Terms of Art and Points of Agreement in Sustainability

Right, so first of all, I'd like to declare victory on the "local" aspect of this environmental argument (which was the whole point of these pots... the rest of the sustainability stuff just appeared as a side effect).  The ongoing comment-blog debate has basically shifted entirely away from issues of local and small-scale farming.  I've noticed some points of confusion arising from terms of art, and some points of broad agreement, so I want to highlight the latter and clarify the former in this post.

Where the sustainafreaks and I are in agreement:

1. Companies need to pay the real costs of the damage done by their pollution.  I come at this from a broadly economic (more on that later) rather than ecological perspective, but the conclusion is the same.  If you are going to pollute or otherwise harm people, the cost of that externality (economic term-of-art) should be included into your operating costs.  That would go a long way to leveling the playing field between "green" industry and traditional industry.

2. Again, from a purely economic perspective, we shouldn't be subsidizing farms (or, really, much of anything at all except basic research and some other things prone to market failures).  If this incidentally furthers ecological aims, that's a bonus.

Terms of art:

The big thing that I wanted to mention in this is that when I say "reduced quality of life" I'm borrowing a term of art from economics.  The fact that I think of this phrase primarily in the economic way probably says something about how far down the rabbit whole I've gone in my reading, but there it is.  As a side note, while some people would happily abandon many modern amenities, I'd say that they aren't the majority case. I can tell by how people keep voluntarily buying all this extra stuff they "don't need".  Everyone has a list like the one in the comments about what bits of modern life they like and want to keep, but the point is that these lists don't overlap, and the people who don't want certain modern amenities can (and do) decline to purchase them.  The fact that we keep making these things indicates that for many people they are standard of living enhancing even in the common sense.

As a side note, I also use the word "externality" a lot, which is basically a cost of production born by society rather than the producer.  Pollution is the canonical example of this sort of thing, and basically every branch of economics thinks that such things should be forced into the cost of production and passed on as added prices.

And because I can't help myself...

Places where we hilariously disagree, or are miscommunicating (limited in scope to sustainability):

Not sold on the Local Food movement: take two

My college roommate--an ecologist--just took a swing at my local food skepticism post.  I think he missed in all the same ways that my other ecophile buddies do, but his comment gave me a great sampling of the typical arguments I hear.  I'm going to address each of them in the hopes that future ecophiles might be able to help me understand their position better, or come to the realization that their position is untenable and surrender to my superior arguments.  You can read his original comments here; I'm just going to summarize what I see as the key claims and arguments and then address them systematically.

My Claims	Common Ecophile claims
Sustainability should be about efficiency	Sustainability isn't just about efficiency
Even if externalities were priced in and subsidies were eliminated, industrial agriculture would benefit from economies of scale and be cheaper than "local" food.	Industrial agriculture is cheaper because its real costs are hidden (subsides and externalities)
Sustainability is only a real concern for resources that we must use continuously, but that we use faster than we make.  Creating a viable alternative, finding a way to slow consumption, and/or finding a way to speed production are the only ways to address real sustainability problems.	We should stop using X now so we don't catastrophically run out of X later.
Organic food has not been shown to be any healthier or more nutritious than regular food.	Organic is healthier and more nutritious
I see no reason to believe that waste per unit product is higher for industrial agriculture, nor have I seen any numbers to show it.  Please educate me if such arguments/numbers exist.	Industrial agriculture produces more waste than local agriculture.

My Conclusions:
Sustainability efforts should be focused on pricing in externalities and improving resource usage efficiency.  The health/nutrition stuff doesn't really have science on its side.  I also think that we benefit enormously from global food markets, since regional disease and bad weather events would be catastrophic if there weren't willing food exporters distributed around the world.  It's one of the best tools we have for avoiding global food shortages.  Increased diversity would be another good defense from this, but we don't need to go local to do it, and I'm not sure going local would help.

My Arguments:
Piles of arguments below the fold.  Before you read them you should know that I approach ecological issues in an entirely human-centric manner.  I don't think we should destroy pretty places or be mean to animals just because we can.  But, I don't care about pretty places or rare animal species or being nice to caged chickens or anything like that except in so far as it benefits human beings to do so.  I think saving the algae is way more important than saving the whales and I'd flatten every mountain in Africa if it meant we could feed all the Africans.  I am glad we forced smallpox into extinction and would happily support mass extinctions of many other organisms that are inconvenient to human beings (eg. malaria, HIV).

In which I bullshit about some things I'm skeptical about in the local food movement

I'm not nearly as well informed on environmental and sustainability issues as I am, for instance, on macroeconomic ones, largely because I know a lot of people who are very well informed on those issues and I can just ask them questions when I'm curious.  Recently, though, I've been finding myself in disagreement with my favorite ecophiles (yes, I did just make that up) on the local food movement.

Basically, I think that local food advocates--especially the organic local small farm variety--are ignoring economies of scale.  The reason organic local food is expensive is that it's made inefficiently.  Some of the stuff that makes local organic farming inefficient also makes its products healthier and more delicious, like eschewing piles'o'antibiotics and using real soil and actual animal food for your plants and animals.  But, there are real economies of scale, both in terms of price negotiations for production inputs like seed and equipment, and also in leveraging advantages from high capital cost - high efficiency machine like automatic milkers, irrigation systems, &c.  The higher-prices-due-to-negotiating-position thing might not make much difference in terms of impact, but any yield increasing efficiency basically means that it takes fewer inputs to make the same amount of output.  Since a big part of sustainability is not using too much stuff to make things, it seems like inefficiency is anathema, or at least at cross purposes, to sustainability.  So why do we sustainability freaks want to do things inefficiently?