2014-03 - How Bad Are Bananas?, by Mike Berners-Lee

3 - How Bad Are Bananas?, by Mike Berners-Lee
WHY I PICKED IT: Recommended by my friend Chris
ELAPSED TIME: 1 Week
RATING: Good

This is an interesting read.  Advocating for people to make smart decisions that impact their carbon footprint, Berners-Lee takes a cut at identifying the carbon footprint of various items.  He shows quite well how you might be missing the point if you spend ages worrying about how you dry your hands (<10grams of CO2e) if you also own a pool (>100 tons).

He makes the case for eating food that is less CO2 intensive in multiple ways:
a) Veggies are less carbon  intensive than meat in multiple ways: Not just amount of space required for animals, but also the gases that come out of cows and sheep.
b) Local is generally better than transported in, but the manner of that transport is also important (bananas come by ship, asparagus comes by plane), and also the seasonality (greenhouses growing things out of season in your own locality aren't good either!).

I appreciated that he starts by acknowledging the limitations of his methodology, but accept the argument that the logarithmic scale when comparing things that are dramatically different is more than sufficient in the context of decision-making.

This book is probably best read in short chunks rather than front-to-back (as I did).