say what?

say what?

Karl T. Ulrich, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton, says that bicyclists are bad for the environment:

Traveling by bicycle, he argued in a recent paper, may cause more environmental harm than driving around in pollution-spewing, fossil-fuel-swallowing cars and sport utility vehicles.

How can this be? Bicyclists are healthier, he wrote, so they live longer. Over their lifetimes, they consume more energy than they save.

So, basically, if one lives a longer, healthier life, then one consumes more energy, whereas if one dies young then less energy is consumed. Following this to the logical conclusion, the environment would be better off if all those pesky humans would just go extinct.

It is this sort of absence of common sense that brings us such things as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, psychopaths like Eric R. Pianka, and the foolishness of the Kyoto accord.

Human beings are not simply consumers of energy. We are a part of the earth's ecosystem, not some alien life form that is invading the planet. Every meal you eat gets processed by your body and returned to the environment, where it becomes the nutrients for bacteria. Every breath you take becomes the CO2 that plants breathe. Circle of Life, folks. And any energy that a human being uses is not created or destroyed, it is simply converted into another form.

When I hear these enviro-death-cult-weenies, I just have to sadly shake my head. "We're causing global warming! We must Do Something! We must destroy our economies or better yet go extinct so the earth may survive!" Sheesh. Global warming is happening on globes across the solar system, as evidenced by the recession of the polar ice caps of Mars and the appearance of Red Spot Junior on Jupiter. Try and find an SUV on Mars. No, it is the sun itself that is giving off more energy.

"We're overpopulated! We're going to use the earth up!" Bah. If everyone lived at the same population density as in Singapore, then the entire earth's population could fit in an area about half the size of Mexico.

Have people lost all ability to think critically?

Technorati Tags: Environmentalism, Global Warming, Kyoto, Moonbats