Augmented Markets

Slate, which I can't help reading (partly because I like their election coverage), is running a series on reducing carbon emissions. Today there's an entry on choosing environmentally friendly foods. To me this seems like a classic example of a problem that is best solved by an augmented market.

The contention is that you should eat locally grown and organic food and avoid meats and heavily processed foods. This will help you to avoid foods that require lots of energy to produce and transport. Consider, though, how computationally difficult it is to tell how much carbon went into something you're eating. If I eat food processed in the US, it doesn't have to travel very far. On the other hand, if I eat food processed in France, it has to make it over the Atlantic, but it was probably processed with nuclear power, which doesn't emit carbon. Similarly, processing food might use a lot of energy, but it might save energy on refrigeration and spoilage. Consider that to produce the same amount of food organically requires more land to be cultivated, which might mean eliminating forests, wetlands, etc. These and countless more examples mean that it's unclear what I, as someone who cares about the environment, should actually be eating.

Now consider a carbon tax. Assuming you could tax emissions fairly accurately (probably not a stretch, since you can just tax inputs like fuel), the consumer can simply choose food the old-fashioned way: by quality and price. This puts a far smaller informational burden on the consumer, and it avoids other market failures like free-riding (I benefit when you forego steak). In fact, ask yourself how many people are likely to choose food based on carbon emissions, and then consider whether the Slate approach is likely to be as effective as a mandatory carbon tax.

Now I realize that these two approaches aren't really comparable. One is a political, the other is personal. The political solution isn't going to happen anytime soon. Still, the personal effort to reduce carbon emissions by changing food choices seems hopelessly quixotic, and it seems to me that environmentalists would better spend their time educating and lobbying on behalf of real solutions.