iblog

The idea of walking being less environmentally friendly than travelling by car sounds absurd; yet this is indeed the conclusion of Chris Goodall, who is the campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, and is also a Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West Abingdon. The reason he says walking contributes more to global warming is that food production is so energy-intensive that we are burning more carbon walking than we would in a car on an average trip to the shops.

Apparently, the best way of benefiting the climate is if people actually ate less and did less exercise, thereby using up less energy. As Goodall explains, using examples from the government’s official fuel emission figures:

“Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles adds about 0.9 kg 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.”

This has led Goodall to deduce the following striking conclusion:

“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.”

Like others no doubt, I find myself wondering whether to take this seriously. Of course the calculations are probably correct, but personally I think that if we are making such calculations to the extent where even our food intake is being brought into question, there is something seriously wrong. I’m all for helping the environment but we must remember that in trying to save it we must not forget the lives of those we are saving it for. Nevertheless, those who are interested in reading the controversial book can find it here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Lifestyle, Environment, Travel, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.