I already posted a comment saying something like this to the story here, but it's likely enough that the energy the consumer spends bring the can of peaches home exceeds the energy used to get it to the store. Where's absurd defined?
The fact that mass-scale transportation of goods means that the amortized cost/impact per can of peaches is small doesn't invalidate the point that mass-scale transportation of goods is energetically ridiculous and likely adds about 3% of global greenhouse gases.
Sometimes the amortized cost per unit isn't the important point.
"Hey everyone, I know the world is doing just fine, but I have this new idea. We'll burn giga-joules of energy every year shipping stuff all over the place, but not to worry, because the joules-per-can-of-peaches is hardly anything".
Thankfully we don't have to choose between dealing with the insanity of shipping everything everywhere six times during production to take advantage of cheap labor and lax regulation somewhere, and steak production being terrible for the environment.
We can get rid of ALL the stupid things that are "profitable" to a few middlemen but nobody else.
