You can stop berating yourself for buying that Spanish clementine or New Zealand lamb. Although lists of "what you can do to save the planet" include eating locally—buying food that is grown nearby—to reduce your carbon footprint, the calculation is more complicated than counting up your food's frequent-flier miles. If the local tomato comes from a greenhouse that gobbled up electricity produced from coal and was trucked in via an 8 miles-per-gallon pickup, and a long-distance one was grown in sunny fields and transported by a 400mpg train, you'll leave a smaller carbon footprint if you opt for the latter. Each calculation depends on the food and where you live, but studies find that dairy products imported by Europe from New Zealand leave half the carbon footprint as local ones, while imported New Zealand lamb (which is pasture-raised) leaves one quarter the carbon footprint as local kinds that rely on energy-intensive feed. While bottled water from the South Pacific is an eco-no-no, "you can't say that food from thousands of miles away is [worse for the environment]," says Jonathan Harrington, author of the new book The Climate Diet. "Transportation is only one piece of it"...

Perhaps the greatest folly, in time lost and dollars wasted, has been the push for ethanol to replace gasoline. In the United States, almost all ethanol comes from corn. When you tote up the carbon emissions caused by clearing land to grow corn, fertilizing it and transporting it, corn ethanol leaves twice the carbon footprint as gasoline.

Begley: Let's Ditch Ethanol | Newsweek Leadership and the Environment | Newsweek.com

My question: Are environmentalists bad for the environment?

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Lol, no probably not, but of course you have to take everything into account and make sure you tally everything up to get the right results, it's just common sense.

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Trust me, I'm a socialist!

There's power in a factory,power in the land, power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand, there is power in a union.
The union forever defending our rights, down with the blackleg, workers unite. To our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in a union.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own. - Billy Bragg

Sense that many environmentalists (and Al Gore) don't seem to have.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Hummmmm very interesting. Means one need think before they buy. But each food store still will have 3 choices or more on every product so maybe we need to limit choices. As pointed out big business helps and also leaves a big carbon footprint. And big business isn't going away nor will they do a thing to mess with the bottom line!
Nice post. thanks

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Yea can't keep the words of your great leader.

Prophet Muhammad - “Do you love your creator? Love your fellow-beings first.”

I don't know if we need to limit choices but, instead, provide more information so that consumers can make more informed choices - oh, and making the more environmentally friendly stuff less expensive would help too. Why the hell it should be more expensive to buy vegetables that weren't sprayed with pesticides than vegetables that were I don't know.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

I don't understand it, either. Perhaps it is because food that is grown without chemicals is more labor intensive because one has to pull weeds and remove any pests by hand. I grow some of my own organic vegetables to save money since I prefer organic.

Carbon footprint aside, I'd rather buy locally because produce that has been picked green to survive transport across long distances won't taste as good as produce that is picked and eaten fresh. And produce that isn't a result of factory farming and is grown in healthy rather than sterile soil with a bunch of chemicals is more nutritious. Health and nutrition are as important as the size of the "carbon footprint" if not more so. And pesticides that are banned in this country can return to us in the produce that is sold to us by other countries where they aren't banned.

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"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Thomas Jefferson

Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

So, since we can't really leave the carbon footprint aside lest we incur the wrath of Al Gore and the Global Warming Cult, living "greener" is not necessarily living healthier?

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Part of the real "eat local" mantra is to also eat in season. Which means no greenhouse tomatoes.

And let's be realistic. Most of our food (really most of our everything) is shipped by truck, not train.

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"Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
-Joseph Welch

Ain't gonna happen, buddy! There's no way you're going to separate a bunch of dieting women from their salads. Them's fightin' words!

Well, at least once it gets to the United States anyway.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

What is the point of this thread?