Well, regardless where the nourishment comes from, I think it’s fair to say that your body will emit more CO[sub]2[/sub] if you walk, but I agree, it’s silly.
[Mod Note]
elbows, comments like this belong in the Pit, not MPSIMS. If you want to critique Two and a Half Inches of Fun’s posting habits, please take it downstairs.
[/Mod Note]
Just have to ask, is this your first official Mod Action?
Did the jackboots fit ok?
Did anyone ever tell you how sexy you are when you’re modding?
Sorry Marley23.
I didn’t call him a nasty name or anything and thought it was a valid question.
Sorry if I crossed a line, too much time in the pit I suppose. It won’t happen again.
Some of those names, particularly “jerk,” implied trolling, which is out of bounds for this forum.
That said, you raised a valid point I didn’t intend to overlook. But I wanted to give TaaHIoF a reasonable amount of time first:
[Mod Note]
Two and a Half Inches of Fun: elbows stepped over the line, but this looks like trolling anyway. Quit it.
[/Mod Note]
So we should walk and then drink cow farts. It all makes sense now!
I think the premise is pretty sound. If you are at a steady weight, and the majority of us are, then you eat an amount that corresponds to the amount you burn. If the person who walks in the example consumes those extra burned calories in an average american fashion, then we can calculate the amount of energy used to create that food. Now I haven’t done this calculation myself, but I don’t see any of you critics who have done that either.
Note that the conclusion might be true even if more of the people who walk are on effective diets than those who drive. This is just a factor added to the equation. Same thing goes for hypothetical more fuel efficient eating habits of the walker.
At one point, if sufficiently many people drink an extra glass of milk, then you will need an extra delivery truck. You will also need extra food for a cow somewhere, and extra containers, etc.
That’s not a correct way to view things. Lots of tiny consumptions will make a difference. So 1 tiny consumption can be said to make 1/lots of this difference on average.
True. But most of us are in energy equilibrium. Even if there is a small factor that propels people to start losing weight by walking once, I doubt it will schew the overall conclusion. Unless it was very close run.
If you mean that the fact that they consume more energy makes them drive more, then it is irrelevant. If you mean that the fact that they drive makes them consume more energy, then that is the same as the point above.
I think the moral of this is that, from the point of view of energy use, we should spend as much time as possible just lying in bed, doing nothing, and only venturing out one or twice a day to dig up some carrots or pluck some tomatoes from our vegetable patch in our backyard.
How is this trolling? I read this blog post and thought it was interesting, and I decided I would share it. The forum is called Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share.
Pats 2 1/2 IoF on the cheek
You’re so cute when you’re trying to look innocent.
My questions remain unanswered.
Tris
Exactly. Clearly they chose milk as an example to highlight the fact that some food items cause more greenhouse gas emissions than others.
I can maybe accept the premise that walking results in more food consumed. But why would anyone drink an extra glass of milk, while not increasing the amount of any other food or drink?
Am I the only one honest enough to admit that if I were to walk 1.5 miles (0.75 miles each way) to the store and back, I would totally use that to justify the purchase of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s?
I said “looks like” trolling and I phrased it that way deliberately: when a poster opens a thread on a controversial topic, offers little opinion and then leaves the thread alone, it creates the appearance that he’s just trying to rile people up. None of those things is against the rules, but it’s something you should pay attention to. Hence I noted it.
Dammit, now I want ice cream.
To point out some of the flaws of the OP example:
- Cows make fertilizer as well as methane. Fertilizer helps make plants which help to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
- They only include the delivery man in the case of the milk. They don’t include the delivery man for the gasoline, nor all the fuel used to operate the pumps that raise the crude oil to the surface.
- Going back to point #1, cows have existed for a long time. Even if there’s more of them in existance than would be if there hadn’t been humans, there would have been some sort of animal taking that place, farting. The earth’s ecosystem has lived without major change for a real long time via the process of having animals live, fart, die, get buried, turn to biowaste, and eventually oil. It’s never had any of its animals actively digging up that oil and burning all of those millions years of pent up biowaste all within a short hundred years.
This is really just designed to make vegan environmentalists without cars who grow their own vegetable gardens even more smug, isn’t it?
Not that I consider the conclussions of that, ejem, study accurate but regarding the quoted text, I have to agree that the implications of some “green” measure are not always fully contemplated (in all fairness the implications of not green measures have a long history of being ignored too)
For example, solar panels; free, clean energy, but, what´s the ecological footprint of making them? I´ve read somewhere that the average solar panel needs 15 years to break even with the energy it was requiered to make it (I´d appreciate some insight here).