11–20 of 78 posts
In particular hard cheese, which takes a lot of milk to produce, can have a bigger footprint per kilo than chicken.
This is super stupid. Hard cheese contains more than double the calories of chicken. And nobody in their right minds will consume hard cheese as the main food item.
One thing that's always puzzled me: surely in the winter, when you have heating on, it doesn't really matter how efficient your appliances are - 'waste' heat from inefficient appliances will just replace heat that the heating system would generate otherwise?
Only if you have electric radiators. If you heat your home in any other way, you're wasting some energy, since electric energy is the least efficient to use for simple heating.
To quote from the article: In particular hard cheese, which takes a lot of milk to produce, can have a bigger footprint per kilo than chicken. This is super stupid. Hard cheese contains more than double the calories of chicken. And nobody in their right minds will consume hard cheese as the main food item.
Some of it is useful, some of it is useless nonsense, perpetuating other myths. If you want to learn how negligible the effect of turning off your lightbulbs or converting to a gas heated kettle is, read "without the Hot Air" by David McKay: http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's transport and domestic heating that are the major energy consumers in the west. It's barely worth focusing on anything else. "wood is a green f…
Same for buying local. Buying mass produced grain from Brazil might be more efficient, but worse for the environment because of the deforestation that's driven by high food export prices.
We won't really know for sure until we have a comprehensive way of accounting for all the different factors on a case-by-case basis.
One thing that's always puzzled me: surely in the winter, when you have heating on, it doesn't really matter how efficient your appliances are - 'waste' heat from inefficient appliances will just replace heat that the heating system would generate otherwise?
For example, Ontario is banning incandesent lightbulbs. However, studies have calculated that because of the colder climate, there will be no net cost savings for the average consumer. Although the government is touting this as an environmentally justified decision, it's more due to Ontario's lack of electrical generating capacity. (which, granted, could be seen as an environmental issue, if you don't want a new nuclear plant in your back yard)
One thing that's always puzzled me: surely in the winter, when you have heating on, it doesn't really matter how efficient your appliances are - 'waste' heat from inefficient appliances will just replace heat that the heating system would generate otherwise?
One thing that's always puzzled me: surely in the winter, when you have heating on, it doesn't really matter how efficient your appliances are - 'waste' heat from inefficient appliances will just replace heat that the heating system would generate otherwise?
Only if you have electric radiators. If you heat your home in any other way, you're wasting some energy, since electric energy is the least efficient to use for simple heating.
If it's cost, you need to see if gas bill savings + price difference of appliance If you're optimizing for CO2 emissions, and live in France, with many nuclear plants, maybe using less electricity doesn't do much.
(I have ground source heating in my home, btw, and it's great for both!)
The perfect examples of this myth are the Toyota Prius and alike, it amazes me how wrong they are.
I've read that the production of these cars is more wasteful than the usual (because of the batteries that have to be shipped), that the global shelf life of the car is poor, that it is difficult to recycle them and finally that the fuel consumption is not extraordinary low (equivalent to a small car).
Yet they receive an enourmous media coverage because they seem to be the response to a greener car.
If you want to reduce your energy footprint, buy insulation for your house and stop driving. Really, everything else is insignificant in comparison.
To quote from the article: In particular hard cheese, which takes a lot of milk to produce, can have a bigger footprint per kilo than chicken. This is super stupid. Hard cheese contains more than double the calories of chicken. And nobody in their right minds will consume hard cheese as the main food item.
From the Volkskrant (newspaper): cheese takes more kg of food for the cows to produce per protein than chicken. For vegerarians cheese is an important source of protein.