Idiot of the Month: Chris Goodall

From yesterday's London Times:

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

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.”

If Goodall is not an idiot, he's an irresponsible publicity monger.

Even taking his argument at face value, someone walking slowly uses few if any more calories than someone driving a car. And while Goodall would be closer to being right if we got all our calories from agri-business beef — we don't.

More importantly, almost no one walks three miles to buy their groceries, while Americans routinely drive 30 miles or more to go to Sam's Club for their Agribeef, which can come from 3,000 miles away. Walking three blocks does not equal driving 30 miles. And local, organic produce would solve more energy problems.

More on this later today, when I update this post.

For now let me comment that the Times, which hates Prince Charles, has commissioned Goodall to make a carbon audit of Prince Charles. I wonder how that will turn out? Yet Charles's Prince's Foundations has hired some of the world's leading experts to study solutions to global warming and climate. And oh, what a coincidence, his development at Poundbury is a sustainable model which reduces driving. Charles also campaigns against agri-business, which uses energy-intensive methods. See Michael Pollan's great The Omnivore's Dilemma.

I noticed a few years ago that whenever Prince Charles criticized Modernist architecture and planning, the next day the Times would have unflattering stories about Camilla.

That's not cricket, old chaps. And this is the group that just bought the Wall Street Journal.