Looney Swedes Now Checking Food Labels for Fat and Sugar Carbon Emissions Content

I guess I just haven't been paying attention to what's going on in the Leftist world; I tend to try to ignore them and let them go their own looney way, but recent news from Sweden is simply too nutty to ignore. The NYT recently published an article about a new food labeling scheme that Sweden has come up with: labels on food will include the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the production of foods, as in this label on a box of oatmeal--"Climate declared: .87 kg CO2 per kg of product." Huh?

Lantmannen, Sweden's largest farming group, has begun placing precise labels on some categories of foods in grocery stores, including chicken, oatmeal, barley and pasta. Take the example of carrots, which it seems to me ought to be a sort of simple, basic food. But evidently not in Sweden. Swedes are now able to obsess about whether choosing carrots over cucumbers is the "right" choice and will help save the planet. Carrots are recommended over cucumbers or tomatoes since the latter must be grown in heated greenhouses, consuming energy. But wait! If  those carrots are gown in soil with high concentrations of peat, then all bets are off, since plowing peat releases "huge amounts" of carbon dioxide. And to complicate the issue, says the NYT article, apparently with no intended irony, "the emissions impact of . . . a carrot can vary by a factor of 10, depending on where it is grown."

Linking CO2 emissions to food consumption has turned the simple act of going out for a hamburger, for Swedes, into a morality play. Swedes who just want a burger now find these carbon emissions numbers listed on the menu, making them choose between killing the planet if they eat a burger (1.7 kg of CO2 emissions), or saving the planet if they eat a chicken sandwich instead (0.4 kg). Kristian Eriksson, 26, an information technology specialist, looked embarrassed when asked about the burger he was eating at an outdoor table. 'You feel guilty picking red meat,' he said. Hey Champ, if you're that gullible, then maybe you should feel guilty.

The article states that two metric tons per year of CO2 emissions is attributable in Sweden to eating. So since I assume that Swedes won't be willing to stop eating entirely, just how much do they expect to save with this absurd food-nanny scheme? The article doesn't say. Have the Swedes allowed themselves to be sold a bill of goods on CO2 emissions propaganda? I don't believe any intelligent person disputes that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. But the how and the when of the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 are far from the established science that the global-climate-changeism people would have us believe.

I found an interesting website: CO2 Science. On this site was a video by Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama-Huntsville, talking about the future of CO2 in a Democratic country--which, unlike Sweden, I guess we still are, sort of, at least for the moment. This Fortune magazine interview with Christy calls him the environmental lobby's worst nightmare - an accomplished climate scientist with no ties to Big Oil who has produced reams and reams of data that undermine arguments that the earth's atmosphere is warming at an unusual rate and question whether the remedies being talked about in Congress will actually do any good.

Says Christy in the Fortune interview: Generally people believe what they want to believe, so their minds will not change. However, as the issue is exposed in terms of economics and cost benefit - in my view, it's all cost and no benefit - I think some of the people will take one step backward and say, Let me investigate the science a little more closely.




Thank God someone still believes in good old-fashioned American ingenuity and enterprise--and democracy.

Actually, I think the "deniers" are starting to have some effect over the "liars."