Posted on 04/16/2005 3:41:44 PM PDT by LibWhacker
LARGE sporting events have an "ecological footprint" thousands of times the size of the pitches they are played on. That's according to researchers who have calculated a sporting event's environmental impact for the first time.
Andrea Collins of Cardiff University in the UK and her colleagues looked at the 2004 soccer FA Cup final, held at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. They converted the energy and resources used on the day of the match into an ecological footprint - the hypothetical area of land required to support the use of those resources. Energy consumed, for example, was converted into the area of forest needed to soak up the carbon dioxide generated in its production, while food consumption was represented as the amount of farmland needed to make it. This method gave the match a footprint of 3051 hectares.
More than half the footprint came from transport. The 73,000 supporters collectively travelled nearly 42 million kilometres to reach the match. Fewer than half travelled by car, but car use generated 68 per cent of the transport footprint. If those fans had travelled by bus instead the footprint would have been 399 hectares smaller.
Food was the second-largest contributor, weighing in at 1381 hectares for the 36,500 snacks consumed. The researchers say this could easily be reduced: for example, substituting all the beef with chicken would have taken 428 hectares off the footprint.
The impact of waste disposal, at 146 hectares, was surprisingly low, says Collins. Recycling would have trimmed this by 39 hectares.
Collins argues that the footprint is a useful management tool to assess the effect of activities. "We'd like to see organisations and policy makers look at the results and hopefully instigate measures to reduce the impact," she says.
"It's in principle a very good idea," says environmental statistician and self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg of the University of Aarhus in Denmark. "But how do you translate energy used into an area?" The size of the footprint depends on what assumptions you make. For example, calculating the land in terms of windmills to generate the energy rather than forest cover to soak up CO2 would give a much smaller footprint.
I bet they just love NASCAR.
So when are they going to do the calculations about the thousands upon thousands of A.N.S.W.E.R. monkeys congregating, marching, (not to mention "Puking for Peace"), and Appeasing in order to prop up dictators?
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong...
I had a self admitted communist professor in college who taught a course on energy. He went on and on about what a waste of resources having golf courses in Arizona were.
That's the ticket. Duke was really just trying to lessen the environmental impact by their lackluster play during the NCAA.
Yes, it belongs. Rats are attacking on all fronts, attacking everything that real men like and enjoy, from material things to spiritual and intellectual things. It's just a bad case of penis envy, if you ask me.
Manchester United spanked Millwall yet the trees still grow, eggs still hatch and the sun will rise tomorrow. Collins is a lunatic. She probably couldn't get a ticket...
This is a laughably inept "study".
Almost all the consumption except travel, that occured
would have occured with or without the event. Those
people exist, and would have been eating, generating
waste (and in many cases traveling) anyway.
Keep up the great work enviromorons. You are fully
exposing your agenda, and your utter incompetence.
If you are eating away from home presumably you are not doing the eating at home which makes things a wash in a lot of ways imho.
Hmmmm. SUV's? I think you're right-- I would replace SUV's with pickup trucks.
:-D
Lol . . . Weren't Kerry and the rats trying to figure out how appeal to the NASCAR crowd last election? Guess that effort died with his election hopes.
Blame it on the Mets always stinkin' up the joint. Maybe this year will be better...
true - we can't destroy the earth. but we can certainly destroy the very thin and fragile layer of "biosphere" that supports us. if we do that, the earth will continue to revolve around the sun, a manner of microbes will still thrive and mutate, and perhaps some species of cockroach will be the dominant species! and the archangels will just shrug, tell God "we told you so.." and withdraw to another corner of creation. we'll be barely noticed...
I bet they didn't take into consideration the numbers that get trampled to death.
At first I wrote "Sports, guns and trucks." Then I thought, wait a minute!, 'ya can't leave out SUVs. Libs are going nuts over SUVs. So I put that in there, and a few other things. :-)
No. The humans have got to go.
Just put wind generators in the top floors of liberal think tanks, the media and Parliament. The torrent of hot air will easily provide enough power to light up every sports event in the country.
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