Daily Score Blog

Whoever dreamed up bottled water was a genius. The ubiquitous plastic bottles are such a common purchase today that many consumers do not think twice before paying two-dollars for water that would cost them practically nothing from the tap. A recent study in New York City calculated that the recommended 8 glasses a day costs about $.49 a year from the tap. As much "designer" H2O purchased in plastic bottles equates to about $1,400 a year!

Clearly, bottled water is no friend to our savings accounts, but there are bigger costs too, as Sightline's new book Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet, explains:

Bottled water is a notorious carbon culprit. Every day Americans go through 40 million bottles of water. The bottles are usually made from petroleum-based plastic, and the vaunted water often comes from a regular old public drinking supply. The bottles must be shipped, often over large distances."

Using a ratio of food miles to calories, bottled water is an enormous waste."
However, it's not just about bottled water; the choices we make when we buy our food also have significant impacts upon our planet. From the amount of energy spent during transportation to the amount of energy spent on production, we all can make a difference and reduce the impact our food has on our planet by being an informed consumer and buying carefully.

If you'd like to read more about this, and other ways in which our daily choices about food and beverages affect our planet, our health, our climate, and our pocketbooks, and the many ways we can make little changes that help offset those impacts, check out Sightline's new book, Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet -- A handbook for designing sustainability into the very heart of our lives, communities, and economies.

More and more consumers are trying to reduce the environmental impacts of the foods they eat. 

But it's not so easy to know what to do -- in part because of the bewildering array of food choices the market offers, but also because it's hard to know what food choices carry the biggest impact.

This nifty study tries to clear away some of the murk, by tackling a fairly straightforward question:  If you care about the climate, which is more important:  what kind of food you eat, or  where that food is grown?

To summarize the findings:  all else being equal, locally-grown food is friendlier to the climate than food grown half a continent away.   But if you're looking for a single food choice that will help curb your climate impact, your best bet is to stay away from cows!

Our pal Peter Dorman is looking for answers: does the class of economic forecasting tools known as "computable general equilibrium models" (a.k.a. CGE models) have any documented track record of success? 

This may seem like an arcane point, but it's quite relevant to climate policy.  Government agencies throughout North America are using CGE models to forecast the economic impacts of various cap-and-trade proposals. But many academic economists -- Dorman among them -- think that the CGE models are built on sand.  Says Dorman:

I think these models are so dubious theoretically and unreliable in practice that there is no case for using them.

Peter's a smart guy, and he's looked and looked.  But he's found no evidence that anyone's actually tested the reliability of CGE models, to see if their predictions match up with real events as they unfold. All it would take is a retrospective study, lining up CGE-based forecasts made in, say, the early 1990s, and comparing them with what actually happened.  But search as he might, he's found nothing of that sort in the literature.

Worse, he suspects that commodity traders and hedge fund managers -- the sorts of people who get paid a lot of money to predict the future -- simply ignore the results of CGE models.  Sure, policy makers and academics use CGE models all the time, but there's no real personal harm to them if the models lead them astray.  For people with actual skin in the game, though, a bad guess is a costly one, and a good guess is worth a mint.  If market traders don't use CGE models in their work, then that's a decent piece of evidence that those models just aren't all that useful for predicting the future.

So for anyone out there who's economically inclined, Peter hopes you'll spread his challenge:  if you have evidence that CGE models are worth their salt -- and that their predictions are any more reliable than, say, informed guesswork -- please let him, or us, know.

[Photo credit:  Flickr user spacetrucker, distributed under a Creative Commons license.]