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@dez
Riding your bike 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 ride to work 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.
We have industrialised our food production. Three quarters of supermarkets’ energy is to refrigerate transport and freeze food prepared elsewhere.
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 rode instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 200g of food to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.