Just shut up about the virtues of walking ...

Oh dear. Should Dr B stop touting the obvious good of walking rather than driving all over the Siena campus? (Neglecting of course the frostbite we'll all work to avoid over the next few frigid days.) Now we here from John Tierney , based on Chris Goodall, the author of “How to Live A Low-Carbon Life.” :

If you walk 1.5 miles ... and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of
milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the
dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to
the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of
you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly
way to go.

And paper versus plastic?

How much reduction, if any, in greenhouse emission would result from banning
plastic grocery bags or forcing stores to recycle them? (The New York City
Council recently passed a bill requiring stores to recycle them.) To come up
with a good number, you’d have to consider what happens to the bags in a
landfill (is the carbon sequestered there, the way it is with old newspapers,
and does the landfill recapture any methane that escapes? You ‘d also have to
consider how much energy, both human and non-human, is expended in recycling the plastic bags or switching to alternatives. I can’t promise these numbers would
matter to the opponents of plastic bags — this sounds to me more like a moral
crusade — but it’d be good to have them.