[ClumsyPilot]

Pollution - shipping basic goods around the globe 3 times to make the simples itema creates a lot of unnessesary pollition.

Fragility - one byte from a bat, one lockdown in China and United Kingdom runs out of toilet paper.

[hedora]

I'd like a source for the first. Given no other information, the best estimate of the energy footprint of the manufacturing process for an item is its shelf price.

This works particularly well for cheap items, where raw material costs (which are mostly just the energy cost of mining and refining) and shipping costs dominate. Usually, things are shipped around so they can be processed in the most specialized/energy efficient facility available. For small items, the pollution associated with shipping via ocean freight is miniscule.

As for the second point, the current system is fragile, but compared to what? If I had to pick a pandemic to live through at any point in time so far, covid would be my first choice.

[SequoiaHope]

> the best estimate of the energy footprint of the manufacturing process for an item is its shelf price.

Not really? This depends on the relative price of the energy of delivery and the value of the other parts of the good. And energy is so cheap, we seem pretty comfortable wasting it.

I've noticed where I live in California most markets sell this kind of jam made in France called Bonne Maman. Not even fancy markets, but the big local supermarket chains. What is weird about this is that California is a huge producer of fruits. I can buy jam made in a nearby town at one of the fancier markets near here, but the big supermarket chain buys jam from France.

This seems like a senseless waste of energy. I refuse to buy the jam from France because it's so wasteful. There's a lot of perverse incentives in our economy, and price cannot optimize for every variable. Capitalism is not as resource efficient as some basic theories would purport it to be.

[hedora]

The transport of the French jam is likely rounding error. This BBC Future article goes into more detail:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...

Search the page for "the climate impact of food miles" to jump to a graph that breaks down the source of CO2 emissions for various types of food. (The caption also references the source article from Science 2018.) Of the things there, the jam is probably closest to coffee or chocolate.

I'd be more worried about Bonne Maman's packaging's CO2 footprint. However, our kitchen floor is concrete, and the kids break a glass every month or so. We stopped buying glasses for them and use the (extremely low quality glass) jam jars instead. When they get older, we'll look for jam that comes in larger containers.