Saturday, October 31, 2009

Carbon footprint gone to the dogs

The story behind Time to Eat the Dog has been bugging some small time:
Brenda and Robert Vale are professors of architecture at Victoria University, New Zealand, who specialise in sustainability and they claim the carbon pawprint of a pet dog (roughly the size of an alsatian), is twice that of a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year.

There must some absurd assumptions made to reach such a conclusion. What would happen if you threw a blue whale into the equation? Would it conclude that the craptonnes of krill are killed inefficiently and Japan should hunt these gargantuan mammals to extinction to save the planet? Is this a suggestion to trade pets into the SPCA for Toyota Land Cruisers?

Suffice to say that it is complete nonsense. There's evidence-based research and then there's this. Honest to Gaia, sometimes the ecological movement can't stop biting its own tail.