No Pizza For You

We are sure you have seen the menagerie of articles claiming that "the Left is coming for your pizza," but like the gas oven fiasco that is not entirely the case.

The saga begins in late June of this year when the city of New York's Department of Environmental Protection made an announcement that coal and wood-fired ovens installed before 2016 would have to be altered (or removed) to fit the new standards. The proposal states that restaurants will be required to evaluate their exhaust systems to determine if they can be outfitted with pollutant trapping scrubbers and if so, they will be required to install and maintain the device. Officials say that it will impact less than 100 pizza restaurants, which considering the size of New York City is likely less than 10%. Those who do not comply will not receive a new certificate of operation, which has been translated to "no pizza oven for you!"

As we have previously stated, a majority of the world's pollution does not come from individual consumers, but in fact corporations. That fact is not something that is shared with the carbon dioxide emissions charts which often show the United States as the number one carbon emissions producer with China, India, and Russia as two, three, and four. There tends to be no variation in which countries are in the top four for highest emission even when the United States isn't listed as #1.

Remember that data is easy to manipulate to tell whatever story the publicist or writer is wanting to tell, so let's dive a bit deeper into these claims. First and foremost we noted that a majority of the graphs we looked at displayed carbon dioxide values stemming from use of fossil fuels and cement manufacture but did not include land use, nor emissions from international shipping or bunker fuels. The graphs that did include land use and forestry still did not include shipping or bunker fuels though it is included in total estimates of emissions present in the atmosphere. Think about how those graphs would change when international shipping is taken into account as a lot of shipping occurs from Asian countries to Western countries. Would including these values change the story of the data? That is something that we unfortunately were not able to further investigate, but we suspect that it would significantly impact the carbon dioxide emissions by country graph.

Something else to consider in this case is the efficiency of the emissions scrubber as well as their impact on the environment. Nothing manmade is going to have a "0" or positive impact on the environment as a whole and in addition to that the scrubbers are expensive. At least $20K for installation and we were unable to find what the average annual upkeep is though we suspect that is not cheap either. We are curious to see what happens as a result of the rules imposed in NYC and if they are sustainable enough to be done in other cities or if they will cause small/locally owned restaurants to close. Only time will tell.

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