From one of the little byways of the climate change discussion:

The report, published by food and drink manufacturing consultancy NIRAS, outlines how the brewing industry has a “once in a generation” opportunity to meet demands for sustainability and yet also flags how creating multiple beers with short production runs drains energy resources.

In a deep dive into how to build sustainability into brewing, the contradictions were revealed highlighting how even though the regulations and consumer pressures have led to sustainability fast-becoming a “licence to operate”, rather than a “nice-to-have” novelty, beer trends for variety were contrary to the guidance.

Speaking about the issue, NIRAS vice president Jonas B. Borrit said: “Sustainability is clearly a key consideration for businesses across all sectors and for resource-intensive manufacturers like breweries, it’s no longer a nice to have, but is fast becoming a licence to operate. Stronger consumer appetite for variety over volume has undoubtedly created commercial opportunities for breweries, but producing up to 100 different varieties of beer in a large-scale plant means that short production runs will require more energy and water.”

So, we should have just the one, anodyne, mass produced and lowest common denominator beer - call it “Victory Beer” perhaps - because climate change.

This is to - wholly and entirely - misunderstand the task before us. Leave aside whether climate change matters or not. Just work with the very heart of what economics is about. The universe - unfairly, annoyingly and inevitably - places restraints upon us. Resources are scarce. The addition of the CO2 limits in the atmosphere to those limits doesn’t change the underlying base in the slightest.

We are in a universe of scarce resources. We wish to maximise human utility within those limits. So, how are we to go about that?

Maybe it is some unibeer. Perhaps it is some wide variety of beers. Utility - in near every society we’ve ever had - seems to be increased when there is some socially accepted method of getting somewhere between happy, high and smashed. So, how to decide?

Liberty, obviously - leave people be to find what increases their utility, leave people be to explore what they can produce which increases that utility. Sure, we face limits, those explorations must therefore take place within those limits. But other than that the correct solution is something emergent from that liberty, not something planned by those who do not know, cannot know, the individual utility functions nor therefore the societal one.

It appears that folk like a variety of beers. Observe in any pub how some have a preference for this, others for that. That is, we’ve already our solution - variety not unibeer.

But then this should be obvious to any sentient being. We do not insist upon the one method of getting somewhere between happy, high and smashed, do we? We have the liberty of doing so through dance - from Sufi mysticism through to the nightclub dancefloor - booze, certain drugs (and we should have greater liberty there) to just being drunk on the pure pleasure of another’s presence. That insistence on just the one method, say soma, has been explored but always as a dystopia.

Our task is the maximisation of human utility within what ever constraints the universe insists upon. It is only with the liberty of choice and variety that this is even conceptually possible. Therefore that liberty of choice must be a part of any solution to any of those constraints.