Part 1: Problems.

Hooray! Wal*Mart is providing organic food in its supermarkets. Americans have a new way to feel like environmentalists, even as we collectively hurtle towards extreme climate change and environmental degradation. We're Doing Something About The Problem! Let's pat ourselves on the back as we hop into our Priuses, drive back to our homes, and crack open that bag of organic kale.

If only it were so easy. While driving fuel-efficient cars and eating organic food is certainly better than the alternative, we are deluding ourselves if we think we can buy our way out of our resource overconsumption so easily. The truth is, we're not doing enough. We use too many of the world's resources, and as other countries catch up to our level of consumption, we're all screwed.

On to the details.

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Wal*Mart's recent decision to provide organic food in its supermarkets was heavily covered by the media and prompted a considerable amount of commentary and brief reflection among people like me. The first-glance incongruity (Wal*Mart, champion of industrial efficiency, supporting hippie-riffic organic food?) was precisely its allure to the casual reader.

The incongruity evaporates upon further inspection. Wal*Mart has not gotten a heart or decided that organic food represents part of its core values. In fact, it could be said that organic food represents exactly the opposite of their core values, being a product where the price is an afterthought to quality and sustainability.

So why did Wal*Mart do this? One reason: Target. As Wal*Mart reaches the limits of its growth in the United States low-cost sector, it is attempting to rebrand itself as a more upscale retailer, to compete with Target for middle- and upper-middle-class customers. What better way to outdo Target than make a big splash by providing organic food? Wal*Mart hopes to bring in more affluent customers to buy the organics, and then hopes they will stay and buy something else.

So how is the ethical consumer expected to respond? Should we applaud this move, and cruise over to our local superstore to pick up some organic arugula? Or denounce it as a transparent marketing ploy and continue shopping at the farmer's market?

The latter seems more appropriate. Even though Wal*Mart's move is, as Michael Pollan noted, an "unambiguous good," it's a very small unambiguous good. Everything that every company does to reduce pesticide use, chemical fertilizer use, antibiotic use, and the other negative aspects of industrial agriculture is a good thing, but consumers can better promote sustainability in stronger ways.

Essentially, Wal*Mart isn't going far enough. The "USDA Organic" seal only codifies half of the goal of the sustainable food community. The other half of the goal is to consume local food. Organic food produced at scales required by Wal*Mart will require enormous farms and long distance trucking of the food, perhaps even from abroad. This is why the smaller, local organic farms will not be threatened by Wal*Mart's decision. (This may mark the first time that a small business group will be unaffected by Wal*Mart.) Farmers' markets can still thrive, and community-supported agriculture will retain its adherents.

The environmental costs of the long-distance trucking and storage will mitigate some of the environmental benefits of increased organic food production and consumption. Additionally, the "organic" suppliers for Wal*Mart will likely be industrialized monoculture (one product) farms where supplies are fragile. It has been shown that farms producing multiple crops and rotating soil usage between them have a higher rate of water and nutrition retention in the soil, making the soil more impervious to droughts. Unfortunately, crop rotation is more expensive, so this is a tactic likely to be ignored by Wal*Mart's producers.

The New York Times editorial page, among others, also worries that as Wal*Mart attempts to keep its organic costs down, it may support attempts to water down the USDA Organic standard. A similar proposal to weaken the Organic seal was defeated just months ago in Congress. Were it to have had the lobbying clout of Wal*Mart behind it, it seems reasonable to expect that it would have passed.

Wal*Mart's plan is essentially marketing-driven. Come to think of it, marketing seems to be our only widely used weapon against global climate change and environmental degradation. Instead of educating people about the problem and the necessary, difficult solutions (more on this next week), we revert to feel-good marketing. You bought a Civic! You're doing your part. You buy organic! What a hero you are. Doing good doesn't require sacrifice! You can just buy your way into heaven!

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Consumers, when buying organic, local food, are paying more, and doing so voluntarily. Part of this increased cost is for quality: the improved taste of organic food (don't take my word for it, ask a celebrity chef.) The other part of the cost (compared to agribusiness industrial food) is the cost of the externalities that relate to food production.

Sidebar #1: Externalities are any costs not included in the price of a transaction. For example, if I build a factory that pollutes a river upstream, the fishermen who live downstream are affected: their fish harvests will be thinner. They lose money, I get to pollute for free. Externalities often are related to the sharing of common resources, in this case, the river. Government intervention of some type in commerce is often justified as being the only way to deal with such externalities. (More on governments next week.)

When consumers buy local, organic food, they are paying extra to reduce the prevalence of pesticides, antibiotics, and nitrates (from fertilizer) in the environment. While these pollutants have no direct cost, they have a strong indirect cost, most significantly in the health-care costs related to cancer, obesity, and antibiotic resistance. Additionally, runoff of nitrates from Midwestern farms travels down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they promote interactions with phytoplankton and bacteria that result in a dearth of oxygen in the water. There is now a "dead zone" approximately the size of Massachusetts at the mouth of the Mississippi River where there is not enough oxygen dissolved in the water to support marine life.

The fact that so many people do buy organic food, at a price premium, is heartening. They are making a voluntary choice to (crudely) estimate the externalities and pay for them. But the problem of environmental degradation, especially global warming/climate change, requires more people bearing more external costs than just those relating to food.

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Buyers of hybrid, fuel-efficient cars (NOT the recent "hybrid performance" cars, which use an electric motor primarily to increase horsepower, not fuel efficiency) like the Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid (or the cute and tiny Honda Insight) recently discontinued are also paying to offset the externalities, in this case the future costs of global climate change. Because these hybrids cost several thousand dollars more than similarly-equipped conventional cars, many people have pointed out that even with high gas prices, the extra savings in fuel purchases for a hybrid car owner is not enough to justify the higher price of the car. Yet when one considers the long-term potential impact of global climate change, the price premium is more than reasonable in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Like Wal*Mart selling organic food, hybrid cars are an unambiguous good. Except for the fact that... they're still cars. So they are a very small unambiguous good.

One nagging problem with the hybrid car phenomenon is that despite all the attention it gets in the press and popular culture, these cars are making no real dent in our carbon emissions. Only 14-15% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector. Priuses and Civic Hybids account for far less than 1% of that amount (the Prius recently topped 500,000 total sales from 2000-2006, but, as a comparison, the auto industry produced 63 million cars in the year 2005 alone). And a Prius or Civic only gets 20-40% better gas mileage than comparable cars. So... doing the math... Prius drivers like my mom have now collectively reduced greenhouse gas emissions in the world by (let's be generous here) .004% (yep, .00004 in decimal). That's a lot of zeroes. Even if all of those oft-scorned SUVs were banned from the roads and replaced by hybrids, greenhouse gas emissions would still be about 90% of what they are today in the U.S. Which is (you guessed it) still too high.

For people to truly have an effect on greenhouse gas emissions, a larger lifestyle change is required. Electricity production is another 21% of the greenhouse gas pie, and 10% comes from home heating oil and other residential and commercial sources. For every McMansion that is built with a (quickly filled) three-car garage, for every family that buys a vacation home, for every person who buys a pickup truck because they need it three times a year to haul things, the environmental cost multiplies. It's the size, stupid. A larger house takes more oil to heat and more electricity to light (and let's not even get started on air conditioning). A second house increases those costs geometrically. Then you need the Big truck to drive your Big TV back from the Big-box store. I realize that I'm being scornful here, but until we have strong renewable energy sources, every day we go on with our Big lives we intensify the impact of climate change.

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Most consumers in the United States for whatever reason (and that's a topic that would require several more essays) have not chosen to minimize the environmental impact of their consumption. And why should they? With the external costs of global climate change not factored in to any of our consumption choices, there is no incentive to do so (beyond faith in the expertise of essentially all of the world's scientists.

It has been widely reported that the United States has about 5% of the world's population yet consumes about 25% of its resources. While our hyperconsumption and hyperpollution during the twentieth century is finally starting to catch up to us in the form of climate change, the situation will worsen as the developing economies of China and India reach our size. China has over 1.3 billion people. The United States has about 300 million. Imagine if every person in China lived the way we do. Greenhouse gas emissions, already far too high, would quadruple. India poses a similar dilemna. Even worse, China uses coal to fuel 70% of its electricity production, which is one of the most smog- and greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The United States uses coal for about 50% or its energy. Unless the United States becomes a leader in renewable energy and efficient energy consumption, our only global warming strategy will be to stave off all economic modernization in developing countries. As you can imagine, developing countries might not be so excited about us telling them to not buy cars, burn coal, or any number of other polluting behaviors that we just happened to utilize 50 years before we knew how dangerous they were.

Sidebar #2: China has publicly stated that it wants to supply 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, but this goal seems both difficult to achieve (currently China's renewables production accounts for less than 1%) and yet still inadequate (2020 is around when many experts believe China's economy will grow to the size of ours, and 85% fossil fuels is still a problem).

Next week, I will attempt (and probably fail) to find a silver lining on these literal and figurative clouds and suggest some solutions and guidelines for people who are concerned about how their consumption patterns affect the environment.

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