At least once a week I seem to find an environmental “expert” with a new opinion on global warming, and how to counter it. The prevailing countermeasure up until now has been, drive your car less, use alternative energies, yada yada yada. A new environmental study has now concluded driving less could actually increase the effects of global warming. Please read that last sentence again, an “expert” is now telling us that by walking more we are increasing our “carbon-footprint”.

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

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.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

Mr. Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.

This is the reason it is difficult to have an intellectual conversation with anyone regarding global warming. There are so many “facts” out there, all of them in direct conflict with each other, only a fool would buy into one theory and argue it as if it were undeniable. The study cited in this article will have you believe that the only way to save the world is to stay in your home with the lights off, only eat vegetables you grew in your backyard, and avoid buying anything which needed to be transported to you.

There are so many ‘inconvenient truths’ to the global warming hysteria, it is mind boggling there is even a debate. First in order to have a debate about how to prevent global warming, you must first pretend that humans are to blame, and not the sun which amounts to 98% of the mass of our solar system. You must ignore similar warming patterns currently taking place on mars, which reveals that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Avoiding the above mentioned truth’s in your debate, here are some other inconvenient truth’s the global warming hysterics avoid in their “debates”.

• Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them
• Trees, regarded as shields against global warming because they absorb carbon, were found by German scientists to be major producers of methane, a much more harmful greenhouse gas
• Humans are only responsible for about 3.4% of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere annually, the rest of it is all natural
• Global mean temperature has both risen and fallen during the period atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising.

So while Al Gore and the rest of the greenies are presumably staying in their home, with all the lights off, hiding from the rest of humanity in an effort to save the world, I’m going to contribute to global warming now by walking to Burger King and having a double whopper with cheese.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Global Warming