mostly a manifestation of fossil energy, with the photosynthetic solar- energy input amounting to a rounding error. Nor are most of your other foods any different; the energy and carbon footprint of hamburger makes cornflakes look like a low-energy bargain. However, there’s one gr eat thing about incredibly wasteful systems: the waste constitutes a buffer of sorts . For instance, if you simply slowed down your container ships from 24 knots to 12, you’d use a quarter of the energy to cross oceans with the same cargo 194 ( the power required to move a ship against hydrodynamic drag increases with the cube of its velocity). Humans tend to think “time is money”, which is why slowing down a container ship isn’t done. But under slightly different human priorities, it could mean shipping produc ts that don’t wilt quickly, like coconuts instead of strawberries. Then again, do you need fresh strawberries in the winter, or might you find that dried fruit tastes as good to you as it did to your grandparents? And a strawberry grown in a nearby field, in season, tastes much better, has a delightfully short supply chain, and far lower embodied energy, which would also come in handy if the trucks ever stop rolling, as they someday must. I’ll mention another thing, while I’m at it: the tyranny of choice . You humans behave as though you are happier with tens of thousands of choices at the store. In fact, you aren’t. You’d be psychologically better off with fewer choices that are adequate than trying for the “perfect product”. 195 The term for this is “satisficing” rather than “maximizing,” and I recommend it as the basis of a simpler and happier existence in which you don’t spend a large percentage of your time making decisions that don’t really matter, like the angst of analyzing an entire grocery aisle of different kinds of coffee or shampoo. And it would be a big help in successfully backing out of your energy and environmental predicaments. The Bottom Line: We are offered hundreds of thousands of product choices. Each of these has its own byzantine supply chain underpinned by fossil energy and transported via oil. We could be just as happy with fewer choices.
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