Which is more environmentally friendly - walking or driving? No, it's not the obvious answer, according to this environmentalist anyway.
"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...But this is based on a false premise. People don't eat any less because drive or more because they walk. No-one will much change their eating habits very much based on what they have done - or not done. Also, people do not exercise and then plan to replace all the calories they lost. So if you walked three miles, you would not intend to eat 100g of beef and replace the calories you used.
“Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere... 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.”" (The Times)
Quite frankly, Chris Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is talking utter bollocks. People won't eat less because they drive rather than walk. Only an idiot would think that.
Title inspired by An Insomniac
Source: The Times
