Drive, Don’t Walk

Rev up your engines, my friends! The careful research of one Brit has turned conventional environmental wisdom on its head:

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.

So one is left to ask: why isn’t this guy considered an environmentalist icon?

If you have a devout Green religionist in your life, you may not want to share some of the other observations:

— Traditional nappies are as bad as disposables, a study by the Environment Agency found. While throwaway nappies make up 0.1 per cent of landfill waste, the cloth variety are a waste of energy, clean water and detergent

— Paper bags cause more global warming than plastic. They need much more space to store so require extra energy to transport them from manufacturers to shops

— Organic dairy cows are worse for the climate. They produce less milk so their methane emissions per litre are higher

— 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

Makes you wonder: is this guy an environmental activist?

Just asking.