A table is worth a thousand words. This one appeared in a short op-ed piece by Paul Krugman, in the New York Times.
Boy, am I proud to be French sometimes!
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I saw an article in the local paper that a man had started to ride his horse on errands to save on gas.
Do you think maybe we should be installing bike racks that could double as hitching posts?
And they call it the French paradox? Just look at the discrepancy between walking in the US and France. Doesn’t seem like such a paradox after all, does it?
For every pound of gasoline burned in a car, roughly three pounds of carbon dioxide are generated by the combustion and pushed out the tailpipe, invisible to the naked eye (but very real!).
Put another way, a person who weighs a (lean) 110 pounds puts the equivalent of her/his own weight of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every time she drives 150 miles in a car that gets 25 mpg.
That’s food for thought.
Vive la France ! ( et vive le train ! )
More seriously, or at least more constructive, perhaps the American use more their cars as the alternatives are not very much developed… no ?
Other thing, the USA are so large compared to France or Switzerland…
I think that plays a lot. As an example, to go from Paris to Lyon, you can take the train instead of the plane or the car. It is a sound alternative…
But to go from San Francisco to New York by train, that must take a looot of time. and money.
Keep up the good work Marguerite, your blog has clearly become one of my very favorites !
From the viewpoint of an average American, the average French person is most assuredly deprived, if not absolutely hopeless. Unable to take a Hummer to the market for a loaf of sliced white bread that won’t even grow mold, the poor French soul will be forced to walk down the street a bit for a freshly baked baguette. Worse yet, if you want a cafe au lait in Paris you’re not going to be able to drive through and get one, even if you could get your Hummer down the street. You’ll just have to sit outside at one of those lovely sidewalk cafes and sip your coffee, talk with those around you, and maybe then go for a walk along the Seine. Now you can see how life is quickly getting worse for these poor deprived French folks. Since they aren’t workaholics like Americans, they’re going to have more time to do more walking for baguettes, coffee, fruit, wine, etc. Worse yet, all that walking around is going to result in slimming them down, cleaning the air, and generally giving them a longer life expectancy. Mon Dieu!!!
Gary, it’s worse than you think. For example, in many of the most famous Parisian clubs, even the more expensive ones, the dancing girls apparently don’t even get paid enough to afford tops. And, one of their tallest and most respected buildings doesn’t even have siding or air conditioning. Indeed, you can see right through it! Not only that, but the Gates of Hell themselves are right in Paris.
All of those things, yet I can’t wait to get back.
Perhaps change is in the offing as a “forced-choice”.
Endless economic growth is the shibboleth of the rich and powerful in our time. But the days of reckless domination of the Earth and its environs may be numbered, it would appear, because the idolatry, the magical thinking, the wishes and the selfish intentions that have driven endlessly expanding large-scale corporate activity and insatiable wealth accumulation could be about to run their course. The plans of the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians for ‘manufacturing’ “bubbles” and big-business boom times could lead the family of humanity to be threatened by the inadvertent loss of life as we know it and the unintentional destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://journals.aol.com/sesalmony/HumanandEnvironmentalHealth/
Well on the upside for us US citizens the trends are starting to move in the opposite direction. While I don’t see everyone giving up their H2s anytime soon more and more people are using mass transit, biking, or walking.
Thanks for the bits of humor here and there. To stay sane, let us not forget to laugh some times . . .
Marguerite, come on, the French don’t even know how to bike.
You might be amused by this plot that shows obesity and the percentage of short commutes by human power
http://tingilinde.typepad.com/starstuff/2008/04/moving-beyond-t.html