On Feb 25, 10:24 am, Robert <n...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:23:30 -0600, "tlmfru" <la...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> >Robert <n...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> >news:l234s3hpts90me8a577d53vdqdf4opfbg9@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >> On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:16:05 -0600, "tlmfru" <la...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> >> A meat eater walking consumes more energy than a car traveling the
same
> >distance.
>
> >> ""It is actually quite astounding how much energy is wasted by the
> >standard American
> >> diet-style. Even driving many gas-guzzling luxury cars can conserve
energy
> >over walking --
> >> that is, when the calories you burn walking come from the standard
> >American diet! This is
> >> because the energy needed to produce the food you would burn in
walking a
> >given distance
> >> is greater than the energy needed to fuel your car to travel the same
> >distance, assuming
> >> that the car gets 24 miles per gallon or better."
> >>http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/beef.html
>
> >Red herring, I'd say. We have to eat! Even a pure vegetarian diet
won't
> >help, as (I've read somewhere) that growing edible crops is very low in
> >efficiency, perhaps less than 2%.
>
> Even if that were true, it takes 16 pounds of edible crops to produce
one pound of edible
> beef.
No, that's false. The grain fed to cattle, so-called "dent" corn, is
not edible by humans. It is grown as animal feed.
> So meat is 16 times as inefficient.
That's not true, either. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of
the idea of efficiency, as well as a misunderstanding of consumer
demand.
Consumers don't demand undifferentiated food calories, any more than
they demand undifferentiated "transportation". Cars are far more
inefficient to produce than bicycles, but no one - well, no one with a
brain - suggests we ought to stop producing cars because bicycles will
work just as well at getting people from point A to point B. And so
with food. Nutritionally, a pound of beef may be equivalent to a
pound of some kind of vegetable matter (except it isn't, but for the
sake of argument); but a pound of beef and a pound of wheat don't
enter into people's preference functions equally.
To say that a given amount of land (and other resources) could produce
more nutrition in the form of vegetables rather than meat, and that
therefore this makes meat "inefficient", is a fundamental
misunderstanding of efficiency. If you have a factory producing
refrigerators, your measure of efficiency is how many refrigerators
you can produce for a given amount of input resources; or,
alternatively, for a given output of refrigerators, what's the lowest
possible amount of resources required to make it. It is incorrect to
say that the factory is "inefficient" because it could, if slightly
reconfigured, produce twice as many washing machines. People aren't
interested in undifferentiated consumer durables, and they're not
interested in undifferentiated units of calories.
Another issue that gets messed up in this absurd efficiency debate is
that cattle, at least, spend most of their lives grazing on land that
is unsuitable for any sort of crop production. This means there isn't
any efficiency issue at all as far as the use of that land goes.
> >> >At the very least, Robert, let people make a feel-good gesture. If
it
> >won't
> >> >help it won't do any harm!
>
> >> Because feel-good gestures can do more harm than good. Here's an
example:
>
> >> "the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while
the
> >conventional Honda
> >> Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the Dust to Dust lifetime of the
Accord
> >Hybrid, it will
> >> require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version.
>
>http://www.leftlanenews.com/study-a-hybrid-consumes-more-energy-in-li...
> >than-a-hummer.html
>
> >May well be true. This was not one of my suggestions, though.
>
> It's a widely believed suggesion. California, especially, is full of
people who think
> they're 'doing their part' by driving a hybrid.
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