We discussed last week the sorry failure of “voluntary carbon markets” to stop carbon or work like markets. But if hope can’t spring eternal, ignorance leaps in, especially since economics doesn’t impress a lot of people who never studied it. And so in The New York Times “Climate Forward”, Lydia DePillis, who we are happy to report has a degree in history, unfortunately praises yet another initiative that won’t stop the climate from changing and if it could, it would prove the problem was trivial anyway. Some unspecified person who knows everything about everything will announce just how bad your kid’s school lunch is, not just for their palate but for the planet. And in the process, economics gets it.

According to DePillis, there are people who know everything about everything including exactly how it’s made and why it shouldn’t be:

“When government agencies are choosing how to spend tax dollars, they typically have one primary benchmark: Who can deliver goods or services at the cheapest price. But researchers are pushing governments to re-evaluate. They argue that some goods, particularly certain foods, may have a lower price tag, but may impose additional costs, such as the loss of species as cropland takes over habitat or the greenhouse gases from cow burps. For years, economists have been developing a system of ‘true cost accounting’ based on the growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures.”

Good luck with that, mate. And as noted her specific focus is school lunches. Not the kind mom packs. The kind Uncle Sam does. And apparently they’re as bad for everyone else as the taste suggests they are for you:

“Apples transported over long distances might cause more air pollution, for example, which ends up causing costly respiratory conditions that might have been avoided. Milk from dairies in areas with low rainfall might deprive other users of scarce water. Serving hamburgers supports an industry that generates planet-warming methane, accelerating extreme weather events that destroy homes and kill people. Add up all those extra hidden costs, and local, plant-based menus might start to look like a better way to spend government money.”

Yeah, might. Especially if you started out sure they would and structured the assumptions in your computer model accordingly. Down with the burgers of death! But also with people who talk about costs without having read Leonard Reed’s 1958 classic “I, Pencil” and understood that unless market prices driven by secure property rights are used to discover the true cost of things, there’s just literally no way to do it.

Certainly a bunch of climate zealots inventing numbers to do with flaming cow burps is unlikely to nail it, especially given the “war on normal” hostility to meat that has attracted cranks since long before the invention of climate change. Especially since, the piece admits, the problem with this much cheaper food is it costs way more. And if you really think a locally-grown apple will stop the sky from igniting, you’re trying at one and the same time to tell us we have a cosmic problem and that it’s trivial to fix.

Mind you when people actually start trying to do the accounting it rapidly becomes a policy as well as an intellectual nightmare. It’s easy to say, and Clean Prosperity did email in July that “Alberta can be a low-carbon leader if the province strengthens its carbon credit market.” But they promptly conceded that:

“Alberta must fix carbon credit market to ensure low-carbon growth/ Oversupply of carbon credits could threaten investment in the province”.

Also known as that if you pay people to pay other people you can’t watch not to do something no one could see anyway, the list of people giving you invisible stuff in return for visible money might get oversubscribed.

Just how bad is this voluntary carbon market? Well, even Climate Home News warned in August that:

“Despite the summer heat – with July announced as the second-hottest month on record – a chill wind blew through the voluntary carbon market this week as yet more doubts were cast on the quality of a large chunk of its offsets. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) announced that eight renewable energy methodologies - which cover about a third of the carbon credits currently available in the voluntary market - cannot use its “Core Carbon Principles” seal of approval.”

It’s a weird combination of a rush for government gold and a languid pace. Thus back in June Clean Prosperity had burbled:

“Today the Canada Growth Fund publicly released its strategy for offering carbon contracts to de-risk investment in low-carbon projects. The strategy outlines the types of contracts the Growth Fund will offer, including a new commitment to offer standardized contracts to smaller projects, which could boost low-carbon investment across Canada. Since launching in late 2023, the Growth Fund has signed three carbon contracts with Canadian firms, the latest one also announced today, with Ontario’s Markham District Energy. The new standardized carbon contracts announced today are essential to unlock the power of industrial carbon pricing to drive low-carbon investment and decarbonization. Clean Prosperity’s research shows that Canada risks missing out on 33 megatonnes of emissions reductions per year by 2030 if we don’t make carbon contracts available to emitters across the economy.”

So we’re not doing it, nobody’s sure how we could do it, and “de-risk investment in low-carbon projects” sounds like the kind of management-consultant hucksterism a prudent investor would avoid, let alone a taxpayer. And a total of three contracts doesn’t exactly sound like an energetic push to get it done as time runs short. But otherwise it’s going great.

Luckily someone somewhere knows precisely how much carbon the ingredients and processes that go into a school lunch spew, precisely how much harm it does, and exactly what to do about it. If only we could find that person.