-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 11:31:50PM +1200, Russell McMahon wrote: > - Paper bags are worse than plastic bags. Nothing surprising there, anything that cheap can't have much of an effect due to how expensive energy is. > - Travelling by diesel train is twice as bad as travelling by car for > an average family. Well I know in the case of the local GO Transit system, a plush diesel-electric, that was true initially until they upgraded to double decker trains. Now however, especially with it's popularity and nearly full capacity, fuel consumption is about 10x less than cars. Not to mention it's saved a *lot* of money in new road construction that hasn't had to happen. His specific example is not surprising at all, I bet it hinges on low ridership... Diesel-electric trains have a very large overhead due to how much steel they have to lug around. People just weigh so little compared to the train itself. Obviously electric trains are different though, no big diesel engines and fuel. > - Organic beef is worse than non-organic beef. His specific example is BS as he's counting methane, however for the environment in general there's lots of reasons for organic to be generally worse. I'll have to dig it up again, but I saw a really neat, and very detailed, analysis of how it actually uses less carbon to ship produce from califonia to downtown toronto ontario on efficient industrial scales than it does to have little farmers markets served by local farms. Planes and trucks are amazingly good compared to individuals in their cars... > - Burning wood is better than recycling it. Not surprising at all, wood is a renewable resource, and harvesting it doesn't take that much energy, mostly done by big efficient trucks and with relatively little labor. In britain especially it'd be efficient as their woodlots tend to be fairly flat, BC might be different due to the hills/mountains. > - Driving to get food is about 4 times better than walking the same > distance. See other posts, likely naive. > - Cloth and disposable nappies (diapers) are about equally bad. Waste of clean water 'eh? Big hint, clean water is a *renewable* thing, which takes very little energy to make. It's not going to run out either with well designed water systems, where sewage gets turned back into drinking water eventually. Only irrigation water is really an issue. He could still be right of course, plastic isn't very damaging either, nor are landfills, especially at 0.1% used. > - SUV's with a single person in each are better than lightly loaded > trains. Explained above. Heavilly loaded trains are a huge win though. All public transit suffers from network effects, it's not valuable until it's all encompasing. But the end result is, look how little carbon New Yorkers use with all those electric subways. Given more nuclear power/wind/solar/hydro they'll use no carbon. > - Trees may be net bad, not net good as believed. [At best a tree is > net good only if it lives forever or if another replaces it when it > dies.] Trees are easilly made into a net good, cut 'em down, and put 'em into landfills. Ideally using them to build stuff or write on first... Just make sure your local ecology can actually support forestry, not all can. > - Don't buy anything from the supermarket *OR* anything that has > travelled "too far". I'm actually really skeptical about that one, fuel-costs are already such a big part of produce prices anyway, why not simply buy what's cheapest? To optimize it a bit, allow for easy importing of cheap labor to make sure that the second major part of produce costs is equalized to imports and you're set. Keeping agricultural land prices low by making sure they will *never* be able to be used for any other purpose will again help keep out any distortion. It's good for the environment, and food security to boot. > While all the above is somewhat funny it is (or should be) somewhat > thought provoking. Even if one distances oneself from the flavour of > the year mindless rush to a "low carbon footprint", but is seeking a > meaningful way to reduce one's ecological impact, these conclusions > suggest that attempting to make the choices oneself in relative > isolation is an almost impossible task. To give up car for train or > car for bike or walking and to then find the overall ecological result > is worse is a bit sobering. The fact that this *may* be true is > annoying. There is no certainty that this one researcher has 'got it > right', considered all aspects or been able to deal with a 'bi enough > picture' to properly analyse the problem. But this is a superb > demonstration that if we are serious about doing something useful then > it needs to be done by using the best available scientific resources > to guide our actions. As long as the societally preferred choices are > driven by fad, political expediency or financial gain by some members > of society then the chances of us doing anything meaningfully useful > is severely hampered. Alas, there seems little hope in the near term > that this won't be the way that things continue to be done. The whole thing is a big waste of energy studying all these little effects. Tax carbon and be done with it. It's stupidly easy, if it came out of the ground, figure out how many kg of carbon's in it, and slap a tax on it before it gets burned. Plastics get a credit, because they don't rot. Lower other taxes while you're at it, do the usual phase in over x years stuff. Of course, actually implementing such a scheme politically is up to you... Have fun watching imports suddenly get a lot cheaper, relatively speaking... - -- http://petertodd.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGysVU3bMhDbI9xWQRAu0MAKCSGe0yZWyHN9Ef6VSyWDafEpFz/ACgi/6Q ONXpcbq2QnWkzs8eGMY++aY= =Jhwu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist