The point of the article (if it really has one) is that growing meat and transport costs are really really bad in terms of greenhouse gas, not that you should all sit on your arses all day to save the planet.
In pure calorie conversion humans are much more efficient than the most efficient cars, it's the (energy) cost of creating that food that is inefficient. If you count the energy cost of creating petrol (entire forests being grown over and over again, wait millions of years) it probably looks pretty darn bad too.
In other exciting news, trees eat CO2 but also expel methane and methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
I think global warming is like cancer. Everything causes it, even the stuff you need.
On a side note, what is always missing in discussions of "energy used" by the body is how much energy is used just sitting and reading (or computering, or any activity where you barely move). They always quote "running for X kilometres for X minutes will burn X calories" but they never say after than "if you'd just sat on your arse instead you'd have burnt X calories".
This page has my answers (if only in 19th century units).
A 155lb man doing high impact aerobics for 1 hour will burn 493 calories. That same man ice fishing (which was the closest thing to sitting and doing nothing that I could find on the list) would burn 141 calories in that hour. Walking the dog for an hour burns 246 calories.
My point is you could burn the same calories sitting doing nothing for four hours as you could doing high impact aerobics for an hour.
Numbers are fun.
Mr Howard has attempted to shift the blame to the states, saying that while the Federal Government has kept its budget in surplus, the states have run up $70 billion of extra debt, placing upward pressure on interest rates. But experts say that argument is nonsense. "It's total, total bullshit," said University of Western Sydney associate professor of economics Steve Keen. "It's like saying that somebody dropped a pebble into the ocean and that caused a tsunami."
Not just total bullshit, but "total, total bullshit"!
On borrowed time [The Age]:
That is why the Howard Government is looking around for scapegoats — and following the advice of its pollster Mark Textor, is blaming the Labor states for the rate rise it sees coming.Three years ago Prime Minister John Howard made low interest rates the main theme of his election campaign, promising Australians that he would be "keeping interest rates low" if they trusted him with a fourth term. They did, but interest rates rose.
The article explains that not only does the States being in debt have very little to do with the rate rise, but that the States aren't actually in debt.
You can just as easily blame the rate rises on Australia's prosperity (for large mining businesses anyway), and our current Federal government takes all the credit for that.
If rates rise at the next RBA meeting, the Reserve Bank will release a statement explaining why, and "the states are in debt" won't be one of the reasons.
If you really want to blame somebody, blame the banks for lending too much to those who can't afford it. You can use that to explain pretty much everything that is "wrong" with the economy right now if you try hard enough.