Climate ghoul John Gibbons is mad that food is cheap
(archive.is)
Comments (21)
sorted by:
Don't be silly. 'Climate change', like 'resources running out' and 'the international proletariat' and 'liberte egalite fraternite', is a fig-leaf for the will to power. If population control gives such a pathetic loser more power, then yes, otherwise no.
I couldn't care less about "climate change" but I could work with doing away with shipping fruit and vegetable all over the place. Unripe fruit is gross. I actually pay attention to the seasons for certain fruits I like and only buy them around then for that very reason. I would also not mind if retail and service industry wasn't open as much. Do we really need everything open 16 hours a day 7 days a week? Why doesn't everything just close more? I know how we got to that point, but I wish we could go back.
Okay, but here's the thing...
The planes would still fly even if there weren't apples on board. The same goes for seafood and flowers.
Every night, for about four hours a night, the busiest airports in the world are Louisville and Memphis. Because that's where UPS and FedEx are. Those planes will fly, whether there is perishable freight on board or not. And the overall volume of FOOD shipped is only a small fraction of the whole.
Shrug
I like cara-cara oranges but I can only get them for about 4-6 months a year.
That only works if you only ever think about a single shipment on a single plane, and also ignore the fact that fuel consumption is somewhat proportionate to cargo weight. Sure there's probably enough other freight to justify any particular flight if you suddenly removed one shipment from the equation, but on a system-wide level the less freight there is waiting the more it will be consolidated and the fewer flights will be arranged overall, they don't just fly for the fun of it.
For the US trucking fleet you'd be correct.
But not for the air freight fleet.
For air freight, the critical constraint is time and gate capacity at the hubs, not the mass and volume of the individual aircraft. Oh, and how many planes they can land in a given span of time. My understanding is both FedEx and UPS are using Continuous Descent Operation to land one plane every 45 seconds on average, and they do that more or less continuously for about three hours a night. Basically the next plane crosses the threshold as the last plane taxis off, which is as close as the FAA will allow two planes to get.
UPS and FedEx have decided (rightly) that standardizing the fleet to a smaller number of airframe types is superior to right-sizing the planes for each sector, since most of their fleet only operates two sectors every 24 hours. Most of their planes are significantly under capacity on at least one of their two sectors, because a place is either receiving more than it sends or sending more than it receives.
To put it another way.. since FedEx and UPS have resolved to be able to get a parcel almost anywhere in 24 hours (give or take), and because they've decided to largely standardize their fleets to only a few airframe types, they actually have a lot of surplus capacity in the air every night. Some routes (looking at the midwest) literally do not EVER ship enough to make up for the fuel of the route, but they still have to make the route every night.
They have to make the route because the only way their overnight delivery works is by getting ALL the planes on the ground for (briefly) the same time, at the same place, every day. The night sort takes a few hours as planes start to filter into the hub, and then wait until all the things they're waiting for arrive. Since they know by computer everything that's expected, they're able to release planes to leave the hub as soon as everything they were waiting for gets through the sort.
As big as FedEx and UPS are individually, they still only account for ~20% of global air freight. The remaining 80% don't all follow their model, although some might, and that portion of the market can still freely contract if demand were to lower. It takes more than a few mandatory daily flights to keep current level of global perishable food import/exports moving.
And people will buy those rock hard stone fruit- I won't- but clearly some people will despite frozen peaches being a better option. Global shipping for better or worse is legitimately amazing- a pineapple is grown somewhere in the Pacific- is loaded on a ship, passes through the Panama Canal, is unloaded in, I assume, New Orleans, and then through some combination of trucks and trains arrives at a WalMart where I can buy it for $2.
And it isn't even anywhere near as good as something bought in-season.
Or as cheap ime. For ex. Back in, I guess May or June I could get 2 bundles of asparagus for $1.50. Come August, September it shoots up to $2.65+ for 1 bundle...since it has to get shipped in from God knows where.
Crickets though when the same sort of talk turns to manufacturing. Not only do we ship finished products half way around the world, we ship the components too!
"Ghoul" is most definitely the correct word here considering the relatively recent history of Ireland when it comes to food.
That's a common theme with leftists in Europe. In Germany they're also complaining that food is too cheap. At the same time they claim to be fighting for the common people.
They are an odd mix of schizophrenic and outright evil.
Not overproducing food creates its own inefficiencies. You need enough slack in the system that people are confident the system will continue to function, or else you will create problems like hoarding and theft.