This article is from The Times (London). Not sure what to make of this, other than perhaps a ‘green’ attack on meat eating:
Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’
Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.
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.
The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”
Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.
Full article here.
Enjoy!
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Uhm, there’s obviously a lot more to it. The fact that no-one lives on a meat only diet only being one of the problems with this statement. So yes, food production is highly energy intensive (water, animal food, land etc) and changes have to be made. We, and certainly a green politician, all know that. This comparison neglects to mention other pollutants (other greenhouse gasses, plastics etc) for the car as well as food production and seems to assume people will not eat if they don’t walk; which considering the growing amount of obese people, is pretty wrong…
I wouldn’t call this person a serious thinker, I’d go for populist instead.
Yes – I always mention HC+NOx from exhausts,more HC+NOx from diesels, plus particulates, 3-NBA and 1,8-DNP from large diesel engines, but only CO2 seems to be of interest.
And it’s not clear he’s including the calories burned while driving (140 per hour), which aren’t that much greater to to those needed for walking (210 per hour).
http://www.calorie-count.com/calories/activity/499.html
Sure, more likely than not you’ll drive for less time, and whatever activity you undertake in the time saved may burn even less calories still, but I’d want to see that “180 extra calories required to walk” independently verified.
However, it’s a worthwhile reminder that many of our assumptions about how to best reduce GHG may be counterproductive, and a good argument for establishing a GHG trading scheme to allow the price signals to properly reflect GHG usage.
Nicely demonstrates why science should be left to scientists and not crazed ideologues. The guy’s day job is to chair communications software company Dynmark International and to act as a part-time member of the UK Competition Commission apparently.
I’m going to eat a 400g nicely-marbled sirloin tonight after reading that (but I won’t feel bad ’cause I’m cycling 16km to work and back).
“…aren’t that much less” I meant of course, not “greater” (don’t like uneditable blogs!)
I doubt very much that the emissions from eating sufficient food to walk 3km to the shops (eating a balanced diet, rather than meat only – meat is not exactly regarded as an energy food!) would be higher than the emissions from combusting fuel to take you and your 1 tonne of metal and polymers shell that same distance, especially if you include the higher emissions in starting the vehicle, and while the engine is not warmed up.
However,
here are the 2005 numbers from the Australian National Greenhouse Gas Inventory:
http://www.ageis.greenhouse.gov.au/GGIDMUserFunc/indexUser.asp
Agriculture: 87.88887 million tonnes of CO2-e,
the biggest component of australian agriculture emissions is
Enteric fermentation (animals burping and farting) : 58.67842 million tonnes
of this, the biggest component is
cattle: 44.03894 million tonnes
By comparison, Australian transport emissions are:
Transport: 80.38942 million tonnes of CO2-e
of this, the biggest component is
Road transport: 70.65045 million tonnes of CO2-e
So agriculture emissions are actually higher than transport emissions in Australia, though cattle emissions are lower than road transport emissions. But we also export a lot of our agricultural production.
One thing that I’m sure is getting missed in measuring GHG emissions from cattle is just how much of it is due to the fossil fuel inputs that go into agriculture. Bovine creatures have existed on the planet for million of years, farting and burping away, and while human intervention has dramatically changed their numbers and diets, if it weren’t for the fossil fuel inputs, they wouldn’t be adding anything to the natural carbon cycle…as I understand it anyway. Also, to what extent has the land-clearing for cattle grazing affected albedo…etc. etc.
And the biggest emitting sector is energy production. Since 1990 agriculture emissions have fallen 42%, while energy production emissions have risen 46% ( http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/inventory/2005/economic-sector.html ). The concern over methane is interesting, because methane has recently been declining, and the IPCC don’t know why.
Having a quick look at the green house office’s methodolgy, I could not find any negative emissions being considered in the equations for pasture grazed cattle. Shouldn’t they subtract the fact that when grass grows it consumes CO2? Am I missing something?
Watch it Robert, they’ll be after you!
Logic is not permitted where GHG is concerned.
Its land use change and forestry emissions that have been decling since 1990 Robert, not agriculture emissions which has remained constant (At least as these categories are defined for Kyoto reporting.)
The reduction in LUC&F, as we all know, is apparently due to restrictions on land clearing, and to a lesser degree to afforestation.
Follow the link I provided earlier to the AGEIS system, which contains all of Australia’s greenhouse data from 1990 to 2005, and lets you produce graphs, drill down into sectors etc.
You are quoting from a report that lumps categories together based on economic sector.
———–
Dylan, cattle convert CO2 to CH4, which is 20x as greenhouse intensive as CO2. So if humans are greatly increasing cattle numbers, then I can see why it would be accounted for.
Having said that, I’ve always thought that agricultural and land use emissions are tough to understand and grapple with.
And the fossil fuel emissions are probably accounted for in energy emissions. The 1999 end use allocation of emissions report here:
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/inventory/enduse/index.html
divvies up all the emissions based on their end use. According to this (see chart on page iv of summary) stationary emissions and transport emissions (fossil fuel use) associated with agriculture are very small compared to the actual biosphere emissions (emissions from land use change, cropping, cows burping etc).
The moron forgot to mention that thinking burns up calories as well. But I guess that is the logical conclusion of green ideology.
“Here in the brave new green utopia you don’t need to go outside. In fact, you don’t even have to think because we have ‘experts’ to do the thinking for you. And every one of those thoughts has been carefully vetted by the WWF so you can be certain they will be accepted by all. So sit back and relax, for yours is not to reason why, yours is but to consume less, be silent, and die.”