentally friendly" as it claims?  I have absolutely no idea.  It didn't smell like solvents, which I guess is good, but I don't really know what's in it, or how that compares to regular carpet cleaners.  I think the cleaning market is somewhere close to where organic food was 20 years ago -- there are no standards, and so it's hard to know whether what you're getting is worth the price.  Is the fancy "green" window cleaner (which costs 4x more than the traditional blue stuff) anything more than vinegar and water and perfume?  Is rubbing alcohol considered environmentally friendly?  Beats me.

interesting odds and ends

• I thought this article on the growth in Fairfax school enrollment was interesting  It says enrollment is up by 2,500, in part due to a shift of 1,000 students from Prince William county.  Some hypothesize it's due to Prince William's crackdown on undocumented immigrants; others suggest it's due to the high price of gas.  It's likely that both contribute, and may even affect the same families. I wonder what the typical shifts between the two counties are.

• Via Yglesias, I ran into this study arguing that redshirting of kindergarteners leads to reduced high school completion, since it means that kids have completed fewer years of school when they reach the age where they're no longer required to attend school.  This doesn't make sense to me, as it's overwhelmingly upper-middle-class families who hold their kids back a year, but lower-income kids who drop out as soon as they're legally able to.  Anyone want to take a crack at it?

• I love Alan Blinder's idea of stimulating the economy by buying back polluting clunkers for more than book value.  One of my pet bugaboos is that when people talk about "green jobs" they always focus on the sexy futuristic stuff like solar and wind power, when you could get a lot more bang for the buck subsidizing new boilers and more insulation in low-cost rental housing.  (As long as renters pay for the utility bills, it almost never makes economic sense for landlords to make those investments on their own.)

Are high food prices bad?

Parke at US Food Policy poses the bold question: "Are high food prices unambiguously bad?"

The obvious problem with high food prices is that they mean that people on the edge eat less, and often poorer quality food.  Food is one of the most flexible part of the budget for most people -- in the short term, you can't reduce your rent, but you can skip a few meals, or see if the local food pantry can help you out.  There's a study that shows that poor families eat less in cold winters, when utility bills are especially high.

So what's good about high food prices?  Let's start by thinking about the parallel question for gas.  I don't think that high gas prices are unambiguously bad.  While I worry about the effect on low-income folks, especially in rural areas, I think high gas prices generally send the right economic signals: buy more fuel-efficient cars, use more carpools and mass transit, think about the costs of commuting when you decide where to live.  I'd like to see more of the cost of gas going into funding things like better mass transit, and less going to enrich oil companies and OPEC, but that's a different issue.

So, is there something parallel for food?  Well, a big part of why food in the US is so cheap is that energy has been cheap.  When Michael Pollen says that the US food economy runs on corn, he could just as easily say it runs on oil -- in the form of fuel for tractors and combines, in the form of fertilizer (which is largely made from petroleum), in the form of the fuel for the trucks that move the corn from farm to processing plant to grocery store.  So, it's hard to imagine how food prices could stay as low as they've been in a world of higher energy prices.

It's also likely that the relative costs of different kinds of food will change.  Bananas may be more expensive compared to apples, free range chicken may only cost twice as much as factory farmed chicken, rather than five times as much.  Some things that have been unsustainably cheap will be more expensive, and that might be a good thing.

But, none of this makes the basic problem of low-income people not being able to afford food go away.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been doing a lot of thinking about how to make sure that low-income households are protected in the context of climate change legislation that will increase energy costs -- basically, the idea is that if the government auctions off all carbon permits, rather than assuming that companies are entitled to permits at the left that they currently pollute, it generates enough money to provide generous refunds to low and moderate income households.  I'm not sure what the food equivalent of that is.

Conservation and savings

We've been in this house for a bit more than a year now, so now we're able to do same month year-to-year comparisons of our energy use.  We've been steadily working on making the house more energy efficient, so I've been curious to see what the impacts are.  We've replaced the windows, one of the toilets, clothes washer, dryer, boiler, fridge, dishwasher, and stove.  Basically, the only things left to do are the hot water heater and the air conditioner...

So, the envelope please...

• Electricity -- Dominion Virginia Power has a handy-dandy button on its site that generates various comparisons for you once you've logged in.  It shows how much you paid in a given month compared to the previous month and the same month the year before, and divides the change out among different temperatures, different number of days in the billing cycle, change in prices, and "customer-controlled use."  So, we paid $71.20 in May 2008, down from $95.02 a year previously.  And the rates went up in that period, so they claim that customer-controlled use saved us $27.28.  So, a decent percentage savings, but not that impressive in absolute dollar amounts.  Even with the forthcoming 18% rate hike, it's going to take us a long time before the improvements pay for themselves.  (Obviously, the energy savings were not the primary reasons we made these changes, so we're not upset by this.)

• Gas -- Washington Gas doesn't offer this kind of comparison, so I have to sort of eyeball things.  We used 13.2 therms last month, versus 63 therms a year ago.  That's because it took us a while last year to figure out how much energy our old boiler was using keeping water hot even when it wasn't sending any into the baseboard heaters.  Once we figured out that we needed to shut the boiler off in the summer, it dropped down to 32 therms. (The remainder is for the clothes dryer and water heater, both of which are gas-powered.  Our new stove is also gas powered, but you'd have to work really hard to spend more than a few dollars that way...)  The more impressive comparison is February to March, when our use dropped from 258 therms to 151 when we installed the new boiler.  That improvement clearly is cost-effective, since our February bill was close to $400.*

• Water -- We get billed quarterly for water, and haven't paid more than $100 per quarter.  While the washer and dishwasher use less water than the old ones, I don't expect it to make a noticeable difference on our bills.  We put in a low-flow showerhead but I'm guessing that it impacts the gas bill more than the water bill.

Dominion is making a big deal out of their new conservation plan, but I'm pretty skeptical.  Based on my results, my guess is that just showing people how much their energy use costs won't significantly affect usage unless they also adopt variable rate pricing, where electricity costs a lot more during peak usage times. (Dominion does not appear to be doing that, since their demo says you'd be entering the rates from your bill.)  I think this is mostly an attempt to convince politicians to give them approval for the transmission lines and coal-burning plant they want to build.

* When I see stories like this one about people with $400 monthly electric bills, I have to assume that they have electric heat, and very poor insulation.  I'm not sure I could run up a $400 electric bill in this house even if I ran the air conditioning with the windows open.

Cross-posted to my home blog.  Also, note the new "Environment" category -- I'll go back when I get a chance and add the tag to some of my older posts. 

How are you adjusting?

With energy and food prices both climbing, one of my regular readers suggested that I ask all of you all what adjustments you're making.  Are you reducing your driving?  Cutting coupons?  Reducing meals out?  Saving less?  And how much are these adjustments hurting?  Do you feel like it's a big sacrifice, or something you hardly notice?

In our household, I'd say we're making relatively minor adjustments:

• Trying to consolidate errands, do fewer grocery runs.
• Doing more shopping at the less expensive grocery stores, and buying less convenience foods
• Really paying attention to turning out lights, unplugging appliances when not in use.
• Taking the bus to NYC instead of driving (the parking costs in NYC were killing us)
• Generally asking "do we really need this" before buying stuff -- especially in the $20 to $50 range, which doesn't feel like big spending, but adds up fast.

I can't say we've really cut back on our day to day driving -- I was already driving to the metro, rather than downtown, and the bus is really more of a hassle than the additional savings justify.  (It's a bit slower than driving, but real problem is that the low frequency makes missing the bus a disaster, so you have to build in huge margins for error.)  I'm actually sort of dubious about these stories about how so many people are shifting from cars to buses.  I'm not disputing the fact that public transit systems are seeing big percentage increases in ridership -- but we're starting from such a low base that if only a few percent of drivers shift to buses, that can be a 30 or 40 percent increase in bus ridership.

I just put in a low-flow showerhead, but that was really an environmental choice rather than a frugal one.  Overall, we've done a lot to improve the efficiency of our house -- new windows, new boiler (we have baseboard heating), high efficiency washer and dryer, high
efficiency kitchen appliances.  Over the long run, these will save money, but for now, we've been writing a lot of big checks for them.

In the short run, things will be better for the next few months, as we won't have to pay for N's preschool, and have already paid for camp for the boys.  But then he's going 5 days a week instead of 3 next year, so that will cost about an extra $200 a month.   But then
after next year we'll be done with preschool and will feel rich.

Several years ago, I read an article on Money.com called the "60 percent solution" in which they argue that you should keep your fixed expenses down to 60 percent of your take-home income.  (I see I wrote about Warren and Tyagi's version of this plan two years ago).  If you were doing that before the recent run-up in prices, you're probably giving up some of your extras, but you don't have to do anything drastic.  If 80 or 90 percent of your paycheck was already allocated to fixed expenses, there's not a lot of room to adjust.

The reason I thought the 60 percent solution article was interesting was that it recognized that it's really hard to save significant amount of money by shaving your grocery bill.  Some of us never spent $5 a day on fancy coffees in the first place, and so can't find savings by giving them up. Instead of squeezing at the margin, it may be better to bite the bullet and look for big changes to make -- a smaller house or apartment, taking in a roommate, finding a second job.

LED lights

In honor of Earth Day, I wanted to post about the LED lights that we've put into our new kitchen. They're LR6 lights, from Cree Lighting.  If you walked in, you wouldn't notice them -- and that's the point.  They look like standard lights, are even more energy efficient than CFLs, don't contain mercury, and can be dimmed (although they require a digital dimmer). 

So, what's the downside?  Well, for now they're somewhat overpriced.  If they last as long as the company claims (on the order of 20 years), they'll more than pay for themselves, but that assumes that we don't discount the future stream of savings.  And they're fairly new products, so no one really knows that they'll actually last that long.  But we decided they were worth a try.  And they look good enough that we're probably going to use them in our living room as well.

I was more than a bit nervous about buying these without being able to see what they'd look like in practice.  (Amicus Green has them, but as part of a display with a bunch of other lights, so it's hard to see what the light looks like.)  So, if you're in the DC area and you're considering these lights, feel free to email me if you want to come see them.

standby energy tax

Last night on the way home, I heard David Frum on Marketplace.  Frum is a former speechwriter for President Bush, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, so I pretty much assume that I'm going to disagree with everything that comes out of his mouth.

But this is part of what he said:

"OK, the price [of energy] is high again. This is the perfect moment to pass a standby energy tax, a tax that would kick in when the price of oil falls below say $60 a barrel. Consumers could feel secure that if they make the investment in a hybrid car, or a smaller house with a shorter commute, they won't feel like fools in four or five years..."

This makes a great deal of sense to me.  I think we've talked about it here before, but it's pretty hard for most people to significantly reduce their driving in the short run in response to increased gasoline prices.  As a recent CBO study shows, the highest response is in those areas where there is existing mass transit as an alternative.  And if the price gets high enough, people start limiting leisure travel.  And indeed, there's some evidence that gas consumption is finally starting to drop a bit.  But most people can't just decide not to drive to work or the grocery store.  However, if people know that gas prices are going to stay high for long periods, they're more likely to make the sort of big changes that Frum mentions.

So, what am I missing?  Is there a hidden problem with it that I'm not seeing?  Or if it's really something that a libertarian true believer like Frum and a green progressive like myself can agree upon, why aren't any politicians talking about it?

Plastic bags

One of the sections of The World Without Us that caught my attention is the description of the gigantic collection of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific ocean.  It was running around in the back of my head last week when I read the NY Times article about how Ireland has essentially stopped using disposable shopping bags, driven in large part by a 33 cent per bag tax.  Meanwhile, D has been learning about recycling at school, and I've been trying to use that as a starting point for a broader lesson about the environment (and turning off lights when you leave the room, please).

So we've decided to see if we can break the plastic bag habit.  We'll keep track of how many we take in each month, and see how low we can get the number.

I understand that giving up plastic grocery bags isn't going to save the world.  And there are plenty of things that involve plastics that I have no intention of giving up.  But it strikes me that using disposable plastic bags in no way improves my quality of life.  It's just a habit.  And one that we can choose to break.

We've got some canvas bags already, and I went ahead and ordered some folding ones that I can keep in my purse so I always have one with me.  We'll see how it goes.

Updated:

So far, so good.  We've had some slip-ups, but have been using them more often than not (and often forgoing the plastic bag even when we didn't bring the grocery bags).

Jo(e) has a great post up about reusable bags.  She argues that the problem is that they're so convenient that they get used for everything BUT groceries.  But if you buy enough of them, they become ubiquitous, and you stop having to worry about what you did with them.

The World Without Us

Last night I was far too distracted to write a book review, but I do want to get back into the habit of writing them.  This week's book is The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman.  As suggested by the title, the book explores what would happen to the Earth if humans simply disappeared one day (whether abducted by aliens, taken in the rapture, or killed by a highly specific virus that left everything else on earth alone).  How long would our creations last?  Would the damage that we've done to the environment be healed, or would our chemical and nuclear facilities wreak even more havoc left untended?

Weissman uses these questions as launching points to explore a range of phenomena, from the Korean DMZ as wildlife refuge, to vast underground cities in Turkey, to the dead zone at Chernobyl, to the question of why there are almost no mega-fauna left anyplace on earth but Africa.  (Weissman's answer is that African megafauna learned early to be wary of humans, while the great animals in other parts of the world were taken by surprise by the dangerousness of these apparently helpless primates.  As I write this, I'm not sure why Asian elephants and tigers are an exception to that rule.)

The wide range of topics in the book are both a strength and a weakness.  Weissman's conclusion is that almost all traces of humans (except for bronze statues and radioactivity) will be erased, given enough time.  But because he jumps from issue to issue, having read the book, I still don't have a specific sense of what the world would look like in 5 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years.

It's hard to read the book, and not be horrified by some of the things that we're doing to the earth -- driving species to extinction, filling the oceans with plastic, changing the very climate.  But it doesn't point to obvious solutions, and can leave you with a sense that nothing we do at this point can fix things very much.

kill a catalog, save a tree

The holidays are still 2+ months away, and we're already drowning in catalogs.  It's clutter that we don't need, and it's bad for the environment.

I went to the Direct Marketing Association website and asked to be taken off their lists.  (They charge you $1 for the privilege, which ticks me off.)  That helps with the random catalogs from companies I've never heard of, but doesn't stop catalogs that you've bought from in the past.  The problem is that I do like ordering from companies like LL Bean and Oriental Trading Company, but I do so from their website, and I don't need (or want) to get a monthly catalog from them.  So I've been calling one or two companies a day and asking them to take me off their lists.

In general, the process has been pretty painless.  But Lilian Vernon was sufficiently annoying that it makes me far less likely to order from them in the future.  You call, and get an electronic voice that asks you what you want to do.  Then it asks you to read it your customer number off the catalog.  Then it asks you to confirm that your address is... (whatever they have in the system.)  Only then does it connect you to a live operator... who proceeds to ask for your customer number again, and for you to repeat your address to her.

Update: Via Aggregating the Fascinating, I found Catalog Choice, a free online site to submit requests to be removed from a catalog.

Poverty and cars

Via Laura at 11d, I read this thread on cities vs. suburbs at Matthew Yglesias' blog.  One comment jumped out at me:

"What's with this "suburbia is cheaper" claim? Where I live, suburbia is more expensive (which is why low income people live in cities and older suburbs)."

I'm not sure overall which is cheaper.  It's certainly true that far-out suburbs are cheaper than close-in suburbs (at least in the DC area, I think elsewhere too.)   That's why Prince William county just passed a harsh anti-illegal immigrant measure -- lots of immigrants have moved there, because a bunch of people can share a house for a lot less than renting small apartments close in.  And there's lots of evidence that everything from food to bank fees to insurance costs more for residents of poor inner city neighborhoods.

So why don't more poor people move to the suburbs?  The US Department of Housing and Urban Development did an experiment called Moving to Opportunity where people who lived in public housing were divided into 3 groups, one that was offered Section 8 housing vouchers that could be used anywhere they chose, one that was offered special vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods, and one that was not offered vouchers, but continued to live in public housing.  This was a voluntary program, so everyone in it had said that they wanted to move.  One of the interesting findings is that the majority of the people who used the unrestricted vouchers moved into neighborhoods that were still high poverty -- not as high as the public housing they came from, but still more than 20 percent.

Under the voucher program, what you pay is based on your income, not the rent, and you can rent any house up to what HUD calls the "fair market rent" for the metro area.  So why did the voucher recipients stay in high poverty neighborhoods?  If the researchers asked this, I haven't found the report that says it.  But I can take some guesses: Because those are the neighborhoods that they knew, where their friends and family lived, where they knew how to navigate the transportation system and which grocery store had the best deals.  Because landlords discriminated against them -- or because they were afraid that they might.  Because they didn't have cars, and the upfront cost of buying a car is obvious, while the added costs of buying food in inner-city neighborhoods is hidden.

All this is mostly a long way of saying that I'm not sure that the fact that poor people live in inner cities proves that they're cheaper than suburbs.

So, Yglesias argues that the suburbs are only so cheap because the roads and other infrastructure are so heavily subsidized.  Lisa Margonelli says that it's a myth that people will drive less if gas prices get high enough.  She argues that high gas prices have hit the poor the most.  I think this is probably right -- if people's driving is responsive to gas prices, it's clearly only in the very long run, as people choose where to work and live.  Somewhat less plausibly, Richard Brodsky claims that Bloomberg's proposed congestion pricing plan for driving in Manhattan would be regressive, hurting poor and middle-income drivers the most.  I'm pretty dubious about the idea that many poor New Yorkers own cars.

But outside of New York, I think the evidence is overwhelming that helping low-income families own cars is a highly cost-effective anti-poverty strategy.  (We've actually just donated our old car to Vehicles for Change, an organization that does this.)  It opens up a world of job opportunities, lets people shop at lower-cost stores, go to church and doctor's offices and more.  In an ideal world, you could do all these things by public transportation, but in most of the US you can't. 

So, how do we help the environment without penalizing low-income families?  I still think that some version of Pay at the Pump auto insurance would be a good thing.  It would convert a big part of the fixed cost of owning a car into a variable cost of driving it, so would both make car ownership more affordable for the poor, and discourage driving at the margin.  School reform isn't usually thought of as part of an environmental agenda, but if you could improve urban schools to the point that they seemed like a reasonable alternative for families who have options, more of them would choose to live in cities.

Commuting choices

We've been in the new house for almost a month now.  We still have a bunch of boxes to unpack, only one room that's been painted, and a list of things to do that seems to gets longer rather than shorter with time, but it's starting to feel like home.  I like everything about the house except my commute.

I'm still trying to sort out the options.  The fastest way to get to work is probably to drive.  But it's bad for the environment, it stresses me out, and parking downtown is expensive.  If I could find a carpool, that would be a clear-cut winner, but so far, I haven't been able to find anyone who is interested via the neighborhood list-serve.

I tried taking the metro to the bus one evening, and I'm pretty sure that's not a viable option.  The main problem is that the bus I need only comes every half an hour, so I'd either have to give up another 10+ minutes to the lead time I need to be sure that I don't
miss it, or risk having to sit around the Pentagon bus terminal for another half an hour.  And it's a long ride.

Today's experiment was walking home from the metro station.  It's a long walk -- about 4 miles -- but the exercise is good for me and most of the walk is quite pleasant.  But if I'm going to do that, I need to figure out a way to get across routes 50 and 7 that doesn't require walking through the middle of Seven Corners, which is about as pedestrian unfriendly an area as humanly possible.  If I figure out a route that makes sense, biking to the metro might also be a reasonable possibility.

What I've mostly been doing so far is driving to a metro station and leaving my car there.  Since D is finishing the school year at his old school, I've been generally driving him to school and parking in our old neighborhood -- but that only works as long as I still have the Alexandria parking sticker on my car.   Once I'm not driving D to school, I'd be willing to park at the metro station near us, except that it generally fills up by 8 am.  And my understanding is that there's a waiting list for the privilege of paying for a guaranteed slot.  One of my friends says that I can park in her neighborhood without a sticker, so I may try that.

The Post had an article this weekend about people who were responding to the high gas prices by telecommuting, one or more days a week.  This makes a lot of sense -- it's one of the few ways that people can really cut down on their commute in the short run, since most people can't move or change jobs on short notice.  I'm definitely hoping to telecommute at least once a week -- my organization is pretty open to it. (One of my coworkers actually lives in Colorado.)

I think I'm in paradox of choice mode here.  When I lived near the metro, I took it to work without thinking about it, and didn't really pay attention to the semi-regular delays and overcrowding.  And if I lived out in the boonies, I suspect that I'd just drive and not worry about it.  But because I have choices, I'm aware of the downsides of all the possibilities, and keep looking for the perfect one.

TBR: The Way We Eat

Today's book is The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.  I requested it from the library after reading the interview with Singer that I discussed last month.  It's an exploration of the ethics of food, focusing mostly on reducing unnecessary animal suffering and environmental impacts.  Singer and Mason organize their discussion around the diets of three American families: one that shops at Walmart and eats whatever is cheap, convenient and tastes good, one that shops at places like Trader Joes and Whole Foods and tries to make generally ethical choices around food even if it means paying more, and one that follows a vegan diet.

The basic argument behind The Way We Eat is that mass-produced food, especially meat, milk and eggs, is incredibly cheap because the price doesn't reflect the real costs, both in animal welfare, and in environmental damage.  Singer and Mason don't think it's inherently wrong to kill an animal for food, but say that if we have to pay 10 cents an egg more in order to allow the chickens to have the room to turn around and access to grass, we ought to be willing to pay that price.  (More formally, they argue that it is "speciesist" to refuse to take animal quality of life and suffering seriously.)

Overall, I found the book interesting and readable.  (I was a little nervous, since I've tried reading one of Singer's other books and found it inpenetrable.)  Singer's much less of a moral absolutist in this book than I was expecting. He makes a strong case for avoiding the products of factory farms, but recognizes that it may be more important in a specific case to eat your grandmother's cooking than to maintain a purist stance.  He doesn't think that the benefits of genetically modified foods are worth the risks in developed countries, but notes that the calculus may be different in places where starvation is a real threat.  (Although he fails to acknowledge the political problems in trying to explain why GM food is good enough for Africans if it's not good enough for Europeans.) 

Singer and Mason are also willing to zing some of their allies.  They suggest that it would be a good thing if we could grow cloned meat in vats, since it presumably wouldn't have any ability to suffer, a suggestion that I think would give most environmentalists the queasies.  As noted in the Salon interview, Singer's not a big fan of the Eat Local movement, arguing that it may be more sustainable to buy food from far away that is transported by ship and rail than local food that is trucked to market.  And they note that improved taste may be a good thing, but it is not an ethical requirement.

So, has reading this book changed my eating habits?  The sections that made the most impact on me were the discussion of mass poultry production. (I was already more or less aware of the issues in beef slaughterhouses, from Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, and I don't eat pork for other reasons.)  Right after reading that section, I walked through the meat aisle at Shopper's Food Warehouse and found it hard to pick up my usual pack of boneless chicken breasts.  So I left with mushrooms and bok choy, but no meat for the moo shu chicken I was thinking of making.

Later in the week, I made it over to Whole Foods (for the first time in the several months since it opened near me) and started looking at the prices.  I couldn't bring myself to pay over $4 a pound for chicken that we wouldn't be able to taste very much of over the sauce, so instead I bought a small package of beef.  I think the beef was slightly more per pound than the chicken, but it wasn't as proportionately more expensive than I'm used to paying for beef, if that makes sense.  If I were to commit to buying only non-factory farmed meat, I definitely think the costs would help push me toward using less of it.  Which Singer and Mason would approve of, of course.

Citizens and consumers

This post started bouncing around in my head in response to Andrea's comments on my post about Eating local and the environment.  And then she posted a long piece today in which she amplified her frustration at with the idea that we're going to change the world through consumer activism.  So you might want to stop over there first.  But the key paragraph (I think) in her essay is this:

Being a good consumer is a minuscule part of the overall puzzle. Helping to make the world a better place, if that's something you want to do, is not something you can buy. (I find it so depressing that even activism these days has become a shopping spree, something you do so you can get the t-shirt or the mug or the plastic bracelet, another opportunity to aquire more meaningless stuff we don't need, as if the whole idea of doing something that won't add to our collections is simply incomprehensible. Do we really need to be bought off with another cotton shopping bag?) You have to be a citizen.

I think Andrea's over-emphasizing the contrast between being a citizen and a consumer, and under-emphasizing the contrast between acting on your own and trying to engage others, regardless of whether you're acting as a citizen or a consumer.  Going by yourself into the voting booth on election day and voting for the candidate of your choice is as symbolic -- and practically ineffective -- as choosing to buy a locally grown heirloom tomato instead of one that's been genetically engineered for pest resistance and durability and shipped across the country.  Except that the locally grown tomato probably tastes good.  Both activities are only likely to change the world if you convince a bunch of other people to do them too.

Without dismissing the importance of political action, I actually think collective consumer action is more likely to have an impact, at least in the short-run, and at least in the U.S.  Because having 20 percent of the public support the environment in the voting booth gets you a lot of speeches in the Congressional Record, and that's about it.  The system is so winner-take-all that even a substantial minority has very little opportunity to move public policy.  But if you changed the consumption patterns of 20 percent of the public, that's a pretty big niche market.

And I believe that shifts in demand do change what's available, even in the housing market.  At least in the Washington DC area, they're literally pulling down small older houses to put up bigger ones -- McMansions, as they're not so fondly referred to.  And, from everything I've read, the consumer pressure on McDonalds to improve the way the cows/beef it buys was treated had a dramatic impact on the entire slaughterhouse industry in the US. 

A while back, landismom had a post in which she explained that the essence of political organizing is giving people Anger, Hope, and a Plan.  Andrea's worried that people aren't angry enough.  I think there's a real risk of pushing people right past anger and into despair, which is as much the enemy of action as indifference.

How do I put this?  If Andrea is right, and a sustainable environment really requires North Americans to voluntarily (either as individuals, or by voting in governments that would mandate it) reduce our consumption by more than 50 percent before we have no choice about it, then I hope the cockroaches learn to write poetry.  I recognize that pretty much everything that we can do as consumers is an exercise in slowing down our race to the brink, rather than in changing the overall trajectory.  But if it buys us just a few more decades between when we (as a society) recognize that our current path is unsustainable and when it's too late to do anything about it, that could make all the difference.

Eating local, and the environment

I noticed over at Life Begins at 30 that they're doing the Eat Local challenge again.  Their goal is, for the month of May, as much as possible, to eat only locally grown foods.  The idea of eating food that is fresher, that hasn't been bred for maximum durability, that you know where it comes from, is very appealing.  Of course, it's a lot more appealing in May than in November, at least in these climes.  (There's a great Margaret Atwood story in which the protagonist worries that her lover, a Canadian opposed to NAFTA, will "smell the kiwi on her breath" in winter.)

And then I read this article at Mother Jones about one of the advocates of local food, Joel Salatin.  I was somewhat bemused by the idea that he made Michael Pollan drive to Swoope, Virginia in order to buy one of his chickens.  I'm sure it was a delicious chicken, and Pollan learned something from the trip, but the gas consumed driving down there almost certainly outweighed any environmental benefits.

Last week was T's birthday, and by trash day we had quite an impressive and slightly appalling pile of boxes from Amazon and other stores to put out on the curb.  But would it have been any better for the environment for me to drive around to half a dozen stores looking for things rather than having the UPS guy able to deliver everyone's packages in one trip?  I'm not sure, and I don't know how to figure it out.

Susan at Crunchy Granola had a post recently in which she asked her readers what each of us are doing to balance our needs with those of the planet.  It reminded me of a book I read a while back, The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists.  This book argues that there's a handful of decisions that we make that really matter from an environmental point of view -- especially where we live, how much we drive, and how much meat we eat -- and that we should pay attention to these choices and not sweat the small stuff. 

The price of gas

Like almost everyone in the US who drives a gasoline-fueled car, I've been suffering from sticker shock when I buy gas lately.  The last time I filled up, I paid $2.49 a gallon, after driving past two stations at $2.69 and $2.83.

Unlike almost everyone in the US who drives a gasoline-fueled car, I don't think the government should be doing something about it.  If anything, I think gas should probably be more expensive.  I don't think people are ever going to take conservation seriously until it hits them in the wallet, and for both environmental and geopolitical reasons (e.g. not wanting to be dependent on oil-producing nations), I think it's important that we consume less fossil fuels.

There's very little evidence that people have started to change their driving patterns in response to the increased cost of gas.  At least in the short-run, fuel consumption is not very sensitive to price (e.g. it's what economists call inelastic).  At the margin, people may do less leisure driving, but the cost of gas is still a pretty small fraction of the cost of a trip.  And driving is still cheap compared to train and plane tickets, at least for a family.  It's going to cost us about $100 in gas to drive the minivan to NYC this weekend, but train tickets for the boys and me would be around $250, and that's with N. riding for free.  And while I love taking the metro to work (I can read!), for most people, public transit is inconvenient if available at all; as Brett at DadTalk wrote: "despite a frugal streak that runs miles deep, I’m going to continue driving to work just to steal a few extra minutes each day with my family.

The big changes that people can make in response to higher fuel costs -- buying more efficient cars, choosing houses closer to work or on public transit routes -- all only happen over time, and if people think that gas prices are going to stay high.  And I don't think people have gotten there yet.

I also worry a lot about the impact of higher gas costs on low-income families, for whom an extra $10 or so is a big hit on their budget, and means that they'll have to cut back somewhere else.  I think any proposal to increase the price of gas needs to address this issue, and cushion the blow.  One intriguing possibility is Pay at the Pump car insurance, where the price of no-fault car insurance is built into the cost of gasoline.  It simultaneously ensures that everyone is covered and changes one of the major costs of car use from a fixed cost to one that varies with the distance you drive.  It would simultaneously promote conservation and make car ownership a lot more accessible to poor families.

And yes, in spite of my environmental leanings, I think making car ownership a possibility for poor families is generally a good thing.  Many jobs are inaccessible without a car.  Groceries are more expensive at the stores you can reach without a car.  And commutes by public transit often stretch to 2 or more hours a day, especially when you need to take a child to day care or school en route.  A bunch of welfare to work programs have tried to create specialized van routes to bring workers to remote jobs, but my sense in most cases is that it's cheaper and more helpful to just buy people reliable used cars.