Canada’s “Food Professor”, Sylvain Charlebois of Dalhousie University, serves up a thick slice of reality with regard to Net Zero, the war on energy, and the war in the Middle East. His dish relies on a point that ought to be obvious to all yet is somehow still largely overlooked, that everything we have including food takes energy to make, so reducing the supply of energy and increasing the cost (but we repeat ourselves) will make food “more expensive”, which is neither a narrow accounting view or fodder for a partisan press release but a way of saying less available, leaving people hungry and vulnerable to illness and death. Yet, he points out, the Canadian government continues relentlessly to drive up the cost of energy and hence of food, while conveniently blaming world events for their own bad choices instead of focusing on how much more disastrous Net Zero would be.

The extent of disruption of global trade due to what is, by historical standards, a small, short, quiet and extremely one-sided war is certainly noteworthy in itself and underlines just how much supply-chain fragility governments, firms, and individuals have tolerated in the name of efficiency. For instance, incredibly, “The packaging on some snacks in Japan is turning a somber black-and-white, as the war in Iran disrupts the supply of an ingredient used in colored ink.” It seems some people didn’t realize that our dependence on the dreaded petroleum extends even to “naphtha, an oil-derived product that’s used in items like plastics and ink” while others didn’t realize having stuff is better than not having it.

Remember “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”? Nuh uh.

The problem here isn’t that efficiency is bad. It’s that if you define it too narrowly, you forget that tomorrow is part of the picture. Miriam-Webster actually seems to define it too loosely, as “the quality or degree of being efficient”, a formulation as obvious as it is unhelpful. But then it explains that “efficient operation” means “effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost (as in energy, time, and money)”. And if there is no production it is not effective.

Wikipedia for its part says “Efficiency is the often measurable ability to avoid making mistakes or wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste.” And again, if you’re not doing them at all you’re not doing them well. Like get stuff you need to make other stuff.

Now back to the issue of making it hard to get food. As Charlebois wrote in the Toronto Sun:

“For years, Canadians were told that catastrophic climate scenarios justified virtually any policy imposed in the name of emissions reductions. In agriculture and food, this translated into mounting costs across the supply chain, escalating industrial carbon pricing, and a policy environment increasingly disconnected from affordability and competitiveness.”

Yikes. Exactly the sort of thing Mark Carney the former central banker with a PhD in economics would act decisively to stop, even if Mark Carney the former international man of greenery, GFANZ and transvalued Values would embrace it. And a classic case of people who ignore tradeoffs forcing painful ones on others, while claiming the science made them do it, even the fake stuff they themselves made up. As Charlebois added:

“Now, quietly, the scientific conversation is evolving. A recent paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, tied directly to the next generation of UN-backed climate modeling for the IPCC’s upcoming assessment cycle, suggests that some of the most extreme warming scenarios used for years are no longer considered plausible. The infamous SSP5-8.5 pathway, often portrayed publicly as a ‘business-as-usual’ future, assumed an explosion in coal consumption, extraordinarily high fossil fuel dependence, and emissions trajectories that increasingly diverged from economic and technological realities.”

But as we have noted, this view is too kind. And the smooth passive voice “are no longer considered plausible” conceals a rough reality. Those scenarios were never plausible and far too many people within the green scientific-advocacy blob knew it and didn’t speak up. The science certainly isn’t evolving, and if the “scientific conversation” is, it’s slow and grudging, including retaining many scenarios not significantly less obviously ludicrous.

As for “economic” realities, some day we’ll doubtless be told they’ve evolved in ways that make previous scaremongering and crazed solutions no longer operative or some such euphemism. But the laws of economics don’t change any more than the laws of science do, and making people not eat for their own good will always stink.