Save the Earth…Be a A Couch Potato

That’s the conclusion of an environmentalist in the UK:

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.”

So what the earth needs is sedentary counch potatoes, who eat little. Of course, this is probably not best for you, but who cares about YOU, you selfish little worm, it’s about saving the planet. As for public transit:

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently.

Don’t know how Boise’s Natural Gas “Clean Machines” stack up against that. Still, it’s an interesting debate. As Captain Ed points out:

These calculations do have a serious point, however. They demonstrate the folly of insisting on particular solutions without thinking the energy equations all the way through. One recent example is the electric car. Environmental activists insisted that consumers should start buying electrical cars, and that the government should subsidize them. They seemed to forget that electricity generally comes from coal in this country, and that the much-maligned internal combustion engine actually burns gasoline much more efficiently than most electrical plants burn coal. The disposal of the batteries also never got much attention, but that was a different environmental problem.

Indeed, as with many liberal ideas, those who back various and sundry harsh solutions on global warming forget about the Law of Unintended Consequences which often means measures meant to ameliorate a problem often end up only making it worse. The War on Poverty was supposed to end poverty and it succeeded only in institutionalizing it. Beware of nice-sounding feel-good solutions to the World’s problems, because rarely are things as simple as our friends on the left make them out to be.

Linked by Random Yak and again by Random Yak who is having far too much fun with this.