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The myth of environmental myths
Time for another sample of incompetent journalism, this time from The Times. The headline claims that walking to the shops damages the planet more than going by car. Of course this is not even remotely true, and a few seconds thought is enough to tear the argument apart.
The assumption the idiotic article makes is that all the calories used when walking come from intensively farmed beef. Do you know anyone whose diet consists entirely of intensively farmed beef?
It also ignores all environmental damage other than carbon emissions.
The choice of beef is significant because it takes far more inputs (of all kinds) to produce meat that any vegetable food. The carbon emissions attributable to (a complete carcase of) beef includes all carbon emission used in producing all the food it ever consumed by the animal it came from. Choosing intensively farmed beef means that this is largely food that has been processed and transported signeficant distance.
The article sort of faces up to this by admitting that there is near parity between the carbon emissions caused if the calories instead come from milk. But we are still dealing with animal products.
Most of the calories in the British diet come from carbohydrates. These are vegetable products which,use far less resources (of every kind) to produce than meat. Beef is in fact a particularly environmentally expensive meat to produce. I wonder if someone it deliberately picking worst case scenarios in order to produce startling headlines? Surely not!
The fact that people who exercise more are likely to lose weight, and therefore need fewer calories to move themselves around (not just on the walk to the shops, but in everything they do) is also conveniently ignored.
Another silly claim is that trains are less environmentally friendly that diesel off-roaders. This gem is true, if there are fewer than ten people on the whole train! Obviously, this has been written by someone who has never been on a commuter train during rush hour. In fact, I cannot remember being on a train that empty at any time, on any line.
By the time the article ends, with the claim that trees are bad for climate change, becaue they produce methane, I had got past any idea of taking the article seriously.
Apart from Dominic Kennedy at The Times, who wrote the article, the person responsible for this tosh is a Green politician called Chris Goodall, who is now firmly on my list of people I would never vote for.
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