Walking Uses More Carbon Than Driving.

A new story floating around the internet is the news story about "How Walking to the Shop is Worse For the Environment Than Driving"

To save you the time of going to the link, here are some pieces of the story.

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.

This is one of the more crazy theories I've heard about this. It is sad to think that I have heard about this now, as much as the cat story popped up. Before you use this as justification to stop excercising, or driving a couple blocks when you could just as well walk, there are definitely some obvious logical fallacies in this report.

The first one is right in the first line, an "Arguement of Authority." He claims to be an expert but that doesn't automatically mean just agree.

The next major problem is the data he looked at and how it was interpretted. I have no reason to believe his calculations are wrong. But, he just figures your drive to the store for your car. Not the truck that brought it to your gas station, not the carbon released in the refinary, not the oil used on the ship ride from the middle east, the drive to the truck, and the energy to get it out of the ground.

Third, whether you walk to the store or drive, you are still going to have to eat. I don't know about most people, but if I walk somewhere, I normally don't eat a bigger meal to regenerate myself.

If it is three miles, go ahead and drive, but if it is only a few blocks or a mile, go ahead and walk, you won't add to global warming. It is still better to walk or bike than drive your car. And it's always better to think for yourself than just accept what you are told.