[QUOTE=scr4]
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?
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The article actually says:
“These results would vary, of course, depending on exactly what kind of car you’re using and what kind of food you eat (or, if you’re going by pedicab, what kind of food your cabbie eats). Michael Bluejay, who’s done some number-crunching at BicycleUniverse.info, says that walking is actually worse than driving if you replace the calories with food in the standard American diet and if the car gets more than 24 miles per gallon.”
So it doesn’t necessarily have to be milk, it just has to be average american diet.
(This Mike actually refers to a book called “Diet for New America”, so I still haven’t seen the actual calculation.)
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.
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Human’s are artificially feeding cows, which obviously makes more of them than would have existed if we didn’t. The question is not how many there would be if humans didn’t exist, but how many there would be if we didn’t feed them and eat them.
Besides, just because nature does something, doesn’t mean that it’s “ok”.
[QUOTE=mr. jp]
The article actually says:
“…[snip]… walking is actually worse than driving if you replace the calories with food in the standard American diet and if the car gets more than 24 miles per gallon.”
…
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It still looks like the calculation is made using the entire carbon footprint for everything involved in the production of milk/food, while comparing it to only the gas consumption of the car alone, without the carbon from the production of the car, extraction and transportation of the oil for the gas. Add to that the impact of making and maintaining the road, and the likelyhood that most Americans would probably drink that glass of milk when they got home whether they drove or walked. It’s very disengenuous.
If the point is supposed to be that your food has a surprisingly high carbon output, it’s true. The way it’s being presented it sounds like the completely incorrect idea that a Hummer is greener than a Prius.
Two and a Half Inches of Fun:
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
My questions are:
Do you personally actually believe this?
Do you personally find the logic and evidence behind it to be useful in forming your opinions?
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These questions remain unanswered. Seven key strokes, eight or nine maybe with punctuation. Less, perhaps. Is that too much to ask?
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From the evidence, you have started this thread entirely for the purpose of eliciting responses, without any intention from the outset of even discussing the information. While this is MPSIMS, it is still simply seeking something other than communication. I object to this practice and find it very unlikely that it is not done deliberately.
