Monday, August 06, 2007

Drive more and save the planet

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’ - Times Online

This is possibly the funniest thing Tim Blair would ever have read about greenhouse gases (with considerable justification , I might add), and he's missing out on blogging about it 'cos he's off on holiday somewhere.

Short version: raising cows makes so many greenhouse gases, you are better off driving the car to the supermarket than walking and having to replace those calories with extra intake of beef or milk.

But there's more:

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.

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. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.

Makes me feel so much better.

As for flying, there seems to have been a bit of a backlash against the "the world must fly less" views of George Monbiot and others, and a good article in The Observer a couple of weeks ago talked about the difficulties of comparisons between different modes of transport.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think Tim B is off to Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to drive some cars. So he's still doing his thing for CO2