That’s just the carbon footprint. Don’t forget all the water, pesticides, hormones, methane, etc.
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Fermi problems!
Someone my size uses about 100 kcal (thermal)/mile to walk, which is ~0.4MJ/mile. 1 gallon of gasoline is ~33.4 kWh thermal give or take, or ~120 MJ/gallon. If a car gets 30 mpg (not unusual), that’s 4 MJ/mile,10x more than walking. But if an average US diet really does take 10 calories of fossil fuel energy per 1 calorie of food (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2011/08/11/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the-energy-we-spend-on-food/), then walking and driving are actually close to break-even in terms of emissions.
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I agree, I grew up in the wilds of Maine, and the nastiness is in no short supply, people just have more breathing room. In cities, with people constantly rubbing up against each other (of course I mean this figuratively, but the literally rubbing against certainly is in a heavy mark in the “cons” column) daily tries the patience of the urban dweller. It’s actually a miracle of human life that people can live in such tiny bubbles of personal space, and not be a whole lot nastier than they are…
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I’m curious about the relative cost of living in a place like Manhattan. I assume that some of the extra cost is because of demand, but another part is due to the extra logistics of doing things in a city.
Am I nuts? Is it really more cost-effective to support humans in a city? If so, why does everything cost more?
And does this cost represent energy costs, or “because we can get it” costs?
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The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about:
You can’t care about the environment and eat meat and/or dairy. Animal agriculture contributes far more greenhouse gasses than automobiles. Not to mention the amount of grain, water, and fossil fuels that are wasted in the process. Care about the environment and want to do the single most important thing besides kill yourself? Go vegan, and be cool about, be a good example that makes other people want to be like you. I can’t recommend Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Eating Animals’ highly enough if you want an articulate, intellectually honest, and factual exposition on the arguments for/against and the facts on factory farming and eating flesh. And if you do take the plunge, get ready for a shitstorm of cognitive dissonance like you’ve never seen before.
Example:
First guy: Doesn’t give a shit if a few calories of chicken requires 10-20x calories of grain, several gallons of water, several gallons of oil, a tremendous and unimaginable amount of suffering on behalf of the animal, a toxic lake of shit so foul it causes neurological problems in towns several miles away (look it up, I’m not just being hyperbolic), working conditions so brutal that the workers often commit suicide or participate in domestic violence, and can overlook all of this because ‘a McChicken just sounds really good right now’.
Second guy: Also thinks a McChicken sounds pretty fucking ace at the moment, but thinks of the true cost of that fleeting moment of pleasure and decides that other things are more important to him than gratifying a capricious craving, decides to eat something else.
Guess which one gets derided as ‘sentimental’ or ‘radical’?
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That’s pretty much what I came up with, 10 to 1. I hadnt heard of the 10 in 1 out stat before, but it seems reasonable. If you consumed mostly local food you could “drive” that ratio down. [1] has some interesting data on walking vs runing efficiency. ad of course someone has already done this before us [2]. The make a lot of assumptions to generalize it, but essentially, biking is ~4x better than walking. And walking is about as efficient as driving. Once they consider the costs of producing the food (towards the bottom of the page) , walking is similar to driving.
[1] http://www.exrx.net/Aerobic/WalkCalExp.html
[2] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/mpg-of-a-human/
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You are living with a 1970’s view of New York.
There are tons of tress in my neighborhood and many safe parks and dog parks to walk dogs. You are much more likely to get mugged in Minneapolis or Cincinatti than in New York.
But, if cities are not for you, that’s perfectly good and fine. Just don’t try to paint them as something they are not.
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But I don’t eat more because I cycle to work. I just weigh less. The energy associated with much of what Americans eat is simply excreted or used to maintain their ever-increasing size. Using it for transport instead (cycling or walking) results in no net increase in energy consumed. Your calculations are disingenuous.
And I’m not counting the energy I’m saving by not having to undergo medical treatment for the medical conditions that I am (on average) avoiding by being active. Or the energy savings I accrue by not driving to the gym.
Another confounding factor in the calculations is simply that people will trade transport speed for distance travelled. The availability of easy transport (cars) means people choose to live further away from what they need (job, friends, family, food). Many of us consider an hour each way as a reasonable maximum “distance”. If cycle, it means I choose to live within about 25km of the office. If I drive, I would perhaps own a bigger house/yard but be perhaps 50km away from the office. If I chose to walk, I’d live within 5km, I guess (and when I did live that close, I did walk). Yes, living closer means less personal space (property is more expensive) but the upside of a pleasant commute and compact lifestyle more than makes up for it.
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I think it’s almost all demand. It’s not like you actually live meaningfully closer to any significant percentage of your food if you live in the country, or any other resource. My experience living in SF was that rent was insanely expensive, and anything involving a service was probably more expensive (those people also had to pay those stupid rents), but everything else was the same or less. Transportation wildly less. Utilities were way less (mild climate also helps, of course, but I’m talking about $35 or less a month for electric and gas).
In theory anything that is shipped to you (which is about 99% of what you buy) should be cheaper in a city, since it can be shipped to a central hub with a smaller “last mile” trip. I suspect desirability/demand offset that.
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I’m not sure what drives it: I expect it’s a mix of factors. To some extent, I think certain people select themselves out of cities because they are incapable of decent human interactions, but largely I believe that cities simply civilize you. You have to deal with the people who live on your street, and whether comfortably or through gritted teeth, you get along. Having no-one around to tell you that screaming racist epithets at the TV while firing your shotgun into the side of the trailer makes you an asshole, well…
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Cities are actually quite efficient. This reminds me of some folks I know who have moved to the BC gulf islands (nothing wrong with that I intend to do the same), but often post articles on how we’re destroying the environment etc without seeing the irony that everyone can’t just move into the country and do the same thing.
Not that I’m not concerned about the environment, yet there is something to the joke ; What’s the difference between a developer and an environmentalist? Answer: The developer wants to build a place in the country. The environmentalist already has one.
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Yep. When I lived in the UK I recall the head of the hobby farmers’ guild (or some such) coming on the telly (that’s what they call it there) and espousing that the country’s environmental problems would be solved if everyone simply embraced the hobby/small farm ideal and procured their own little rural space in which to grow their organic veges.
Here in BC, you still get hippies saying that we should all have run-of-river hydro schemes to power our cabins in the woods, and veggie gardens to feed ourselves. It never occurs to them that there would be no woods, or rivers if we all did that.
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But there’s so few vegans. Aren’t you afraid they’ll go extinct & then you’d have to go back to eating cows & pigs? >snark<
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Right, once you look at other logistical factors and health considerations driving is obviously much worse. We were looking at it strictly from a fuel perspective. The additional benefits of biking and liviing in a place that promotes biking, make it not only much better for individuals, it also means denser, cleaner cities. +100 for the pleasantness of commute factor. i’d reccomend Pedal Power (ISBN-13: 978-1594514623) for a realy good in depth look at cycling culture in america and the benefits that come with changing the transportation paradigm.
Get an electric or plug in hybrid car.
Sorry, you’ve triggered a knee-jerk reaction due to posting about chicken in particular. I’ve never heard anyone say that chicken uses anywhere close to 10x as many corn calories to produce. Beef, on the other hand…
There are good ethical reasons to give up eating meat entirely. If it’s global environmentalism you care about, though, the real problem is not meat per se but beef.
If you look at the pie charts I linked to earlier, you’ll see that the beef-free diet is pretty close the vegetarian diet. Most of the water use, most of the corn, most of the methane emissions are from cows.
I /do/ think that vegetarianism is a correct, moral choice. But waging an anti-beef campaign is likely to have a much more positive environmental impact than arguing against meat in general, because for whatever reason the ethical (animal-rights-related) arguments against meat are impossible for the majority of our species to hear or care about.
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Sorry, my intent was to generalize about meat in general. I just finished driving a 14 hour graveyard taxi shift so my brain is blob-like. My post itself was a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that almost never is animal agriculture mentioned in articles about the economics of conservation.
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It is probably less carbon for you to eat a nice vegan meal, bike on down to your local Place To Buy Things, and purchase some, I dunno, furniture made by the local Shakers than it is for you to eat a Vegan meal, get on your machine made out of intensively-mined minerals and hydrocarbons, and have UPS deliver you some IKEA shelves.
But the goal isn’t perfection, it’s progress. Which was kind of my point: there’s not One True Answer to this (if everyone goes Vegan tomorrow, it’ll help, but we’ll still have a problem), and the most one person can do to affect carbon emissions isn’t exactly a thing we have an instruction manual for.
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I think this is partly because people don’t have to confront the reality of it, it’s so compartmentalized and roped off from ever other aspect of eating. Spending an afternoon reading and surfing the web for information about factory farming (which is how more than 99% of meat/milk/eggs are produced) forces you to make a choice. No rational and empathic human being can walk away from that information without making one of two choices. The first, choose not to participate in it, the second, choose to ignore what you see (and every child can plainly see is immoral) and continue to participate in it.
P.S. Thank you for your post and for what it added to the discussion.
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This is an excellent point.
