At least eat less…

Being a consumer of animal products is the worst thing a person can do to the environment. It is the American diet that uses the most fossil fuels and releases the most greenhouse gases. Chalking it up to “meat tastes good” is a poor excuse for irrational behavior. There is no such thing as a meat eating environmentalist!!!

The relevance of saying “walking is worse than driving” is rather to say “eating beef is bad”.

The fact that there may one day be a biofuel that doesn’t stink is not a reason in the slightest why it’s ok to drive biofuel cars – it’s a reason to pursue biofuel research. It’s still true we shouldn’t be driving biofuel cars right now.

Your counters to bicycling and train-riding were completely off the mark. I’m surprised that you thought those points were worth putting in an article.

Finally, I was a little dismayed at your dismissal of the meat criticism. Sure, people who are militant about anything are annoying… but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily wrong. It’s annoying to be told that it’s bad to do what you like. It’s annoying to be told that you shouldn’t drive your hummer because it’s unnecessary and overpolluting – but it’s still true that you shouldn’t drive the hummer, and the annoyance is only there because you have destructive preferences in the first place. If you can put up a post that implicitly says we should hold off on driving so much, you can suck it up and admit that even though you do eat meat, you do so for bad, selfish reasons, and that you probably shouldn’t.

…I should have mentioned the manufacturing costs of cars…

Not at all: the prat claiming walking uses more energy than driving should have done. I think all the points you made were spot-on.

A couple of points: all these so-called ‘X is worse than driving’ articles invariably seem to ignore the environmental penalties of actually manufacturing the car (vs a bicycle or pair of shoes). Also, in my experience at least, cycle-commuters and walkers don’t actually eat more than car drivers, either, they’re just slimmer.

I don’t have the figures, but I’d be willing to bet that the train vs car arguments only holds in countries with third-world train technology (which definitely includes Britain) and state-of-the-art cars. In fact, that probably only does apply in Britain.

While I understand that trains and walking are of little relevance to US readers, they’re statistically immensely important in global terms. 100’s of millions of people walk 3 or more miles a day. Not in the US, sure, but the US is only–what?–5% of the world’s population.

I assume this is a US-centric website. Lots of people walk or bike to work around the world. I live in a major European city and I walk around 3km a day to go to work. Going by car would take double the time (including finding a parking spot) and public transportation would save me maybe 5 minutes.