Absolutely Ridiculous Journalism
Yesterday I referenced a page put together by Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low Carbon Life. Goodall was also recently associated with an article that I find to be extremely disingenuous and misleading. You can find it here. The gist of the article is that driving may be better for the environment than walking, in certain circumstances. Basically the author assumes a beef diet, ignores the environmental cost of extracting and refining oil, along with that of manufacturing automobiles, and bungles in a variety of other ways (see excellent responses here and here) in order to come to a counterintuitive conclusion that reinforces an apathetic response to the environmental challenges of our day. A more thoughtful article would have pointed out how terribly inefficient our agricultural system/dietary choices must be to make walking even nearly as high impact as driving a car, since accelerating and decelerating a human body clearly requires less energy than accelerating and decelerating a car, which is a several thousand pound hunk of metal with a human body in it! (To be fair, the article does get to some of these points in a roundabout way later on.)
As an example of non-ridiculous journalism, this San Francisco Chronicle article (regarding charcoal versus gas for grilling) does a great job of admitting and embracing the complexity inherent in most emissions calculations without striving for the sensationalist headline. Would that all environmental journalism were like this.