Whining about wine

When you get a chance, check out the "Environment" section of this month's National Geographic.  It's about the carbon footprint of shipping wine from major production regions to various major US cities, and you can see it here.  It's worth looking at for a few reasons:

1). The main point, which it makes dramatically, is transporting goods by truck, which is the most common way by far to move things in the US, is incredibly inefficient.  Moving a bottle of wine from Napa to New York by truck releases 4.4 pounds of CO2 versus just 0.9 to ship a bottle from Sydney to NYC.  It's roughly equivalent in terms of carbon to drink a bottle of wine trucked to NYC from upstate New York as it is to drink one shipped from Bordeaux.  

2). Also interesting is the backlash on some wine blogs, particularly those devoted to producing upscale wines in idyllic parts of California.  I googled the article to try to link to the graphic (they don't have it online! n00bs...), and turned up a bunch of  these blogs ranting about it, plus some very probing comments on the site of the guy who made it.  One of them even has a new graph that adds in the carbon emitted by sending a package of National Geographic magazines across the country :-).

It looks like they have some points--he wasn't entirely fair to California, assuming for example that all Australian wine started in Sydney instead of the countryside, and possibly assuming that wine shipped to the ports closest to its destination instead of checking where it actually goes.  I see their concern that now in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of slightly-informed National Geographic readers Californian wine is Bad For the Environment, while in real life it's less clear.  So I'm going to reconsider my initial impulse to chide them about pouncing on environmentalism the minute it touches fancy small-batch wine from California.  Mostly, though, we should stop flipping out about eating (or drinking, apparently) local for energy reasons, at least until we know what "local" and "far away" mean.  This was brilliantly expressed last year in Time.

I liked the original graphic mostly because of how it made the point that the distance food travels doesn't matter nearly as much as the way it travels.    If we really wanted to help the environment through infrastructure spending, and make ourselves much better set up for future prosperity, we would be seriously thinking about improving our freight rail connections. It's sort of crazy that we've let trucking overtake rail transport in this country, through a combination of auto/asphalt industry special interests and government policies that required railroads to run money-losing passenger trains (this makes me a little nervous about $40 billion high-speed passenger rail projects in California).  They had trains in the 40's that could ship food cross-country with less energy than we use today.  Families used to ship their refrigerators to their vacation homes for the summer, just because it was so cheap!  I really like the idea of taking a fast train from Minneapolis to Chicago, but I have to wonder if that option makes anywhere near the economic and environmental sense that investing the money in freight railroads would.