Tiddles and her Carbon Footprint

What is it with the Climate Change Nazis?

I just posted an article that we all ought to be veggies as cows fart a lot of CO2, and now some other Nazis are telling me that I should take account of my kitties emissions as part of the Global Warming FIGHT.

FFS - where will it end?

"Forget scratched furniture and suspicious patches on the living room carpet – your pet suddenly has a lot to answer for: the planet's environmental future no less.

Brenda and Robert Vale are professors of architecture at Victoria University, New Zealand, who specialise in sustainability and they claim the carbon pawprint of a pet dog (roughly the size of an alsatian), is twice that of a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year. Writing in Time to Eat the Dog, the pair use all sorts of calculations to compare the ecological impact of pets with common vehicles or household appliances. Instead of looking at the volume of carbon dioxide produced – the normal method of measuring carbon footprints – the Vales have used the amount of land necessary to grow enough food to "power" your dog, cat or your car. So, according to the couple, 0.84 hectares of land creates enough food to feed a German Shepherd for a year, but only half this space would be enough – if all the food was converted to energy it could use – to keep a Land Cruiser going for the same length of time.

Mind-bending stuff, and more than a little scientifically dubious ("I wouldn't have thought a dog had anywhere near as high a carbon footprint as a car," says John Buckey, managing director of carbonfootprint.com). But taking the statistics at face value, did you know that cats have a marginally smaller carbon footprint than a Volkswagen Golf (both roughly 0.15 hectares)? Or that hamsters have a footprint of 0.014 hectares, meaning if you had two it would be about as environmentally dangerous as owning a plasma television? Given the state of British broadcasting, the animals would probably be more entertaining..."