Archive for the ‘The Environment’ Category

I recently read this article on organic foods over at quackwatch.org. Following the article, the author had posted a reader protest complaining how it was unfair to lump organic farmers/foodies in with other “quacks”. The reader asks:

Honestly, is it so nutty to think we would be better off eating food that ISN’T full of chemicals and additives, preservatives and artificial colors?

Thinking about this question, I realized that the answer is “yes”. Nutty is probably not the word I would use to describe it, but it is a bit strange to think that we would be better off eating “food that isn’t full of chemicals, additives, preservatives, and artificial colors.” More accurately, it is a tad nutty to believe that so-called “natural” or “organic” products do not contain chemicals, additives, preservatives and artificial colors. The truth is that all foods — not just “artificial” foods — contain chemical preservatives and colors! The reader has simply assumed that because the chemicals found in organic foods are naturally occurring, they must also be safe.

This variation on the naturalistic fallacy is the foundation of naturopathy and a lot of modern new-age quackery. We have already explained in previous posts how natural is not always safe. Nature produces just as many harmful substances as it does nutritious substances… if not more. Furthermore, all “synthetic” compounds created by humans are merely variations on the chemicals we have already found in nature. The fact is that any distinction between the natural and artificial (insofar as it applies to the realm of biology and chemistry) is tenuous at best. In reality, human synthesis of chemicals usually involves nothing more than facilitating, or expediting, natural synthesis. Even when we create elements not found in nature, we produce them using other natural elements. Anyways, it is not as if you would find Ununpentium on the ingredients list of your favorite cereal. Conversely, finding all natural Uranium-238 on the ingredients list might be cause for concern.

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In my recent article about Consumer Reports, I mentioned that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that organically grown foods are any safer, tastier, or more nutritious than are their non-organically grown counterparts. Accepting this premise, you might say that it is still a legitimate choice to purchase organic food to support a more “natural” method of farming. Aside from the fact that this is quite fallacious, it is also very wrong.

The fact is that here in Canada — and in other countries that have modern farming practices — we have the most plentiful, healthful and safe food supply in all of recorded history (though you would not know it by talking to a naturopath). So much, in fact, that one of our biggest problems right now stems from an overabundance of food and the resulting over-consumption of certain types of foods. Short of obesity-related health problems, we live in a time and place where people are living longer than ever before.

Enter the organic food crowd, who believe that we are being slowly poisoned by the pesticides and antibiotics in our foods. The truth is even if evidence surfaced that eating non-organic food is harmful (none exists, to date), any negative health effects due to pesticide or antibiotic consumption would be vastly overshadowed by the health benefits accrued by modern farming techniques. In a way, organic food proponents bear some resemblance to anti-vaccine proponents. People who have never had to deal with nation-wide pandemics of measles or polio fail to see the importance of vaccinating their children and maintaining herd immunity against the diseases. Similarly, people who have grown up in a country with an abundant supply of safe and healthful food fail to appreciate all of the harms and waste that we have been able to eliminate through modern farming techniques.

The other problem with organic food is that even if we wanted to, we simply could not feed all of the people in Canada using organic farming techniques, let alone the world while maintaining affordable food prices (if you think increased food prices due to rising oil costs are bad…). Short of a mass extinction, there appears to be no way to reconcile this huge problem. Organic farming would only ever work as long as a small percentage of the population consumed organically grown foods — but proponents of organic foods believe that all food should be grown organically.

So why is organically grown food bad?

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With global warming all the rage in government, the media, and the scientific community; and the recent introduction of the new Liberal carbon tax plan, a lot of talk has focused on the issue of who should be footing the bill for our increasing energy use. Whereas proponents of the bill think that Canadians have to start paying attention to our levels of carbon emissions, opponents of the bill point to the fact that Canadians are already burdened with high energy costs and require relief, as opposed to increased taxes, at this time.

First: a few facts. We know that there are a number of externalities from carbon emissions. Global warming has more or less been universally accepted at this point in time, and we know that the effects will range from moderate to severe harm to our environment. Even if you don’t believe in global warming, you probably still acknowledge that combustion processes, that are the source of most carbon emissions, are significant contributors to smog and other pollutants. These things are both bad for our health and for our environment. We also know that, currently, these costs are not factored into the price of using fossil fuels and other carbon-emitting power generating processes. As a result, we grossly underestimate the cost of using these energy sources, and neglect to factor in the environmental and personal harm that we inflict when using them¹.

As previously discussed, while proponents of the carbon tax generally recognize that it is our responsibility to mitigate the above mentioned harms, critics don’t believe that the average Canadian citizen should be punished via increased energy costs. Some people don’t believe we should be paying these costs at all, but this is clearly not a [long-term or sustainable] solution. So if the Canadian citizen isn’t footing the bill for these costs, who should be the one to do it? Big corporations? Distributors? Producers?

Taxation tends to be misunderstood. If you levy a tax against a big corporation, nobody seems to care, but levy the same tax against your citizens and there is a big outcry. The truth of the matter is that no matter who is taxed, the consumer is always the one who will end up paying for it². Why is this the case?

The economic principles behind this phenomenon are rather simple. In an ideal (closed) free market economy, businesses are driven by two distinct mechanisms:

1. Profit Maximization: Businesses will always try to maximize their profits through minimizing expenses and maximizing the price of its products.
2. Competition: Consumers will choose to purchase the cheaper of two (or more goods), assuming comparable function and quality, businesses will compete to try and achieve a larger portion of the consumer market, and thus competition will drive businesses’ prices down.

These two factors work together to develop a market equilibrium where a company’s revenue will equal its expenses. By taxing the business, all you are doing is adding an extra expense that the business must factor in to their prices. Just like every other expense, this helps decide the price of the product that is sold to consumers: Raise the costs of production, and you will also raise the final price of the product. This will result in a new state of equilibrium, where consumers are paying more for the same product. The same process happens regardless of what stage of production you add the tax; it is factored in as an extra cost, which is then passed on to the consumer. People don’t care as much when the tax is added on earlier in the process. Just because you don’t directly observe the price increases from a business being taxed (unlike seeing the sales tax being added on when it comes time to pay for something), it does not mean that you aren’t paying a higher price because of that tax.

Obviously we don’t live in an ideal free market economy, but the principles are more or less the same. The result is that there is virtually no difference between taxing a business and taxing the consumer. Of course, in a more complicated system, where you have to compete to retain business and jobs on an international scale, whom you tax becomes more important. However, the fact remains that taxing will ultimately affect the consumer. So remember: the next time the government decides to tax a big, greedy corporation, and give the money to honest, hard-working citizens, that corporation is just going to turn around and pass that expense onto the consumer³.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when people take science and corrupt it for their own political ends. In recent years, global warming has been – pardon the pun – a rather hot topic; hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear about it in one form or another. The environmentalists have championed the theory, the right-wingers have dismissed it as propaganda, and everything in between. For every Inconvenient Truth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/) there’s a Great Global Warming Swindle (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020027/). We have to be more energy-efficient. We have to drive hybrids. There’s not a scientific “consensus”. Etc., etc., etc.

It wears on one’s nerves. And though I’m surely to be labeled a “global warming denier” or something equally as asinine, I’d like to explore what it IS, and what it IS NOT.

Global warming was originally an extrapolation from a predictive climate model. Depending on how you tweak the parameters, the same model will predict global cooling, or global temperature-not-changing-at-all. Granted, it does make logical sense. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and levels are elevated due to human activity, therefore human activity is causing the Earth’s temperature to increase. But overly simplistic, albeit rational, explanations such as these have no place in an essentially chaotic system such as climate. (Side note: some models will predict that heating actually causes cooling in the long run: more heat causes more water vapour in the air, which causes more clouds, which reflect more sunlight away from the Earth, which causes the planet to cool)

Global warming is not something that can be tested scientifically. One big problem is that we only have one planet to “experiment” on. Even if we could somehow test multiple Earths in the laboratory, there are far too many variables to be able to pin down the effects of a single one. At the end of the day, it comes down to what is statistically likely. To put it more bluntly, the idea that humans are going to cause a significant increase in the average temperature of the planet is a guess. An educated guess, to be fair, and one that is backed up by historical data such as graphs of atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature:

So I’m certainly not trying to say that it is a “myth” or that it is “impossible” or anything of that sort. There is a clear correlation in that graph, which lends support (but certainly does not prove) to the idea that man-made cardon dioxide can increase Earth’s temperature.

But even if it turns out to be wrong, the rest of the environmentalist message is still absolutely correct. Use less electricity. Drive more fuel-efficient cars. We KNOW that pollution from car exhaust and coal power plants kills tens of thousands of people annually; there would be no downside to getting rid of that. And maybe global warming alarmism is what we needed to give us a kick in the “green” direction. Hell, if all it means is the demise of the hideously obnoxious Hummer H2, then it is absolutely worth it.

Just… seriously… it’s not a political platform, it’s not a news headline attention-grabber, it’s a bloody computer model. It’s not even scary anymore; sorry, fear-mongering media, you’ll have to find something new to frighten us with.