Better for the planet to drive than walk
It is great to see conventional wisdom challenged head on. Dominic Kennedy writing in the Times on 4 Aug 2007 says that walking to the shops does more harm to the environment than driving. Calculations by Chris Goodall author of How to Live a Low Carbon Life show that driving a typical car for 3 miles adds about 0.9 Kg of CO2 to the atmosphere. Walking the same distance, you would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace these calories and that would take 3.6 Kg to produce - 4 times as much.
Shattering more green myths he points our that diesel trains are more polluting than 4×4 cars, that organic dairy cows are worse for the environment than non-organic cows and that paper bags cause more global warming than plastic bags.Â
It turns out that our methods of food production, transport and storage (in chilled conditions) are terribly wasteful of energy. The answer to global warming might be to keep driving and flying but to slaughter all the cows and eat locally grown vegetables and pulses. Unconventional wisdom indeed.
 Paul Sloane