What's The Difference Between A Whacked-Out Uber-Liberal American Politician Who Thinks He's A Scientist, And A Whacked-Out Uber-Liberal British Politician Who Thinks He's A Scientist?
A couple thousand miles worth of Atlantic

Like everyone else, I'm trying my damnedest to lessen my carbon footprint. I no longer use carbon paper. I sold off all my stock in diamond mines. Caveman Laboratories now just guesstimate the age of ancient artifacts... what more can I do?

Alas, now I find out that just walking to the store is worse for the environment than if I were to drive a car. Huh? I is confuzed.

Britain's answer to Al "Sure It's Hot... It's Called 'Summer'" Gore, a certain Mr. Chris Goodall, Green Party candidate (of course) for Parliament from Upper Dip-Shit Upon Tyne, Recently enlightened the rest of us uneducated slobs that... well, the headline says it best:

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’

Here's a wee bit of the article;

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.”

I reiterate - Huh? I thought that driving my mean ole automobile was one of the Cardinal Sins perpetrated against Ghia, or Mother Earth, Sacred Planet... or whatever the hell I'm suppose to refer to the world as. But wait... there's more.

What if, instead of beef, the walker drank a glass of milk? The average person would need to drink 420ml – three quarters of a pint – to recover the calories used in the walk. Modern dairy farming emits the equivalent of 1.2kg of CO2 to produce the milk, still more pollution than the car journey.

Cattle farming is notorious for its perceived damage to the environment, based on what scientists politely call “methane production” from cows. The gas, released during the digestive process, is 21 times more harmful than CO2 . Organic beef is the most damaging because organic cattle emit more methane.

I KNEW IT! We've all been Al Gored by evil farting cows, and didn't even know it. I say kill 'em all before they get a chance to fart again.