> > http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

This is utter tripe and I'm amazed that anyone with an ounce of critical
thinking in their head can't pick out the fallacies at once. The very first
example compares CO2 emissions of a car with that of a man walking the same
distance. The trick is that he using only steak as the mans source of
energy. Steak is one of the LEAST efficient sources of energy in terms of
how much CO2 it produces. That same human, if I wanted to take the opposite
bent, could be fed on veggies grown in his own back yard and therefore have
actually released NO net CO2. The plants he grew having consumed more CO2
than he released.

Not to mention (thank you Gerhard) that:

> You don't need to dig deep to see what he did with the 
> walking vs driving comparison. According to the article, he 
> compared the CO2 created by the fuel burned in a car 
> (apparently without considering the resources necessary to 
> put the fuel into the tank, much less the resources necessary 
> to put the car in front of your house -- you won't find that 
> in "the Government?s official fuel emission figures" which he 
> used as base) with an estimate of the /total/ of the energy 
> resources necessary to create food -- and all based on the 
> assumption that we eat only what we need. Show me one 
> piclister who does that :)
> 
> To make a more reasonable comparison, one would have to 
> consider also the resources necessary to put the fuel into 
> the tank and to produce the vehicle (of course spread out 
> over the lifetime km or miles). Then one would have to see 
> whether we don't eat so much that a few km of walking are not 
> really that visible in our food intake. And of course CO2 is 
> something, but not everything. They didn't do anything of 
> this, so whatever...

It just amazes me what the human mind will do to hold on to it's desire for
a fast car, cheap (toxic) food, and the chance to damage the world a bit
more for everyone else.

---
James Newton, massmind.org Knowledge Archiver 
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http://www.massmind.org Saving what YOU know.

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