The 100 Mile Delusion

From the National Post.

“If you are concerned about the carbon footprint of your diet, focusing on transportation is kind of like worrying about the air pressure in your tires of your car rather than whether you have a fuel-efficient car or not,” says James McWilliams, an environmental and agricultural historian at Texas State University, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and a former part-time locavore. “What matters so much more than how far it travels from farm to fork is what kind of methods were used to produce it.”

and

Though greenhouse gas emissions themselves are often not part of the price of food, all the fuel, fertilizer and land clearance responsible for creating them — all net contributors to greenhouse gas emissions — are all in there. “In a global market economy, people have the incentive to use resources as efficiently as possible,” Prof. Desrochers says. The steeper the price tag on a bag of baby carrots, the more likely their production came at an environmental cost.

and one more

“What I really do see … is that buying local is a political act. It’s a gesture that, in essence, thumbs its nose at globalization,” he says. If left-wing posturing and green-posing is your priority, then stick with your 100-mile diet. Leave it to average consumers, buying the globally sourced groceries at their local, corporate, big-box retailer, to do genuine good for the planet.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/copenhagen/story.html?id=2320323#ixzz0ZKj8kDGz
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It sounds like the National Post is saying that we should support anything that keeps the price down on products because that is a sign that less energy was used in its production.  I guess we should support child labor because children need less energy than a full grown man.  Mass-produced industrial goods from China must be better for the environment because they cost less at Wal-Mart.

The logic baffles me.