Posts Tagged ‘carbon’
Carbon Craziness
France may be the first country to impose mandatory carbon footprint labeling requirements for all consumer products. A bill will be considered in early 2010 to make reporting of the carbon footprint mandatory in France by 2011. The USDA FAS, in its report “Proposed Carbon Footprint Labeling Could Step on Trade,” looks at the trade implications of the issue.
Though it stands to impact processed food more than fresh, this move strikes me as about the most anti-consumer law that could be devised. With as much as 5% of the product cost expected to result from the reporting exercise, the law would produce nothing more than a “gee-whiz” number that most people would ignore anyway. Plus, as the USDA FAS report points out, there are numerous questions about both how the numbers that would be reported and the potential trade impact of the law.
