Couch Potatoes are Environmentally Friendly

[drplokta]

Apparently, if you are concerned about global warming, you should drive instead of walking wherever possible. Your fuel (food) produces more greenhouse gases in its production and use than your car's fuel (especially if you eat a lot of beef and dairy produce).

Comments

[wag-9393.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Strikes me that there is an assumption there that driving a car uses 0 calories?

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

No, that it's not significant above basal metabolic rate, I think.

The important assumption is that your bulk calories are from industrial livestock farming. The energy efficiency ratio of industrial beef is about 0.08, ISTR. That's about the most inefficient and environmentally damaging way that we can currently get our bulk calories. Home-grown potatoes can be 100 times more energy (and thus, CO2e) efficient.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

This makes certain assumptions about your diet. Surely the correct approach is to cut down on the meat and dairy, and to buy as much locally-produced stuff as possible?

Plus, at the moment, driving involves so much brain power for me that it's much more knackering than walking.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

It rather depends on what you eat to replace your calories. The figures were calculated on the basis that the walking calories were recouped by eating 100g of beef. If instead you ate an apple grown on one of your own garden's trees then you'd be saving carbon production at every step.

This result is not an endorsement of using the car, it's a condemnation of energy intensive agriculture, especially in meat production.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

By the same logic, if you're concerned about your carbon footprint to that extent, you should kill yourself. Better still, get a gun and kill lots of people. It's hard to have a lower carbon footprint than a corpse, after all.

[damienw]

especially if you sequester the corpses in, say, a peat bog...

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

You're awfully practical, for a fan, you know.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

And the lack of exercise increases your carbon footprint when the hospital treats you, but you pay back bigtime when you die early.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

So the assumption is that if people drive instead of walk they then eat less and thus reduce the volumne of greenhouse gases they are responsible for?