I agree with the gist of the article, and the figures are mostly right; but the opening comparison is a bit disingenuous [1]. The figure of 13000 kWh per year is indeed ridiculous, but apparently the U.S. and Canada are quite the outliers in this regard: every other OECD country consumes on average at most <i>half</i> of that --in Germany, for instance, it's less than a <i>third</i> of that (around 3500 kWh per year).<p>It's still an orders-of-magnitude difference of course, but a less gargantuan gap nonetheless.<p>[1] <a href="http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity-consumption" rel="nofollow">http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity...</a>
the proposed solution sounds like greenwashed cover-fire for the same fertilizer & pesticide folks that got us into this mess in the first place, what with "green revolution"s and such fueling population growth post ww2...
I think it's total poppycock. We should reduce our population over the next century or 2, we should get off the fossil fuel imperative (it's a single-source failure point for our entire infrastructure) and we shouldn't listen to "big industry" and it's so-called solutions that really amount to digging our holes deeper.
Despite the presence of statistics in defining the problem in this article, the proposed solution bears precious little examination.
Locally grown produce simply IS better overall (transport energy, health (honey from same region containing pollen and dead microbes from region, vaccine like effects... freshness, wow i could go on and on. it's science not hype)
etc.
I will contend that the supermarket food system, including it's producers, distributors, etc are the problem, not the solution. I give you "general mills, nestle, coca-cola" as examples of what happens to food when you depend upon suits to feed the planet.<p>this article stinks, primarily because it doesn't address the proposed solution and analyze pros and cons, but rather it simply defines a problem, and then naively pitches a solution that clearly has certain economic interests at stake. what blatant biased advertising.<p>the times is getting sad lately... pity