This is curious. Greenpeace is giving away free pedometers at COP16 in Cancun. Watch the video below. I don’t really understand the point of all this, except maybe its some sort of guilt over the limousine largess from COP15 in Copenhagen, and they want people to walk to their hotels? Even so, they apparently are unaware of this Times Online article which points out, walking apparently produces more CO2 than driving:
Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’
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.
…
{Goodhall says] “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.”
Well, that’s inconvenient. Greenpeace says the opposite. They write on the Greenpeace More Walk Less Talk page:
COP 16 will be the seventh Conference of the Parties since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force in February 2005. That’s a lot of talking.
The physical layout of these meetings means there is a great deal of walking. Walking, as we all know is very good for you – it’s credited with helping breathing, improving circulation, bolstering the immune system, and helps people stay in shape.
It is also, of course, good for the climate. But, as international climate negotiations processes show, sadly so far – not enough governments are “Walking the Talk.”
So, in Cancun – Greenpeace is hosting “More Walk, Less Talk” – a competition to find the person and the country that covers the most ground in Cancun.
Yes, the race to the future starts here. Grab your step-counter and go!
Well I’ve got no beef with the “walking improves health” message. I wonder what the winning prize is? Watch the promotional video:
And the battle continues over the issue of walking versus driving, the Pacific Institute wrote a rebuttal to the walking is worse versus driving story.
As noted by Goodall, what really stands out in this comparison is the astoundingly high GHG values for walking when the calories come from beef or dairy. The idea that moving a 2,853 pound Nissan Sentra42 plus a 189-pound driver could possibly generate fewer GHGs than if that driver simply walked the same distance underscores the staggering carbon intensity of beef and dairy production. To be fair to Goodall, this was in fact his underlying message: meat-intensive diets are energy intensive and greenhouse gas intensive.
So obviously, the message missing from the Greenpeace Pedometer message at COP16 is “walk but don’t eat meat or dairy”.
So much for those fancy Cancun dinners on whomever is funding the attendee. Bean burrito for you!
Of course the whole “walking to save the planet” idea gets negated by the simple fact that none of these people arrived by sailboat in Cancun, but used some fossil fuel gussling airplane and then maybe a train or taxi.
But at least they’ll feel better about themselves walking around hungry, right?
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UK Sceptic says:
November 30, 2010 at 10:39 pm
“Hold on, aren’t those pedometers made out of plastic? And isn’t plastic made out of Gaia killing oil?
face/palm”
Not only that, but they’re made in China’s coal-fueled plants and they don’t work worth a darn anyhow. Total waste.
double facepalm
“he climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes.”
Sounds like most of Britain under Labour – now they’re being asked to work and pay for their own education, the couch potatoes are angry
Peter Ward says:
December 1, 2010 at 12:18 am
I remember reading that a cyclist emits the equivalent of about 50g of CO2 per km, which is much higher than someone just sitting. So 2-3 people sitting in a car emit less CO2 per km than if they were cycling. That doesn’t get much press.
Now we have someone saying that walking emits more CO2 per km than driving! It just shows how the automotive industry is achieving great things improving engine efficiency. They don’t get much credit for what they’re doing.
As I’ve said before, if governments are serious about reducing CO2 emissions they should ban all sporting events because they generate excess CO2 merely for entertainment. As a dedicated greenie, David Cameron should yesterday have been lobbying FIFA to cancel the football World Cup, not to hold it in UK!
————————–
Breathing emits carbon that has already been taken out of the atmosphere by plants so effectively doesn’t contribute to CO2 build up in the atmosphere. By performing cellular respiration, we are simply returning to the air the same carbon that was there to begin with.
The difference is CO2 from fossil fuels is that they are buried outside the carbon cycle many millions of years ago, so by releasing them as you use your car increases the CO2 in the atmosphere.
The only way I can see that you could argue that walking causes more CO2 than driving is by taking into account the fossil fuels that are burnt to transport and make the food you eat.
Pedometers? Clearly discriminatory to the wheel chair dependent. How insensitive. Oh my.
Re Steeptown says: November 30, 2010 at 11:57 pm
That’s the spirit. Greens do not encourage critical thinking because thinking increases brain activity, which generates heat, which leads to global warming. Some climate scientists have recognised this contribution to the world’s problem and have given up critical thought, leaving it instead to their computers who’s heat can be captured and recycled. Plans to tax scientists for generating excess heat are in hand, as are gym and jogger taxes. Exercise fans often test their lung capacities as a measure of fitness, or excess pollution as it will soon be known and can be taxed in accordance with the results. Next generation pedometers will contain GPS and linked to other biometric sensors in hats and facemasks to automatically debit individual carbon accounts based on performance, or alert green police squads to dangerous polluters.
Classic, absolutely classic.
They know the only reason they’re there is to wrangle about money, with the climate being used as the stick with which to beat the developed countries. The Tuvalus have to play the part of the victims, and wail about how “climate change” will affect them disproportionally, and that it’s mostly the Wests’ fault anyway, so they need to both pay up, and “de-carbonize” their economies. Meanwhile, the developing countries, like China have to “explain” why they have to continue to forge ahead at full-steam without any of the constraints, because the West has already done that and they should be allowed to do the same. The developed countries’ job is to minimize their accountability, and how much they owe the rest of the world, and point out that if the world is to have any success reducing carbon, everyone, particularly China has to be on board. Thus, the circus atmosphere, and the little, mindless diversions like “fossil awards” ceremonies, and step-counting.
It is all quite amusing, actually.
Let’s all go back to nature. 6 billion people burning wood fires, eating inefficiently produced crops, prone to any and every disease. Natural child birth (remember how many women used to die during this procedure?). Get rid of all pesticides and we can understand the relevance of plagues in ancient times. Go back to sailing vessels and horse drawn carts – yeah I can imagine the mess in any any modern city. Oh, I forgot that we’re supposed to reduce the population to a sustainable level. Should be easy; everyone will be fighting for food, water and shelter. I’d get a bicycle, but I’d be ashamed of the of the amount of CO2 released in the manufacture of the body and tires.
Just once, I’d like to see all the green movie stars, media moguls and politicians live the actual life they are proposing for a year. No cars, no jets, no trains, no internet, no electronic media, no heat, no air conditioning, no new clothing every week, no shelter except what you can build yourself by hand, only natural medicines. Unless you’re homeless, your no even close. Industry eliminated slavery; slavery to other men and the whims of mother nature.
Ah forget it; just watch the Rain Forest episode of South Park.
This is hilarious. This has to be a prank on the environmentalists.
Of course, there is a solution to this though, Rickshaws. A normal citizen running the almighty important people around town uses less carbon that both of them walking.
Mikeysan>
“While this is an interesting exercise in maths, it works on the assumption that a person will have to alter their intake of food because they walked to the store instead of driving. I think it’s pretty obvious that people don’t really do that. ”
Totally disagree with you. Whilst there are some people who routinely eat too much, I think it’s pretty obvious that you get hungrier when you’ve done more physical work. I know I do. Days when I work from home, sitting at my desk, I tend to eat one whole meal less than days when I walk a few miles on the way to/from work and spend the whole day moving around.
It helps if one is a Martian.
Walking 1 mile burns less than 100 calories more than sitting on your butt doing nothing.
Driving a mile in a vehicle which gets 31 miles per gallon burns 1,000,000 calories.
It takes an average of 10 calories in energy input to produce each calorie of food on your table.
Those are the facts.
Walking is about a thousand times more energy efficient than driving.
Who ARE these people making these ridiculous claims that walking is actually less energy efficient than driving? It takes a real dumbass to say it or believe it.
Dave Springer says:
December 1, 2010 at 8:07 am
Those are the facts.
Walking is about a thousand times more energy efficient than driving.
Who ARE these people making these ridiculous claims that walking is actually less energy efficient than driving?
—…—…
??? And turning off every power plant in the US is more energy efficient than burning coal. And cutting off every natural gas pipeline going across the Appalachians to the east coast cities is more energy efficient than wasting that fuel in a boiler.
So what?
If I work just 15 miles away, I need to spend six hours a day just walking to and from home. one quarter of my life spent walking – nothing gained, nothing produced, nothing earned – I need to walk 1/4 of every day before I get anything done. If the grocery store is “only” 1 mile away, I need to spend 40 minutes getting food. And, if I do, I can only carry two bags back. Tomorrow? Another 40 minutes wasted walking to get food. But that loss is of no concern to an enviro activist. We use cars because every person driving anywhere at any time in any place has made a specific and deliberate decision: Every person has decided that he values his or her productivity and time more than the pennies saved by walking/crawling/swimming/flying out the window.
Likewise, every person jogging on an expensive plastic-lined artificial running surface in plastic-lined jogging gear wearing plastic-lined shoes and plastic-lined artificial socks has made a specific and deliberate economically-driven decision that his or her exercise is more valuable than any other investment of time, pain, energy, and effort. Me? At 6 foot tall, 150 pounds weight and 110 blood pressure and a heart rate of 76 and a cholesterol level of 140 – I consider running a painful waste of everything I value, so I refuse to “exercise” at all in any way at any time. To me, jogging is a stupid waste of everything “I” value.
Should I prevent everybody from wasting their time running or biking or hiking around the neighborhood in their expensive clothes and fancy outfits and exotic shoes? Surely that would be more “efficient” energy-wise. More “efficient” use of the earth’s resources of food, energy, clothes, shelter, fiber. It would make “me” feel better about the poor in Africa who have no shoes at all. No food at all – so they can’t get fat and need exercise!
Today’s enviro’s value their “religion” of a supposed “pure earth”more than any (other people’s) lives, health, or gain. Productivity, efficiency, improvement and economic gain IS their avowed enemy. Regardless of logic and regardless of
racookpe1978 says December 1, 2010 at 8:49 am: “Today’s enviro’s value their “religion” of a supposed “pure earth”more than any (other people’s) lives, health, or gain.”
I find it completely bizarre and actually verging on the culturally insane that we are compelled to explain to enviro-loons why motorized transportation is valued by humanity worldwide over walking, or riding on the back or a camel or an elephant for that matter.
It is just about as Twilight Zone weird as when I was forced to explain to a 20-something U.S. Congressional aide why people in America’s vast heartland might often find it difficult if not impossible to “ride a bike” or “take the Metro” to work every day, and hence why punitive gasoline taxes might be detrimental to that spectrum of America that does not live in an urban metropolis such as Washington DC.
No surprise though. She did not get it.
Roger Knights says:
December 1, 2010 at 8:07 am
It helps if one is a Martian.
Don’t be silly. Martians are notoriously humorless. Ack-Ack!
We can laugh, because they have already lost the war, yet they idiotically soldier on.
@racooke
Hey look, I didn’t ask anyone to walk instead of drive, okay?
My bullsh!t alarm rang when I read the driving energy efficiency claim. It took about 3 minutes to look up the facts from reliable sources (USDA for energy to produce food, engineering data for calories in a gallon of gas, and some exercise website for calories burned walking vs. sitting at rest.
I don’t care whether knowing the facts makes you alter your habits or not. It’s not a factor in my walk/drive decision matrix so it would be hypocritical of me to suggest it should be a factor in yours.
@racooke
“Should I prevent everybody from wasting their time running or biking or hiking around the neighborhood in their expensive clothes and fancy outfits and exotic shoes? Surely that would be more “efficient” energy-wise.”
You probably have no right whatsoever to stop anyone so that’s a pointless question. You have every right to give advice and otherwise express your opinion to them. If someone starts telling me why they’re into jogging I come back and say I prefer to combine exercise with constructive activity. But that’s just me. To each his own. It’s (ostensibly) a free country.
Cars versus shoes aside – my question is – how much carbon was wasted in producing those useless devices?
Those free pedometers are very handy! Provided you have a watch or calculator that needs the same size battery. Best to get that battery out of the pedometer as soon as you get it, the cheap ones have no off switch and the battery has likely been draining since it was assembled in China.
Ah! In the one drawer I have an unopened McDonald’s Stepometer™ that was included in their Go Active!™ Adult Happy Meals in 2004. Which is now opened. It’s dead. The battery is a LR1130, both the circuit board note and the small instruction sheet says it takes an AG10 (alternate designation). Stamped on the battery case, it says “0.% Hg” therefore it must be good for the environment. Oh look, Amazon has them for about $3 for 10. Too bad the instructions are messed up, ‘unscrew and remove contact plate, slide battery to side’ when it’s ‘pivot arm to side, pop out battery.’ How many have such a small Phillips screwdriver, and would go to the trouble of following those directions instead of throwing it away?
Gee, you’d think in this day and age that a group like Greenpeace would’ve sprung for a model charged by a small solar cell, or that is self-charging when used!
It’s nice that they’re giving them away, pedometers can accomplish small miracles. As the wisdom of Wikipedia puts it:
I’ve had two of those units since 2004. Yep, those benefits should be kicking in any time now…
Brian H says:
November 30, 2010 at 11:03 pm
“The key to the value of fossil fuels is that so much of the energy input has been done for us, in the deep past, and we are now draining/exploiting that.”
Comparing energy required to energy acquired is pretty much the definition of “economically recoverable” and applies to all energy sources. Some fossil fuel sources are running pretty tight (like tar sands) where the energy required is 90% of the energy acquired. For light sweet crude in shallow easily accessable wells it’s about the reverse of that. Naturally as long as there’s more energy coming out than going in there’s a profit to be made.
Ethanol from corn was more of an experiment and just something to get the ball rolling. Grains are way too valuable to use for feedstock to make liquid fuels. Fuel oil from algae cultivated in salt water is a whole different story. It all a matter of either finding/breeding the right species and/or genetically engineering one. I’d bet on genetic engineering.
If liquid biofuel production got just more than 10% beyond break-even it would be better than tar sand (for instance). The cool thing about biofuel is there is vast room for improvement in the feedstock and refinement cost whereas with fossil fuel there’s nothing really on the horizon that offers any similar room for cost improvement. Small improvements are made such as horizontal drilling and incremental efficiency gains in refinement but nothing that could be an order of magnitude or more improvement.
From Dave Springer on December 1, 2010 at 8:07 am
You are experiencing a frequent confusion. As mentioned here (Discovery Health), a “calorie” on a food label is actually a kilocalorie, 1000 calories. Doing that does wonders to save space on labels. Perform a reality check for confirmation: “Specifically, a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). ” How many kilograms of mostly-water mass to an average human body, that must be continually heated to around 100°F? A million calories a day, or 1000 food label calories, to keep a person alive seems perfectly reasonable.
So each calorie of food on your table is actually 1000 calories.
By your numbers, that’s less than 100,000 calories burned to walk one mile. At ten calories of energy input for one calorie of food, provided both numbers use the same calories (food label or actual), that’s less than 1,000,000 calories of energy input to walk one mile. From here and elsewhere, 100 food label calories per mile, for a 180 pound person, is a good rule of thumb. Thus that would be around a million calories invested per mile walked.
Thus while you had thought you had shown walking is a thousand times more efficient than driving, you really indicated it was about the same. Also the car can carry in one trip what it’d take the person three or more trips to carry on foot. It doesn’t take much to see how driving could use less energy than walking.
BTW, do you have a source for that “10 calories in = 1 calorie of food” tidbit? I Googled this Harper’s Magazine article from 2004 that had it, “The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq“:
Examining a half-pound box of generic “Honey Nut Toasted Oats Cereal,” it says there are about 8 servings at 120 food label calories each, so for four times as much (two pounds) that’s 8x4x120,000 ~ 3,840,000 calories. As mentioned back at my first link, agreeing with your figures, a gallon of gasoline has about 31,000,000 calories, thus for a half-gallon that’s 15,500,000 calories.
Thus going by the article, 15,500,000/3,840,000 yields only around 4 calories energy input for each calorie of that cereal. If it’s that low for such a highly-processed (and frequently derided for being such) food, I wonder what foods are so extremely energy-intensive they jerk the average ratio to 10:1.
Just out of morbid curiousity, how did the delagates get to Cancun in the first place? Swim?
I assume that the jets that transported these social engineers were powered by GE electric engines?
If this really were about a sincere scientific concern rather that a purely political agenda, why would they not web, satellite, or video conference?
re: Dave says: December 1, 2010 at 6:49 am
Mikeysan [wrote]>
Totally disagree with you. Whilst there are some people who routinely eat too much, I think it’s pretty obvious that you get hungrier when you’ve done more physical work. I know I do. Days when I work from home, sitting at my desk, I tend to eat one whole meal less than days when I walk a few miles on the way to/from work and spend the whole day moving around.
To expand on Dave’s reply to Mikeysan, which I think will make the point even more obvious… look at the issue on a long term basis rather than a very short term one. If someone walks to the store, they may not change their food intake at all on a one off or even short term basis.
On the other hand, if one considers the increased caloric expenditure over longer time frames, say, a year, it becomes very obvious that one would absolutely be forced to increase food intake. Otherwise, at some point the individual would literally starve.
The most simplified version would be to assume a healthy normal weight individual who’s neither gaining or losing weight. Add enough exercise to use 250 calories/day, no food increase, and that person loses roughly 26 pounds in a year. It doesn’t take long to starve to death at that rate.
Granted, how long to starvation in the real world, adding the unreal world parameters of set constant additional calories/day without any change in food intake, would all depend on the individual and what their weight was when they started, how efficient their metabolism, and if at the starting point they were already either a steady weight, losing weight, or gaining weight. Only some of the folks who were steadily gaining weight at the beginning of our thought exercise and were already quite overweight might avoid starvation if they failed to increase intake when they increased their activity over the long haul.
Obviously all of this is on a real world sliding scale (no pun intended!). Even many overweight and gaining would eventually starve if their activity level is increased enough for a long enough time period without concomitant food intake increases – although with small enough activity increase, high enough beginning weight, perhaps some would live out their lifespan before starvation would get ’em.
Point is, its pretty obvious that with increased energy expenditure, food intake must increase eventually or you get really negative consequences!
@Michael
There is something called the rule of law which applies to the leaker(s).
As for Julian Ass., dictators all over the world are rounding people named on wikileaks and disappearing them at this very moment.
Don’t they know that excessive walking can lead to the early destruction of shoe soles.
Well they are in the right place; they should be able to make some new sandals out of some old truck tires that got their tread shredded on some Mexican country road. But don’t bother hunting for materials on the Baja highway, because there are desert rats, that grab anything before the noise from the crash or other disaster, has echoed around the mountains.