From ClimateREALISM

By Heartland Institute

By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett 

The Independent published a story reporting on how British television presenter and gardening journalist Alan Titchmarsh urged UK citizens to stop eating avocados because of their alleged climate impact. This is nonsense. As islands, the United Kingdom imports a lot of their food, and, as a result, attempts to limit a carbon footprint are a waste of time and perhaps detrimental to nutrition. Certainly, the carbon footprint of avocado imports is miniscule relative to the UK’s and the globe’s total output. To pile more alarmism on, The Independent also suggests that avocado production is likely to decline due to climate change. This is refuted by available data.

The Independent’s post, “Why Alan Titchmarsh is urging Britons to eat Weetabix,” contextualizes Alan Titchmarsh’s claims that avocado consumption is bad for the environment. Titchmarsh, a regionally famous television personality, goes further advising that people should eat “traditional breakfast staples like Cornflakes, Weetabix, and Shreddies,” instead. According to The Independent Titchmarsh links deforestation to avocado production, and points to the carbon footprint associated with shipping and handling for avocados to reach the UK as contributing to dangerous climate change.

Part of the reasoning behind the grain-based cereal suggestion is that these are more often locally produced, or are at least produced a shorter distance away, as opposed to tropical avocados. But the “food miles” theory has lately been debunked, as discussed in the Climate Realism post “Thanks, WBUR, For Explaining “Eating Local” Has No Impact on Climate Change,” where recent data showed that locally farmed foods almost always had higher carbon footprints than food grown efficiently elsewhere. This might not hold true for a comparison between local mass-produced wheat versus distantly mass-produced avocados, but the formula is not as simple as “distance equals higher footprint.”

Importantly, wheat and avocados have different nutritional profiles so eating processed wheat doesn’t provide the same nutritional benefits as eating avocados and vice-versa.

Chasing carbon footprints is a waste of time anyway. Individual efforts do nothing at all to impact atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Even if the UK ceased imports of all avocados, the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere from shipping in general would not change. Most goods are shipped combined with other goods by sea and air freight, so picking on avocados alone is pointless on the carbon footprint front.

With regards to deforestation, if a UK consumer or importer is worried, a simple solution would be to select growers that do not practice mass deforestation to plant avocado trees. More importantly, they could advocate that the country stop demanding and importing palm oil for use as a “sustainable” fuel source and cooking oil, since copious research indicates it is responsible for widespread deforestation in some of the most biologically diverse and intact tropical forests on earth. Ending palm oil deforestation would do far more to benefit the environment than foregoing the occasional avocado toast with breakfast.

The Independent also suggests that climate change itself is also impacting “the largest avocado-producing countries.” They cite a study which predicts that Mexico could see avocado growing regions reduced by 31 percent by 2050 even if global warming is stopped. Despite global average temperatures already increasing to 1.5°C since pre-industrial times, data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicate that avocado production has skyrocketed in Mexico. (See graph below)

Since just 1990:

• Production increased 333 percent;
• Yields increased 32 percent;
• The most recent world record production was set in 2023.

The United Kingdom gets most of their avocados from Peru and Chile, according to The Independent. Luckily, as Climate Realism has already covered concerning Peruvian climate change, a recent regional drought in some parts of the country are highly localized and natural, having nothing to do with global warming. In fact, some local droughts are likely due to the very deforestation that Titchmarsh is concerned about. As importantly, for a clear understanding of the impact of climate change for avocado production and potential supply issues in the UK, during the recent period of slight warming, avocado production in both countries has boomed, increasing more than 348 percent in Chile between 1990 and 2023 and by more than 1017 percent in Peru. (see the graph below)

All in all, The Independent’s and Titchmarsh’s concerns are not well founded, as even a cursory look at available avocado data show. UK residents can happily enjoy their guacamole and avocado toast without worrying that they are contributing to climate change.

Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading free-market think tanks. It is a national nonprofit research and education organization based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

Ed. note: With the US-led demise of Net Zero and “energy transformation,” prior attempts to come to grips with climate futility and energy reality are worth revisiting. This article, “Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?” (Annual Review of Environment and Resources: Vol. 46, 2021), is an example of a faulty worldview, a vastly overbuilt academic climate network (23 authors), and an inability to seriously deal with critical views of climate alarm/forced energy transformation.

“The globalizing formations of industrial modernity … are, arguably, most distinctively driven by an array of fallacies, fictions, and fantasies of control.” [1]

This post presents the article’s Abstract, Summary Points, Future Issues, and Conclusion followed by my critical comment.

ABSTRACT

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve.

However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today’s carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.

SUMMARY POINTS

1. Despite three decades of political efforts and scientifically informed warnings of the likely catastrophic effects of climate change, CO₂ emissions have continued to rise globally and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990.
2. Since the first IPCC report was published in 1990, more anthropogenic fossil CO₂ has been released into the atmosphere than previously throughout all of human history.
3. The failure of leadership, particularly from within high-emitting countries, sectors, corporations, and individuals, has locked in intra- and intergenerational suffering and long-term existential threats to livelihoods and ecosystems.
4. Entrenched geopolitical, industrial, and military power and associated mindsets are fundamental barriers to effective mitigation.
5. Orthodox schools of thought and research traditions (including highly constrained forms of modeling), particularly in the fields of economics, energy, and climate mitigation, need to be challenged and replaced with, or complemented by, more heterodox approaches.
6. Three decades of choosing to fail on mitigation have shifted the climate challenge from a technocratic adjustment to business as usual to requiring a rapid, system-level change within both industrialized and industrializing societies.
7. Transformations toward more sustainable and just futures require a radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change.
8. Attention to equity, high-carbon lifestyles, and conditions for enabling new social imaginaries has the potential to disrupt dominant, high-carbon development pathways.

FUTURE ISSUES

1. How could geopolitical competition over energy resources and ideologies of control that frame dominant responses to climate change be challenged and overcome?
2. How have mainstream economics and neoliberal responses to climate change (e.g., carbon markets and a broader financialization of the environment) become so pervasive, and what opportunities are there for alternative or complementary approaches?
3. How can research approaches currently dominating advice and underpinning climate mitigation policy (such as integrated assessment modeling) be complemented with a more varied array of approaches and perspectives?
4. How could approaches that rapidly reduce energy-related emissions be realized (e.g., actively displacing and disassembling fossil fuel–based energy systems, and energy demand management practices)?
5. How can the large asymmetry in responsibility for emissions within, as well as between, nations be addressed in climate policy and governance?
6. How can fossil fuel–based, high-carbon lifestyles, practices, and visions of incremental mitigation be rapidly replaced by sustainable alternatives and profound system change, informed by a timely response to the Paris temperature and equity commitments?
7. How can knowledge systems and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change be transformed?
8. How can existing and new social movements mobilize popular power and social imaginaries in a way that effectively challenges the status quo and helps drive structural change at the scale and pace required?

CONCLUSION

This article has demonstrated that, while the reasons for 30 years of failure to bend the global emissions curve are multifaceted, a common and strong thread is woven through them all. In various guises and to differing degrees, the centralization of power and the privileges that accompany it have coalesced around a particular worldview. Through recent decades, the central tenets of this worldview have evolved into a wider global Zeitgeist whereby development and progress are reduced to economic growth and defined by increasingly narrow financial metrics and indices.

Coincident with this financial reductionism and economic characterization of nations and societies has been a growing recognition that the “system” externalities are set to undermine the very tenets of the system. Thus far, however, the power and inertia of the existing system have been sufficient to give the impression of ongoing control. The challenges are “recognized” and “internalized,” and through promised technical futures that are carefully costed in elaborate models, the existing power structures remain unchallenged.

From Bias to Gobbledygook

“The process of writing this article has been iterative and humbling,” the 23 authors admit. [1] “As the article coalesced, it became increasingly evident that any attempt to distil a single clear narrative was misguided.” It is also stated: “… we coauthors have not necessarily been neutral observers of others’ failings.”

This aside, the analysis turns against the general population that has been duped or is just plain unqualified for the task at hand, which is a “radical reconfiguration of long-run sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions.” Translated, a governmental low-carbon, Net Zero lifestyle must be mandated for one and all.

Enter the vast right-wing conspiracy. It is stated that “people can, at least temporarily, be steered to ignore physical reality.” The masses are victims of “elite political discourse,” “dogmatic political-economic hegemony,” and “narrow techno-economic mindsets.” The “psychological, social, and emotional capacity of individuals and groups to understand, explore, and create different social imaginaries has been steadily weakened.” And:

“Inadequate responses from societies can partially be attributed to psychological factors such as the limited capacity to apprehend and formulate responses to climate change….”

An ‘epistemological monoculture’ … has impoverished the collective global capacity to imagine and realize forms of living not dependent upon exploitation of people and natural “resources”….

In the educational and epistemological arena, indigenous and decolonial traditions of thought are already providing a powerful critique of education’s role in reproducing and defending the status quo.

Back to reality. Gobbledygook is defined as “language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms.” This is why the above article is so obtuse.

Will the separation of government and climate change result in these “experts” doing something more useful? Even getting a job in the private sector creating wealth rather than theorizing to redistribute it?

——————

[1] Authors: Isak Stoddard, Kevin Anderson, Stuart Capstick, Wim Carton, Joanna Depledge, Keri Facer, Clair Gough, Frederic Hache, Claire Hoolohan, Martin Hultman, Niclas Hällström, Sivan Kartha, Sonja Klinsky, Magdalena Kuchler, Eva Lövbrand, Naghmeh Nasiritousi, Peter Newell, Glen P. Peters, Youba Sokona, Andy Stirling, Matthew Stilwell, Clive L. Spash, and Mariama Williams.