Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Your Dog Wants Steak.

I just saw a story today that says the carbon footprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle (SUV).

OK... as an owner of two dogs, when I first read the article I felt a twinge of guilt for once criticizing  Al Gore's hypocritical energy consumption.

Upon closer review, I did discover the comparison in the article uses the assumption that the average medium size dog consumes almost a pound of meat each day and the owner of the SUV only drives 6200 miles per year.  OK...given those comparative assumptions, maybe a dog does have a larger carbon pawprint.  However, I highly doubt these assumptions are reasonable.

With articles like this, it's no wonder that so many people are skeptical about the claims of climate change.

For the record, I take the issue of climate change very seriously.  As someone who leans conservative, I believe it should be a conservative's nature to "conserve"  while at the same time be concerned about how the human race is polluting the Earth that G-d gave us. However, I tend to be a bit skeptical about both the claims from the extreme left and the denials from the extreme right regarding this issue.

Besides, after evaluating my own energy consumption habits using an online carbon footprint calculator, I discovered my 10.4 tonnes of CO2 is just half that of the average American (20.4).

As a result, I'm feeling less guilty about my dogs right now.

Hey Gypsy and Maggie... bark once if you'd like a rib-eye for Christmas dinner or bark twice if you'd prefer a porterhouse.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

arf arf!!!

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Randy said...

What if my dog is driving an SUV?

Anonymous said...

I am not clear on how my sending money to Carbon Footprint.com will offset anything other than my bank account. I use what I use, and sending these folks money does nothing other than fund someone elses ability to have a bigger carbon footprint!