Take II: Is driving short distances really better than walking?
Before you think that this post is about that silly Boston Legal show back around Christmas, wait. What we're really talking about here is checking our energy uses from a different point of view. Let me elaborate.There's a New York Times article that explains how Andy Revkin chatted with Ed Begley, Jr. about the energy that was needed for the cabbie to power a pedicab. "Walking is not zero emission because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place," says Chris Goodall (author of "How to live a low-carbon life" and the same person behind this argument when it surfaced last August). The key is that we have to take in account the energy used to make our food. If you replace your calories with, let's say, a cup of milk, you have to take in consideration the cow's methane emissions and the CO2 used for transport until your house. Of course, using a home-harvested baked potato, or even better, a home-grown raw carrot, actually makes your walking cleaner from a CO2 perspective.
To go even further, Michael Bluejay, from Bicycleuniverse states that someone who eats the standard American diet does more environmental damage by walking compared to a car that gets better than 24 mpg. Although the best option is using a bicycle, which is more efficient over a distance.
This by no means should justify the use of cars over other means of transport, as Goodall himself adds a comment to the NYT article: "The food supply chain is about 20 percent of UK emissions, about the same as private transport. Motor vehicle fuel efficiencies are improving in Europe, driven by regulatory fiat. There is no similar push to improve the CO2 performance of the food supply chain. World meat consumption is expected to double by 2050. (source NYT Feb 24 2008). This is incompatible with a stable climate."
Related:
- ABC's Boston Legal says walking is more polluting than driving
- Here's a new one: walking is worse for the environment than driving
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jim 9:17AM (2/27/2008)
Yawn. How many angels fit on the head of a pin?
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MarkR 9:18AM (2/27/2008)
Now you've gone and done it, your flirting with the slippery slope/ elephant in the room that no one is addressing and that is something that I've known all along. Let me preface the following with wile it may be true we’ve got bigger fish to fry like wasteful autos, and electric usage, and mcmansions.
Any human impact beyond the required necessities of life, Food, shelter, work is detrimental to the environment. Everything from walking to the Opera for 3 hrs of entertainment, donating money to the Ballet to subsides some skinny chicks co2 emissions to riding a bicycle for recreation and even typing on this blog and the electrons that are used to power all the computers that read it.
The majority of what we do and purchase these days fall outside of the necessity category. You could argue that every time a cyclist goes out for a bike ride when it is not a necessity to acquire his daily needs to live is a waste that creates additional CO2 and hardship on the environment, from the additional daily food required to the wear and tear requiring additional maintenance on the bike.
Not that I plan on changing my life style and reduce some of the luxuries’ in life I currently enjoy but in all honesty we are a wasteful people with money to burn. It’s just something for everyone to think about today as they enjoy there co2 burning starbucks cappuccino that increases their heart rate causing them to create more co2 than required, or as they look forward to their relaxing 50 mile bike ride Saturday
Speaking of which, my cup of Joe is getting a little low, time for round two while I plan my Saturday 80 mile recreational ride….
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rgseidl 9:19AM (2/27/2008)
If you're going to count the entire production chain for that glass of milk, you have to do the same for the fuel that goes into your car - plus what it took to produce it in the first place. What is more, cars actually get terrible gas mileage while the block is still cold.
The more cogent argument against walking is that it's slow and time is money. For local errands, bicycles - possibly with electric assist - are definitely a better option, weather permitting.
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sensitive_man 9:38AM (2/27/2008)
Remember you need to take into account the long term health benefits too. Walking gives one better health, live longer consume more. So we def. need people to drive otherwise the will just continue to consume.
Makes perfect sense, no? No!
I swear this kind thinking is propagated by special interest of corporations that want more roads, more cars, and more oil revenue. At the very least they have succeeded in wasting our time talking about this instead of taking real action to solve our very real global climate problems.
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Chad 9:39AM (2/27/2008)
Actually, the average American, who carries around a lot of stored fat, would not require any more food to walk. They would be burning off some of their fat reserves. This would have the disastrous effects of making a person healthier and better looking.
Seriously, this is ridiculous. Don't exercise because you will cause more CO2 emissions. How about all the emissions that come from needing medical treatment from an unhealthy life?
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Randy 10:24AM (2/27/2008)
Oh this is too comical.....let me see, should I take my fat a** and drive my car one block? Oh could actual walk the whole block, and do myself and everybody else some good in the process. Do they think we are that stupid??????
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Yggdrasilly 10:36AM (2/27/2008)
So if I just kill enough hippies, I get to drive a Hummer. Wow! It's like Green Stamps, only cooler.
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Zigster 10:54AM (2/27/2008)
geez i'm about to turn republican on this nonsense
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steven 11:22AM (2/27/2008)
@1: Are the angels dancing or standing still? Of course some religions don't believe in dancing...
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UH2L 11:36AM (2/27/2008)
Also, if we walk more and lose weight and eat less, our appetites will lessen and then we will help the environment relative to driving. And yes, I'm not sure they took into account the much worse emissions from a cold car instead of a warmed up car. I guess the solution is to ride our bicycles more.
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KarenRei 12:06PM (2/27/2008)
"Also, if we walk more and lose weight and eat less, our appetites will lessen"
Wow, do you ever exercise? The more you exercise, the more of an appetite you have. Just because you lose weight doesn't change this fact. When you're burning many thousands of calories per day, you get -- surprise, surprise -- hungry. Now, if you *stop* exercising, and you're thinner, yes, you'll be less hungry (unless you gain back the weight due to your newfound lack of exercise). But so long as you keep burning all those calories, your body is going to want (and need) to eat to keep up with it.
Anyways, anyone who wants to *drastically* improve their "human mpg", so to speak, has a very simple solution in front of them: eat less meat. It's really that simple. Meat is horribly inefficient for the environment. It's the SUVs of food. The NYT did a really good article on this that gives a sense of scale of the damage it does:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html
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BenE 12:12PM (2/27/2008)
Sustaining a human life by creating a job is incredibly polluting (especially if this human lives in a society with high living standards) However, in the case of walking vs driving if you are going to include pollution through human effort (which I agree you should as it is probably the most important source of pollution), you should also take into account the energy spent with the money you paid to the the humans who designed, built and sold the car as well as the humans who extracted, processed and sold you the petroleum. I'm pretty sure when you take all of those into account walking is much less damaging to the environment than driving. If you think about it, cheap, made in china Wall-Mart products are probably the most advantageous for the environment as they sustain humans who use very little energy and resources. There's a very large trade-off between the environment and ethical treatment.
There are only three ways to save the environment, reduce population, reduce standards of living or find technology which increase efficiency. No society can break the laws of thermodynamics.
Ideally every product and service should be produced in sustainable quantities by super efficient intelligent robots and consumed by a sustainably small population.
Population has by far the greatest impact on the environment as there is a minimum standard of living people will accept. Recycling a few bottles or saving a few liters of gasoline does not make a significant difference relative to the energy and land spent for basic needs like food, housing and health care. Since people are not willing to live in a closet on half a cup of rice a day, reducing the population is the only option.
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kballs 12:20PM (2/27/2008)
This is total BS.
1. Cars have terrible efficiency and emissions when they are cold (and the cat hasn't warmed up), and also at low speeds, and also with start/stop of local neighborhood driving. Your 24MPG car gets probably 8MPG and has 10x normal emissions when driven 1 mile from a cold start to the grocery and back with many stops and slower than 35mph.
2. You're going to eat all that crap anyway, so why not USE IT instead of storing it on your waist? In fact, you don't even need to eat anything, just burn what's already on your waist.
3. Ride a bicycle (if your trip is on bike friendly streets). Miles per food goes up on a bike vs. walking, just as highway speeds in higher gears gets you better MPG in a car than 25mph neighborhood driving.
4. Exercise regularly and lose weight. The better shape you are in, the less calories you burn per mile.
5. Eat locally grown food. Production chain emissions drops dramatically the closer the food production is to the consumer. Best case: Your own backyard garden.
6. Remember that for the carbon released by burning 1 gallon of gasoline, the equivalent of 2 gallons was already released in production before it even got into your tank. This effectively turns your 60MPG hybrid into a 20MPG guzzler.
7. Stay home. Do you really need to make that trip to pick up some trivial items when you're just going to make another one tomorrow? Why not combine trips? Call ahead. Do you know if the store even has what you're looking for? How many trips have you made to stores that didn't have what you needed, and you had to drive to 4 different stores to get it? (they really should make it easier to check local inventory from the web, not many stores do this yet)
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MarkR 12:38PM (2/27/2008)
Ahh, I see some great thoughts coming out. In todays society the options are endless to show where we waste energy. If you want to get all nazi about it , I wouldn't recommend it though, you could say a lot of medical treatments are un-needed and are not good if they prolong a humans life, you could also say the world could use a good culling of humans. But again lets not go there, because like most of us that read this, I'm not high enough on the food chain to survive a world mandate culling. I'd have to go hide in the forest some where and live off the land.
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hektik 8:19PM (6/18/2008)
Hola Xavier, hi everybody,
Definitively human population is too large now year 2008, in the times to come, at the current standard of living. If the rate CO2 emissions per human being has to be lowered (and population will increase, do not fool ourselves), we will have either to spend more time with no emission activities (less driving, less flying, and so on), or with environmental friendly activities, some of them economically rewarded, some of them not. We all (developed countries) will have to pay for this mess and, if it is with money (what we have plenty of), the invoice will be cheaper than with the alives of most of us (present and future), or do they think this is going to be for free????
Cheers
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Brian 12:57PM (2/27/2008)
I think you forgot the effect of dinosaur farts from the dinosaurs that died millions of years ago to make the oil used to make the gasoline. Also, the wind resistance on my clothes as I walk to the corner store. Maybe if I shave all the hair off my body and go naked (walking sideways to reduce frontal area), I will use less energy and you will be happy.
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UH2L 1:42PM (2/27/2008)
"Wow, do you ever exercise? The more you exercise, the more of an appetite you have. "
I wasn't talking about exercise as in working out. I was just talking about walking which won't raise your appetite much, if at all. I have found that when I eat less, my appetite slowly diminishes relatively speaking depending on if I've been working out or not. And I'm vegetarian so I'm doing my part there. Thanks for the link to the article. It's very compelling, but most people won't give up meat just like they won't give up gas guzzlers.
Atul
http://www.thingsivenoticed.com
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UH2L 1:45PM (2/27/2008)
"you should also take into account the energy spent with the money you paid to the the humans who designed, built and sold the car as well as the humans who extracted, processed and sold you the petroleum."
What about the energy and resources spent on finding a mate and the actual process of creating a human, and the doctor's visits and hospital trip and diapers? Only God knows how much energy went into designing humans.
:-)
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dhofmann 1:57PM (2/27/2008)
A carbon tax would make the CO2 performance of the food supply chain all the more obvious. Meats and other inefficient foods would see a more dramatic jump in price than grains and fruits and vegetables.
Make that carbon tax revenue-neutral and get rid of corn subsidies so HFCS is no longer the standard sweetener.
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Ken 4:10PM (2/27/2008)
Wow.
How about the extra carbon make by the healh industry that has to deal with unhealthy slobs that drove thier car everywhere?
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