Flipping Popular Envionmental Myths
Did you know you have a smaller carbon foot print if you drive to the store than if you walk (at least if you eat beef)? It’s true.
Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.
Now that’s scary. How are we supposed to get on top of environmental issues when even eating is destroying the world?
August 6th, 2007 at 7:08 am
I cry Shenanigans. Chris Goodall, the author, is a financial analyst, not a scientist.
This is faulty logic at best, because the person who is driving will likely buy the same amount of meat at the store as if he’d walked, therefore producing twice as much.
His argument proceeds as follows: Driving 3 miles to the store produces .9 Kg (2 pounds) of CO2 from the car. Walking that distance consumes 180 calories, which he claims would take 100 grams of meat to replenish, which magically results in 3.6 kg of emissions.
This is totally screwy, there’s no logical connection at all. The C02 is being produced for the meat wether you buy it or not, so driving still increases the emissions by adding its weight to the weight that’s already been produced.
What a jackass. I get his point that food production causes problems, but geez a bit of common sense and logic, especially on the part of the media would be nice.
I hate the way that everyone gets equal time for science news, no matter how crazy they are. You can have one bad “scientist” claim the world is flat, and he’ll get equal time as everyone else who comes in with actual evidence to the contrary.
Ugh!
August 6th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Q: “How are we supposed to get on top of environmental issues when even eating is destroying the world?”
A: Drastically reduce population growth.
August 6th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
What the hell is an “Envionmental Myth?” Does it have to do with being jealous?