Walking Worse For The Environment Than Driving

Posted by Mike Richard on August 7, 2007
Filed under: Environmental, Sidelines

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Thinking of hoofing it around the country for your next backpacking holiday?

Here’s an odd theory. Via TimesOnline.co.uk:

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

It’s starting to look like the safest thing we can do for the environment is lie flat on our bedroom floors, with the AC and television off and breathe slowly. And try not to think too much neither - all those brain cycles don’t come calorie- and carbon-free, ya know.

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Vagabondish editor, Mike Richard, lives in Rhode Island - a spit of land in the northeastern U.S. He is a professional web designer and travel junkie with an unhealthy addiction to backpacking, camping, hiking and seeing the world. He enjoys knit hats, small, declarative sentences and speaking in the third person.



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