but what’s even better is to consume only locally-sourced and renewable materials
Actually, it depends. We did an analysis in one of my university environmental science classes about if you’re living in Montreal in the winter, if you should buy produce from the subtropics (California in our analysis) or local produce. Well, local produce in Quebec is grown in greenhouses in the winter. And as it turns out, the carbon footprint to heat those things far outweighs everything else combined: including transportation. Like, you can get many times more produce shipped straight from California for the same amount of carbon emissions of a single stalk of local broccoli. The difference was so far beyond any margin of error that there was no way we could justify getting local produce no matter how much we tried (I’m pretty sure most people in our class went into it assuming local would win hands down).
The takeaway is: if it’s really cold, food production isn’t efficient and you might just be better off getting non-local food from somewhere warm.
Freezer might be a viable alternative actually. Especially if you use a heat pump and use the “waste” heat to heat buildings in the winter. Or, even with greenhouses, a ground source heat pump that stores thermal energy in the soil in the summer and extracts it in the winter could potentially also work. Heat pumps can be up to 5x more efficient than resistive electric heat.
The thing is, to my knowledge, the only fresh produce available locally in Quebec in the winter is greenhouse grown because it’s literally too cold for any edible plant to grow in the fields. Broccoli isn’t special in this regard because nothing would be in season.
To be fair the assignment wasn’t really meant to actually inform people what they should do. It was meant to test our ecological impact assessment and data analysis skills that we learned over the term, so they probably did pick a relatively simple example (still with real numbers though).
Actually, it depends. We did an analysis in one of my university environmental science classes about if you’re living in Montreal in the winter, if you should buy produce from the subtropics (California in our analysis) or local produce. Well, local produce in Quebec is grown in greenhouses in the winter. And as it turns out, the carbon footprint to heat those things far outweighs everything else combined: including transportation. Like, you can get many times more produce shipped straight from California for the same amount of carbon emissions of a single stalk of local broccoli. The difference was so far beyond any margin of error that there was no way we could justify getting local produce no matter how much we tried (I’m pretty sure most people in our class went into it assuming local would win hands down).
The takeaway is: if it’s really cold, food production isn’t efficient and you might just be better off getting non-local food from somewhere warm.
@poVoq@lemmy.ml
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Freezer might be a viable alternative actually. Especially if you use a heat pump and use the “waste” heat to heat buildings in the winter. Or, even with greenhouses, a ground source heat pump that stores thermal energy in the soil in the summer and extracts it in the winter could potentially also work. Heat pumps can be up to 5x more efficient than resistive electric heat.
The thing is, to my knowledge, the only fresh produce available locally in Quebec in the winter is greenhouse grown because it’s literally too cold for any edible plant to grow in the fields. Broccoli isn’t special in this regard because nothing would be in season.
To be fair the assignment wasn’t really meant to actually inform people what they should do. It was meant to test our ecological impact assessment and data analysis skills that we learned over the term, so they probably did pick a relatively simple example (still with real numbers though).
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