[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by octothorp

Really, really weird stats. I'll assume they're right that a dog's food consumption equals 0.84 hectares of agricultural land. Apply that by about 121 kilos of CO2 per hectare for barley production*, and dogs come in right around 100 kgs of CO2 per year.

Compare that with a 2006 Nissan Pathfinder that goes 10,000 km a year (as Iggypop noted, a very skewed number), which generated 3.75 tonnes of CO2. I'd love to hear where the authors get the missing 3.65 tonnes from.

*Couldn't find a great source of barley CO2 footprint, but ended up using a table in this PDF about beer production. http://www.climateconservancy.org/cca_fattire.pdf

Edit: Ah, from reading elsewhere about this article, apparently their SUV calculations don't factor in tailpipe emissions.

Ah, there's the real kicker on this.
If they aren't including the energy requirments to actually move the car then it's a totally misleading conclusion.

If all they're doing is spreading out the production costs of the SUV over the life of it, and ignoring the operating costs (I mean costs energy wise of course) then they could make the data say whatever they wanted.

If I spread it out over a long enought time, I could show that an aircraft carrier is less damaging than a dog.


Care to post where you found that tidbit?