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What's the Carbon Footprint of Bicycling?
Hugh Pickens writes "Brian Palmer writes that although none of the major manufacturers has released data on their energy consumption and how much greenhouse gas making a bicycle requires, Shreya Dave, a graduate student at MIT, recently estimated that manufacturing an average bicycle results in the emission of approximately 530 pounds of greenhouse gases. Therefore, given a 'typical U.S. diet,' you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint. However, calculating the total environmental impact of a mode of transit involves more than just the easy-to-measure metrics like mileage per gallon. Using a life-cycle assessment, Dave concluded that an ordinary sedan's carbon footprint is more than 10 times greater than a conventional bicycle's (PDF) on a mile-for-mile basis, assuming each survives 15 years and you ride the bike 2,000 miles per year. What about other ways to get to work? According to Dave's life-cycle analysis, the only vehicle that comes close to a bicycle is the peak-hour bus — and it's not really that close. A fully loaded bus is responsible for 2.6 times the carbon emissions total of a bicycle per passenger mile while off-peak buses account for more than 20 times as many greenhouse gases as a bicycle. What about the carbon footprint of walking? 'Walking is not zero emission because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place,' says environmentalist Chris Goodall. 'Food production creates carbon emissions.'"
The whole carbon footprint thing is overrated. and the carbon credits is just a way to make businesses feel better about wasting and polluting. What's the carbon footprint of sleeping? What's the carbon footprint of sitting on the couch watching TV? What's the carbon footprint of eating a microwave pizza? What's the carbon footprint of teleporting? geez
Since the whole carbon footprint thing is so grim, what way of doing myself in has least impact on the atmosphere. I was thinking of getting sucked into a jet engine, killing two birds with one stone as it were.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I walk to my shop every day and I am really, really worried how much I contribute to the global warming. Someone should get a grant and research that as well, because I won't be able to sleep otherwise.
...and wonder how so many otherwise intelligent people could have fallen for the pseudo-scientific boondoggle that is AGW hysteria.
Or we'll wonder why more of us didn't accept the hard facts and take the vital steps to save our world from self-destruction.
Like everybody else, I have my suspicions, but I don't really know which will occur.
By growing his bamboo bicycle frame into the shape he wants. Fairly cool!
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/growing-bamboo/
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
What is the carbon footprint of getting the first post? Have some consideration for the planet, man!
Circumcision is child abuse.
to calculate something that is fairy obvious and intuitive to most people.
Every animal has a carbon "footprint".
Some bacteria probably dont. But even yeast makes CO2 when fermenting.
It would be pretty funny to see the carbon footprint measurement applied to microscopic life (ad absurdum). Damn bacteria, polluting our air and making our cheese enviromentally unfriendly! Now I have to be vegan!
What's the carbon footprint of a plant? It's negative right?
I'd be surprised if there were many bicycle owners who didn't do 400 miles in one year, especially if they're using them for a daily commute. 2 miles each way every weekday will do that in 6 months. And bikes last for years. Mine used to belong to my father, who did 20 mile rides on it on a regular basis.
The 'instead of driving' thing makes this a bit more complex though. I don't have a car, so most of the time I use the bike the alternatives would be walking or getting a bus. The energy usage of the bike versus walking is difficult - going in to town I need to pedal about three times to coast there. Coming back, there's a gentle slope where it's about as much effort as walking, followed by a steep hill where the wheels aren't much help and I have to lift the mass of the bike as well as myself up the hill. If I bought a car, then I'd have to factor the cost of producing the car into the calculations.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I say do nothing.
1. Keep burning fossil fuels. Eventually they'll become so expensive, no one can afford them.
2. Let Global Warming happen. It will cause so much havoc with crop yields, sea level rises, fisheries collapsing, disease and whatnot, that it will force correction of the base problem.
3. The base problem is that you have 7 billion people all trying to live like Americans. The planet cannot support that level of consumption; hence it will be self correcting.
According to the article the major contribution to the CO2 footprint is the construction of infrastructure. They divide the construction cost of bicycle infrastructure with the number of bicycles to get a CO2 footprint. So the argument goes: If there were twice as many bicycles then we would need twice as many bicycle lanes.
A serious question I've always had for this crowd is, what are the big picture ramifications for http://goo.gl/fFOhBthis mode of transport?
Let's see, walking is not zero carbon because of the food energy.
After the carbon cost of making the bike, biking's not zero carbon either, for the same reason.
But I only ride my bike for exercise, thus I don't save anything vis-a-vis my commute to work, and I have the food energy cost. Therefore my bike riding definitely has a carbon footprint.
Oh noes. Guess I better stop riding and turn into an obese blob for the sake of the environment.
How about this thing?
It's entirely made of wood.
I dump tons of carbon into the environment each day driving my big lifted jeep to work, and some days, I even drive my bigger F350 diesel truck, just because I can. AND, AND, on the weekends I take my RV and boat out and play, dumping even more carbon. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about any of it, nor do I give a damn whether the morons who come with this garbage like it.. Carbon footprint, another bit of greenie garbage pseudo science, just like the social science feel good crap they've been foisting on the world for generations.
...it is still going to save the rider in gas money (provided they're riding the thing whenever they can, obviously a bike rotting in a garage does no one any good).
I see a lot of people screaming left and right about how all these technologies like mass transit and solar power and such are "just as bad", but the end result is always the assertion that "we should just do whatever because nothing we do will ever help so screw it". Here in Madison, WI, where there are a fair number of cyclists, there are still those people that go out of their way to prevent them from riding. Every article about a bike riding event warrants thousands of comments about how much these people wish they could go drive over the riders in their Canyonero and other such crap.
Every little bit helps, does it not? And why so much hostility for green energy initiatives? Are we just going to keep on burning oil and coal for power? I mean, clearly we need to start coming up with alternatives, right?
We live in a system where our living causes carbon to be outputted. The point should be to reduce that footprint so the natural sources can take it out of our atmosphere or do whatever with it. The carbon footprint of a bike vs a car is crazy different. Hell I don't think most people realize that buying a new car instead of fixing an old one is better for the environment. The summary even goes to point out that walking isn't carbon neutral. DUH growing food costs energy. Sometimes I wonder how people can be so short sighted when it comes to highly complicated systems. They see only one step in front of them. Very sad
I bought a used bike.
Additional benefit: I can leave it outside in the city all the time without worrying about it being stolen.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint.
And my 11 mile round trip to and from work? Already covered in two months of the first year.
Bikes also damage roads far less than cars do. A heavy bicycle weighs around 30 pounds
Slightly misleading, as it doesn't take into account the 170-pound rider on the bicycle. But I've read that the damage done to a road by a vehicle is somewhere between the third and fourth power of the weight per axle.
My current way of getting to and from work is a bicycle during good weather or an off-peak bus during rain and during late fall and winter. But the article says off-peak buses are horrid. Should I change it?
So if I read this right an off peak bus has twice the carbon footprint of a car. Nice.
I ride my bike for two reasons and two reasons only: To lose weight and [uh]....make that one reason.
I used to bike to work because we had shower facilities. Now that I work somewhere without showers I no longer bike to work....even though work is only 2-1/2 miles.
I still bike when I can so I can look good for strippers.
There's nothing in the picture to suggest he's actually "shaping" the bamboo at all.
All the bamboo parts of the bike appear to be straight - with plenty of "hemp epoxy composite" to hold it all together.
This nation (USA) is the greatest on the face of the earth
[citation needed]
Also by riding year round and not owning a car how much of the medical systems' resources am I saving versus being the same person and driving instead all my life? That should be calculated too.
"Walking requires food production" How about just being alive; forget the food. We breath, burp and fart.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s10e06-manbearpig
What is the carbon foot print of carbon footprint studies? Why don't these savants calculate the reduction in carbon use by using a bike instead of a car every day for a year? Cars take carbon to make too. I wish these scientists and politicians had parents that taught them how to be human instead of cogs in a debt slave construct. For example, its a good idea to tell your kids that if you look for things to bitch about, you'll find them. Guaranteed.
Sounds like a great idea! I suddenly have the urge to go to a junkyard and find a whole bunch of tires!
Its actually somewhat misleading to include food-footprint in this analysis.
Firstly it has a bad history - such as people comparing food consumption with oil consumption while ignoring the food consumption of the car occupant.
Secondly, and more importantly, because it's non-standard. Comparing CO2 emissions is hard because all sorts of areas overlap. Therefore there's some commonly accepted approaches. Among them is to separate CO2 emissions from food production from CO2 from personal transportation. This way you can say "A person has a Carbon footprint of X. Y% of this is from their diet and Z% is on their personal transportation". It avoids making dubious assumptions about people's activities, (such as assuming car occupants eat only the calories they need and are not overweight, or that all cycle routes are flat, or whatever).
It is also much more useful for comparison and policy making - for example the logical response to finding that people have large food-related carbon footprints is to address food production methods, not to make people exercise less!
You're doing it wrong.
The idea isn't to get us to recognize how much we're damaging the earth. The idea is to get us to believe that by virtue of our existence we're messing up the earth for our elite powers that be. Which of course is nonsense, the earth had plenty more carbon floating around before we got here, which plants happily turned into oxygen for us. Plant more trees instead of selling them across borders to make enough government cash to pay your fat pension. Someone should figure out the carbon footprint of government.
Bicycles don't have feet.
Nor is there anything on his website to describe that either, after a quick gleaning and reading of the marketing pdf. I therefore blame Wired for a bad article and instead link the homepage of said bikes for further convenience.
To say "walking isn't zero" is an obvious case of having an incorrect measure. A human needs food energy to exist. The increase in food energy used for the human to walk isn't necessarily a subtraction from the input. The human might eat 3 big macs a day. Just one of them might be necessary to fuel the humans walking energy needs (I'm assuming the walk less than 100 meters per day). if the human eats 3 big macs per day; walks monday through friday but does not walk for the rest of the week there is no measurable carbon consumption than if the human walked all 7 days whilst consuming 3 big macs per day. 21 Big Macs Consumed == 21 Big Macs Consumed. It is absurd to believe a human will only eat if they need to then expend energy.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
When you drive you don't eat or go to the doctor?
The manufacturing process of the bicycle will have roughly the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car door. And these researchers want us to think you have to put 400 miles on the bike before break-even?
I'm sorry, but if they can make such an obvious biased mistrake, why should anybody give even a moment's thought to the rest of their study?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
How about the carbon footprint it took me to read this or the research used to produce this. Good Lord, please stop considering Al Gore serious...
What about the people who make the bike? Did they take into account how much they eat?
I am surprised they didn't count in the CO2 we exhale. Imagine that - living is not zero emission, let's commit a group suicide in the name of our mother earth.
Enough of this BS.
because just like with motorcycles... one day its too hot, then its too cold, oh I am late, its raining or will, snow?!?!, rabid weasel alert, and so on.
People make all sorts of wonderful justifications but most never stick with it. Many also don't have the opportunity to ride to work. We usually settle down and work where we can especially in a market like this. Let alone having a job where riding to work and being able to clean up is a possibility.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Like pedestrians . . . (cue snare drum rim shot).
Have you ever tried to cross Randall at Dayton on foot? With the walk sign on? With some fine upstanding citizen on a 15-speed bombing through the red light? Or at that marked crosswalk across University near where Bob's Copy Shop in University used to be? When that walk sign is on, I guess the red light for the cross traffic doesn't apply to cyclists in the bike lane.
Of course, as a pedestrian, you are never of any danger of being hit, with the force of an NFL free safety making a flying tackle, only taking the hit, on cement, without helmet or pads, because the cyclists know how to weave around any pedestrian who dares to enter a crosswalk.
Seriously and all snark aside, I would have a lot more sympathy for the concerns of cyclists if there was a little more respect for people on foot. Is that so anti-green?
High density has severe negative costs
Well proven, sir!
Ride the wave, get some public exposure, but in the end they just spouted some rubbish.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of all that fake research is.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
"because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place"
But that's only a second or third order effect. The carbon in the vegetation or dead animal bits that you eat are generally from farmed sources and so are replaced with carbon from the air. The carbon cost is only from doing the farming (e.g. non-carbon neutral tractors). And of course you need to eat anyway, and the increase in food consumption is likely to be small for most people.
While it's true that the production of food used as fuel for the biking (or walking) creates carbon emissions, you have to balance it against the need to exercise. So you should compare the carbon emissions for the driving plus the carbon spent on exercising at the gym to balance things out. (Of course, some people don't exercise, so you should add in the carbon emissions of the hospital stays after their heart attacks or strokes...)
I do find it stupid how people seem opposed to getting off fossil fuels etc because "it won't help". Yeah... but how about we not burn fossil fuels and drive everywhere because pumping noxious gases into the atmosphere and slowly getting fatter are bad things?
That said, I've seen plenty of inconsiderate dickish cyclists who cycle on pavements and such. Of an evening I usually walk for exercise along Southsea Esplanade in Portsmouth (esplanade = long paved section alongside the sea), which itself has a long cycle lane alongside its entire length. The number of cretins I see cycling on the esplanade and completely ignoring the cycle lanes is really beginning to grate...
I write bullshit
My favorite is the leap from "Well, making solar panels and other clean energy technologies, as well as buses and bicycles, causes pollution, too, so we might as well just keep on truckin' because fuck it."
You know, it doesn't happen very often, but sometimes I really envy those that think that they're going to be raptured up to heaven or something one day, or that the world is going to end in 2012, so that they don't have to worry about a fucking thing in their lives beyond the immediate future. Must be nice to not care at all about the effect you have on the world around you, but I still don't understand why they have to try to prevent anyone else from at least trying. Even if I thought every person around me was going to die in a zombie apocalypse, I'm still not going to slash the tires on their getaway vehicle. Why so many others feel the need to do so is beyond me...
Reduced medical costs from better health need to be included, too. I commute to work on a bicycle, lost 40+ pounds and feel better all around. Before that it was just recreational riding.
Other benefits: sharper reasoning. If everybody rode a bike Obama would still be a 'community organizer' in Chicago, keeping a small number of people poor and dependent on the government. Now he does this for the whole country.
Road rage would disappear, too. Regular physical activity reduces stress.
And after the initial 400 miles it's all gravy. A good set of tires (Schwalbe Marathon+) lasts 3 or more years. I have studded tires for winter use and they should be good for 4-5 years.
Like all forms of life, we increase the entropy of our environment. Good thing we have a sun adding more energy to it all the time.
If our carbon footprint is excessive, we will make the world unlivable by ourselves a bit sooner. But we will never get to a zero carbon footprint so long as we are alive, and therefore I think we would better direct our efforts at economically viable solutions, rather than just trying to guilt-trip people into doing the impossible.
People who don't like bike-riding are not going to bike to work, no matter how much you yammer on about their car's environmental impact.
Find a different solution.
Here's a novel way to reduce your commute carbon footprint by 20% or even 40%: Work from home one or two days a week. I WFH 5 days a week. No commute. No A/C. Almost no showers. What could be greener? Now, if I could only find someone to pay me money for this work...
destroy all life on earth!
-- the author of this post is a Star Trek Fan AND a German
Going to work I have done in the past 7 miles per day to 14 miles per day, about 250 days per year (not counting week end biking, or doing 400 miles on a trip). That is about 1750 to 3500 miles per year (actually counting week end I have on my bike i have nowadays about 2200 per year). That is quite an heavy usage...
The costs and resources for segregated lanes should be assigned to motorized traffic. Cars and trucks are what make roadways so dangerous that people can't walk or ride bikes on them without putting their lives in peril.
Without cars and trucks, you wouldn't need separate bike lanes.
'Food production creates carbon emissions.'
luckily photosysthesis eats up some of that carbon...
The world cannot be completely 0 emissions or all the plants would die off once the CO2 is all gone.
(But yeah, we still need to reduce the amount of CO2 we pump out)
than the blood splatter with ancillary innards.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
probably not, and you're forgetting the side effect of better health.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Dead people have a smaller carbon footprint. Cycling in the current 107 degree heat through heavy traffic is a sure way to achieve that reduction.
Therefor, given a 'typical U.S. diet,' you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint.
So building a car has a zero initial carbon footprint? Seriously, I consider myself to be a pretty environmentally friendly, but these studies are ridiculous because they imply that we shouldn't put out ANY carbon into the atmosphere. Well, why don't we just wipe out all life on earth then? What we should be more concerned about is carbon balance. If we produce carbon emissions, we need to find a way to convert that carbon back into a non-gaseous form. Without industrial production, plant life can easily do that. With the mass development of industry and machinery, we need to find ways to augment it.
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Even worse, don't forget that it takes ten pounds of crude oil to deliver a pound of food to a plate, when everything is added together.
Look, you need to be careful when you use statistics from sources that don't spell out exactly how the figure is generated. A quick google http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_one_gallon_of_crude_oil_weigh search of how much oil weighs per gallon comes up with about 7 pounds per gallon for light sweet crude. Now, today's oil price for West Texas Intermediate is $85 per barrel http://www.oil-price.net/. There are 42 gallons per barrel so the cost per pound is
42 gallons * 7 pounds per gallon = 294 pounds for a barrel
$85 / 294 pounds = .29 cents per pound
So according to your statement above, food requires 10 pounds of oil per pound of food, SO the average pound of food should cost at least $2.90 because that is how much it would take to cover just the cost of oil. It ignores cost of land, labor, equipment, seed, or processing and profit to farmer and retailer. Sorry, that doesn't sound right. Staples (corn, rice, wheat, potatoes) certainly don't cost that much per pound. Legumes don't. Most fresh fruit doesn't. Milk doesn't. Cheese will, but some cheeses on sale won't. Vegetable oil doesn't. Olive oil might. Most meat will cost at least that much. Maybe the figure you quoted was just referring to meat or processed foods.
In any case, before you use figures, just make sure that number makes sense. (I am reminded of the time in college when as a grader in a physics class, the students were asked to find how high a pressurized leak on a water tank would shoot into the air. Two student's answers had the water at escape velocity speeds, sending them into orbit the earth.)
If somebody is overweight, at all, and that person is burning off fat that he/she should burn off anyway; would that not affect the calculations?
What if somebody rode a bike to work, instead of going to the gym?
What's the carbon footprint of reading yet another absurd study on carbon footprints?
It takes less to build a bicycle then a car. It takes a lot less to power it. As a bonus, the human powering it gets exercise while doing so (which a lot of humans really need). We really needed a research grant to figure this out?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
If it costs $2700, that implies there's a fair bit of energy going into making it, whether directly or indirectly. If that's mostly labor costs, what do you think those employees do with that money?
Certainly there are greener and less green alternatives when looking at similar price points, but I don't see how spending 10x the amount on a bike could possibly be considered a "greener" alternative.
Johnson, L. (1969, July). America, we just landed on the friggin' moon! Houston, TX.
To calculate your carbon foot print you need only multiply the amount of fascism and eugenics by the frequency of repetition
(f+e) * r =
Holy crap, you shouldn't even be here, call the green police
Carbon footprint of his numerous mansions and private jet use....
The only solution to the carbon problem is to exterminate the population and leave the bodies out so that you don't leave a carbon footprint trying to bury them. Turns out the nazi's and the khmer rouge were more green than greenpeace!
The carbon footprint thing is overrated, but not useless. The problem is that it is often used without context. Canada is replacing their paper currency with plastic, for example, and it has a much better carbon footprint, in part because the plastic does not break down and thus does not release carbon into the atmosphere.
But that also means that what goes into the landfill does not biodegrade, and that we are using a non-renewable resource rather than a renewable resource for the money. (Even though it is only a tiny amount of that nonrenewable resource). Those considerations should be included in the environmental impact analysis of using the new money, but IRRC, they were not--the whole emphasis was on carbon footprint.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I wonder if the study takes into account the fairly regular situations where cars have to slow down to overtake a bike, thus using more fuel than if the bike hadn't been there and a constant speed been maintained?
.
Based on my personal expenses, bike commuting and car commuting work out to be about the same. I'm old fashioned enough that I figure carbon costs are a proxy for energy costs and energy costs are reflected in dollars. Some of you will disagree but it works for me. Over the past four years, I've spent about the same commuting by bike twice a week versus driving 3 times a week. It's a twenty mile commute so I've logged about 8000 miles over the past four years. The obvious cost of gas is missing from the bike side of the ledger but the biking gear and upkeep on the bike more than offset that savings. Expenses like tires, tubes, wheel truing, cassettes, chains and replacing torn gear from the occasional spill add up. Moreover, I figure some drunk or texting driver will probably hit me one day and that expense will add several multiples to the biking expense.
The article over simplifies the concepts of sustainable transportation and calorie consumption in the same ways thinly veiled "anti-green" articles attack more sustainable forms of energy production. In the energy debate, there are arguments against solar because of the lack of sun in Seattle, arguments against nuclear energy because of the waste that would be created if the entire world was put on nuclear power, and arguments against wind farms in natural wildlife reserves. They use worst-case scenarios to judge methods of alternative energy creation instead of how they would actually be implemented.
The same goes for sustainable transportation and this article. FTFA: "If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip." And that assumes I'm going to drink a milk. From a cow. After a warm walk. Who the hell drinks milk after getting sweaty? People drink water or have some fruit! Instead of postulating what the worst can be, why not survey people to find out what *actually* happens? Or worse-- why bother considering food at all?
Even in the "worst-case" scenario where everyone in the USA stopped driving private vehicles and just rode bikes and public transit as necessary, would we all focus on beef to make up for our additional caloric needs? And would it make such a massive hit to the environment when compared to to complete loss of people buying and driving their own cars? -- Not that I'm advocating such pie-in-the-sky thinking, but if you want to bring in cow-pollution, let's really compare it to the pollution from manufacturing, transporting, using, and disposing of cars. I can be disingenuous, too!
Lastly, focusing only on the mythical carbon footprint or GHG emissions of any mode of travel is BS science. It's only for "wow" and "fear" effect. You have weigh to the relative benefits of a mode for the passenger, operator, and third parties (cost, health, pollution, etc.), and the habits that may come along with regularly using a mode of transportation (lethargy and car driving for example). There are entire schools of study on sustainable transportation and summarizing it in a childish (trollish?) article is silly.
It's not about finding single a form of transportation that is a "winner"-- it's about finding a mode that is best for you, where you are now, where you need to be, and when you need to be there. Sometimes driving your truck alone on the road is sensible-- like when you're heading over to buddy to help him move. Other times, it's stupid-- like when you drive 3 blocks down the street to pick up some tic-tacs.
Regular Trips:
Walking is suggested for round trips under two miles -- It helps keep the person healthy and burns no fossil fuels in the process. When you get home, don't raise 40 cows for slaughter.
Bicycling is suggested for trips for round trips under 15 miles (fitness and competency varying) -- It helps to keep the person healthy and burns no fossil fuels in the process. See above comment about raising cows.
Bus Transit is suggested for round trips under 15 miles or longer trips depending on availability-- It burns fossil fuels, but it's like a giant carpool.
Train Transit is is suggested for round trips over 30 miles or longer trips depending on availability-- It burns fossil fuels (directly and/or indirectly), but it's like a giant carpool.
Carpooling and Vanpooling is suggested for 20+ mile commutes -- It reduces the amount of pollution per user in areas where transit is not an option
Irregular Trips
Carpool (see above)
Passenger Jet - In a packed jet and for trips greater than 700 miles, you're actually doing pretty good when it comes to your share of greenhouse gases. The longer the trip, the better since the largest concentration of fuel burning comes at take-off.
You al
I think you need to back this up with numbers. There's an awful lot of diseases-of-the-unfit that cycling makes less likely, to the point that in one Danish study, non-bicycle commuters were observed to have a 39% higher mortality rate. Could just be a coincidence, of course. In my own anecdotal case, riding a bicycle allows me to avoid various forms of medical care -- in my 20s, with a cranky knee, whose symptoms were relieved by cycling, the knee doctor offered the advice, "I can cut you open, or you can ride your bike, your choice." Now, it tends to relieve symptoms of arthritis in general (on those joints that get flexed-not-impacted by riding) as well as keeping my weight down and my blood chemistry in a good place (we've got before/after comparisons, it's pretty striking).
Your cost of food-production estimates are wildly overstated. This has been addressed by people like Pimentel, and if you avoid meat, you are probably doing okay. As a general rule, the cost of a food item sets an upper bound on the energy required to produce it. So for example, a gallon of milk costs about the same as a gallon of gasoline -- so it could not take more than a gallon of gasoline's worth of energy to produce that milk (this ignores taxes, etc, but round numbers). A gallon of 1% milk has enough energy to fuel a cyclist for about 150 miles -- 2% and whole milk, much more (the rule is 50kCal per mile). So the bicycle beats a car there, pretty easily.
It's also possible to do better -- oats, in particular, yield 5 kCal of food energy for every 1 kCal of fossil fuel input (units are a bear, I know), so that if you cook them carefully (not usually the case) you can get an effective mpg of 3000. Cooking them carelessly lowers that to 2000 or even 1000mpg.
And it's been a few months since I last saw Manhattan, but the guns must be carefully hidden, because I didn't see any, and it was bloody expensive, which normally suggests that people wish to be there, not the opposite.
Now, I'm not one of the rabid global warming fanaticists who think we're going to have a water-world in six months, but even I can see the flaw in this study. If a bicycle, which is several orders of magnitude simpler than a car, produces X amount of carbon to build, wouldn't a car produce C * X carbon to build, where C is the number of times more complex a car is than a bicycle?
Damn hippies. This is what happens when the government funds climate research. These people have way too much free time and we're all paying for it.
Just for spite, I'm going to drive my gas guzzling SUV up to home depot, buy some aerosol cans and just spray them in the air. That'll offset any "savings" you get from buying a "green" bike. :-p
I mean, how many angels can balance on the head of a pin ? To argue that bicycles are , in any sense whatsoever, as polluting as cars, is just silly. Smart doesn't equal wise
When will we be rid of these sick people propagating this absurd lie about carbon emissions?
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
I doubt that it was taken into account.
We are competing for our machines.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
The hostility comes because most green initiatives involve the use of force. Either force to collect tax money to be wasted on things that are never used like many mass transportation systems. Or force to hike up the prices of things people want to use like gasoline. I have no problem with environmentalists that live their own lives and use them as an example. When they use force to make other people bend to their will is when I object.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Not at all. I'm guessing it's mostly labor cost and profits.
Probably the same things the customer would have done with the money if he hadn't bought the bike, so it doesn't matter.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of all that fake research is.
I would like to know what part of it you think is "fake", and why. If you actually read the links you can get to the sources for their research, and how they arrived at the numbers mentioned.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Hell I don't think most people realize that buying a new car instead of fixing an old one is better for the environment.
I'll spare you the "fixed that for you" but you totally got that backward.
It's the fault of business owners and landlords.
I would utterly KILL to live within reasonable biking distance of work. That reasonable distance is 5 miles. something that I can make it at a leisure pace within 30 minutes and not breaking a sweat. Well I cant afford to do that because the company I work for chooses to pay the lowest possible wages to ensure highest possible profits making sure I cant afford any of the condos, apartments or homes near work within that 5 mile radius.
If businesses were paying honest wages, located themselves where the worker base lived, AND land-lords/land-owners overcharging heavily because of the excuse of " it's the price the market will tolerate" causes the situation that most workers have to commute a distance that requires the use of polluting transportation along with the fact that in the USA the corporate hostility towards mass transit making sure that light rail and other systems to remove the need for single cars to be driven to the workplace exist. It is why I ignore all this "carbon footprint" stuff because it is a worthless venture. If it was actually important than businesses and governments would be making it priority #1 to build infrastructure for public transportation and encourage companies to move to where the workers are as well. Also real incentives for carpooling by charging extra taxes on any vehicle that exceeds a certain threshold. IF you can afford to drive your Ford Excursion XLT alone into work 45 miles every day, then you can also afford an extra $2500 a year on your licensing costs used to fund building and operating of new mass transit systems.
But it's all moot. Everyone will bitch and moan about "carbon footprint" and do nothing about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
i got a bicycle to take to the downtown train which is 2 miles from my house. I calculate that time is what i will use to gauge the success of my bicycle purchase.
Using the car to drive to the station is lazy. Walking is too slow and i don't want to be all sweaty the second i get to my desk job. Bicycle wins.
here's a small list of other, probably unacknowledged modes of transportation
inline skate
skateboard
heelys
golf cart
segway
horse
donkeh
camel
piggyback
titanic
deathstar
Unfortunately, some sort of force is needed to overcome the tragedy of the commons.
According to the article the major contribution to the CO2 footprint is the construction of infrastructure. They divide the construction cost of bicycle infrastructure with the number of bicycles to get a CO2 footprint. So the argument goes: If there were twice as many bicycles then we would need twice as many bicycle lanes.
In most cities (in the USA), there are so few bike commuters that doubling the number of bikes on the roads wouldn't need any infrastructure upgrades. On bike to work day in San Francisco (when many more people bike commute than usual), I barely noticed any increase in bikes on my route to work. And (at least in my city) there's very little new construction involved in creating bike infrastructure - usually bike lanes are squeezed into existing traffic lanes (sometimes by removing parking)
If there was a significant shift from cars to bikes, bikes could take over more of the car infrastructure without any additional construction cost (which would require much less maintenance - a bike causes a tiny fraction of the road wear compared to a car/truck).
At 35mph my car gets about 30 MPG.
At 7mph my car get about 5 MPG.
The 5 cars ahead of me and the 4 behind me (assuming they all are also only 4 cylinder engines, 1 or more passenger) are doing no better.
Why aren't we going faster and getting reasonable mileage?
Why, why, why....
Could it be the low footprint faery holding everyone up proving how eco it is?
No footprint for that asphalt it is riding on either.
I really like how it drives its car 20 miles, parks it in front of my house, then rides the last mile to work.
Ohhhh so eco friendly.
No brain, no pain.
It seems like the only way to truly remove my carbon footprint is to cut off my feet...
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Walking is not zero emission because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place
And if your food energy is anything from Taco Bell, you are most definitely responsible for extra greenhouse gasses.... *badump bump ching*
I'm here all week.
They're looking at this from a wrong point of view.
If you are using a bike for transit, then that means you're not using a car instead. So instead of calculating the bike's carbon footprint for that day, calculate the difference between the two and see how much better it is.
"What about the carbon footprint of walking? 'Walking is not zero emission because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place,' says environmentalist Chris Goodall. 'Food production creates carbon emissions"
Driving or sitting in the car isn't zero emission either. But if they want idiotic details, let's go for it, walking and biking is healthier, which means a lot less drug use and research (which branches into a lot of industries), fewer doctor visits, longer life span which in turn means more productivity. And so on.
There was someone comparing a bike with a car in terms of use length. Well, there are a lot of people who have decade old bikes, but when it comes to cars, changing it at least every decade is the norm.
It's funny, I always hear what a waste "mass transit" is and how no one ever rides it, but every time I take the bus, it's either damn near full or standing room only. The worse the economy has gotten, the more people have started riding.
Yes, it's subsidized by those that do and do not use it alike. However, those that don't ride still benefit because that's just that many less cars on the road every day, which are going to be increasing your daily commute, which is going to increase the gas you use, which is only going to cost you more as gas gets more scarce and thus more expensive.
I don't know what your area is like, but where I'm at, if all those people utilizing alternate means of transportation started driving, it would be a nightmare. Our roads can't even handle the traffic we have now; during rush hour a 10 minute drive can take 30, and I'm talking highway driving. Your mileage may vary, of course, but honestly, I bet it doesn't vary by as much as you think it does...
Sushi is more expensive than gasoline, so are most "lean and trendy" foods that I tend to see the bike commuter crowd eat (at least at my work). I sincerely doubt they are saving money on gas, as they are replacing it with the kinds of expensive food that you can use to sustain exercise.
You make the same mistake TFA does - you assume that food intake has no cost. For this type of analysis, you have to take into account the energy needed to produce the food consumed. TFA assumes food intake is constant between the car/bus rider, walker, and bicyclist, which is rather silly if you're going to be using your bike to replace your car on a 5-10 mile daily commute. All that energy for pedaling has to come from somewhere.
Industrialized society has shifted food production away from labor-intensive operations in favor of mechanized operations which are energy-intensive. That is, the cost of energy is so cheap compared to the cost of manual labor, that for many industrialized food products the fuel-energy used to grow it exceeds the nutritional energy of the food. That's why you get seemingly counter-intuitive results such as corn ethanol in certain cases being net energy-negative. IIRC, energy from glucose converted to ATP to mechanical work vial cellular respiration is about 30% efficient, which is approximately the same as a good ICE. So if you were to compare fuel-energy used by a gas-powered moped vs. food-production-energy for a bicycle, for industrialized nations I'm not at all certain that the bicycle would win.
... I wanted to kill myself, but then again, throwing myself in front of a bus isn't carbon neutral. What's the carbon-footprint of a handgun? A rope? A bridge, calulated per jumper? Aaaarrgggh.... Damned if i do and damned if i don't I guess i'll just hold my breath... (...and no, i'm _not_ being all that serious...)
Timeo hominem unius libri
Most people already eat too much food, so they don't need to eat anything extra to ride the bike for 5-10 miles per day.
Maybe riding the bike provides incentive to eat more, but without further data it would be a hasty conclusion. Maybe it is motorists who eat more because they are more likely to grab a candy bar after filling up.
human-powered biking burns more fossil fuels than e-biking, due to the fossil fuels used in fertilizing, processing and transporting food (even for vegetarians).
Let that last one sink in. Burning coal to power an electric bike is more environmentally friendly than eating a vegetarian diet and pedalling!
You're assuming that a human powered cyclist eats significantly more than a electric powered cyclist -- I don't eat any more food when I bike, if anything, I eat less since my weekend meals tend to be bigger than my weekday meals (when I commute to work). And if I didn't bike, I'd be burning off calories by running or at the gym.
We just need to get everyone to stop breathing, leave that untainted Oxygen in the air, stop putting our evil human carbon on all of it!
Wow! You environmentalist nut jobs are really sick. If you froze in a hut you'd really have a low carbon footprint too, but life wouldn't be much fun, would it? Then again you environmentalist Flagellants love to suffer. Well, I'm off to gas up my Tahoe, which I drive 20 miles to work alone.
an ill wind that blows no good
Strictly speaking, the wording of the summary is wrong. One doesn't have to go 400 miles on the bike instead of a car to cover the carbon footprint. One simply has to avoid 400 miles of driving. If you really had to get somewhere, sure, some of those miles will be replaced by bike riding. But not all travel is like that. The urge to get out and go somewhere on a nice day might be satisfied with far fewer miles of travel, or bad weather or simply not feeling up for the ride might cause some to opt out of a few outings.
Of course staying home has some footprint too, and with huge screens many of our entertainment systems now us more energy than the vacuum tube powered color televisions of the 60's.. Even those big iMacs feel pretty toasty on the back. Maybe one of these days some innovative company will put light-pipe connections on computer and television displays to allow supplementing or replacing back-lighting with light piped in from outside. Surely someone like Apple would have no trouble with on the fly adjustment of the monitor color profile (compensating for some changes in back-light intensity and color temperature) and many systems (TVs at least) already dynamically control back-light output (and adjust video to compensate) to make bleed-through less noticeable on dark scenes and to save energy. Yes, in not actually reflecting how good the screen is, those dynamic contrast numbers are somewhat bogus, but at least there's an upside to the tech behind it). Monitors could have an optional energy-stretching mode where gamma is altered on marginal light-pipe input or when ambient light is high to reduce the contrast in darker areas effectively making them more visible without more back-light power. The energy savings could be huge.
Maybe our bikes could be fitted with disc magnets on the wheels and stationary coils on the frame to produce power when going downhill, possibly charging mobile devices or a battery for a light, or even warming the seat in winter.
Then there's the low-methane diet...
Why I don't like mass transit (vs. cars):
1) You spend 5-10 minutes waiting at the station for it (if you are lucky 10-40 minutes if you are not). For short trips, this is not worth it.
2) You have to walk to it some distance, so you have to physically carry everything, and you can't carry much (like laundry, or groceries, etc).
3) They are often dirty and vandalized. The dirt is not yours, so you don't know what exactly it is or what diseases it may carry. Also, since the train is a public facility, no one has an incentive to clean it.
4) They often are less comfortable -- designed for ease of cleaning rather than comfort.
5) When riding them you are "in public" rather than in a more private space. When riding a car you have to worry about driving -- but on the bus you have to worry about your fellow passengers, who may get violent.
6) They generally don't go exactly where you want to go -- so you have to transfer (more waiting) or do a lot of walking, or both.
7) Costs you money every-time you use them.
8) Often have restrictions on what you can carry/do. (Just try taking one to the shooting range with a couple rifles and pistols, and ammunition. Also, no eating/drinking.)
9) Limited hours.
Why cars are OK (compared to bikes):
1) Sometimes it is way too hot (e.g. heat index above 100*F). Sometimes it is way too cold (windchill below 32*F). Sometimes it is raining, snowing, or there ice on the road.
2) Hills are a pain.
3) Starts are a pain.
4) If you ride on the road, it is dangerous and cars are pissed at you because you are in the way. If you ride on the sidewalk, pedestrians are annoyed because you are moving fast, and quiet, and you have to bike around them (if you don't slow down to their speed you are a dick).
5) Other bicyclists are dicks (and being a bicyclist, maybe you are too?). They also like to spend money and brag about it. The blow through stop signs and street lights, and generally act as though everyone else is in the wrong.
6) Bikes can be easily stolen. Most bike locks can be undone in less than a minute.
7) You can't carry much of anything (backpack + basket + tire-rack). Especially if hills are involved.
8) You pretty much arrive everywhere drenched in sweat.
9) Also, they are dangerous. The most significant injuries in my life (so far) was an accident between me and a cub, that nearly took my two front teeth).
10) You can't go anywhere. Seriously, you are limited to basically a 15 mile radius. You can't see your relatives 400 miles away with a bike, unless you have a week to go there.
11) Extra dangerous at night.
12) Bike helmets are dork city.
I lived in Los Angeles for four years without a car. Living in Louisiana now, my primary mode of transportation is a bike currently.
Every article about a bike riding event warrants thousands of comments about how much these people wish they could go drive over the riders in their Canyonero and other such crap.
There's a strong backlash for a lot of reasons, one of them being a sort of denial. If you offer convincing evidence that people's behaviors are causing massive problems, then they either need to change their behavior, or they need to react violently against the evidence. Nobody wants to admit to themselves that they're a bad person, that their selfish behavior causes problems. People certainly don't want to find out that their addiction to convenience is going to destroy the world. The only remaining recourse is to hate people who are trying to change things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_charitable_countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Think you have some misconceptions there about USA carrying the world on it's back... You don't do shit for other country's except when it can benefit you with some cheap oil or generating some more profit for the weapon-industry... Or give some more power to the government...
Also, riding a bike or bus to work don't exclude you from having a car.... And it helps both the environment and your wallet and even the economy by reducing the amount of money going abroad... All things that are good for your wallet, family and country...
I throw my bike on the back of my SUV to drive to the park. To which vehicle do I assign the Carbon Demerits?
Who cares what the 'carbon footprint' of bicycling is? There is no 'global warming', there is no 'man made global warming', so it's all a load of tosh.
www.climatedepot.com
Because I have to eat and food produces greenhouse gases? Yeah, that must be it! Laws of thermodynamic prove that I absolutely have to eat extra so that I can keep my healthy 200 pound shape despite exercise. Great thinking, maybe you folks get your nobel some day.
True, you are converting food to CO2 when you ride a bicycle or do anything else that "burns calories". The point that just about everyone is missing is that the food you are burning was grown in a field only a short time earlier, and all of its carbon was taken from the CO2 in the atmosphere. All of it. So your net contribution of CO2 in that time is exactly zero.
When you burn gasoline driving a car, you're using carbon that had been buried for many millions of years. This carbon has been "out of the loop" for a very long time, and all of it counts as a net addition of CO2 (about 20 lb. per gallon of gasoline) to the modern atmosphere.
400 miles? That's it? Sounds like a good day (350miles, 560km sub 25h).
strike "less impressive" and replace with "more impressive but less genuine" in parent
Why not take it to the extreme and calculate the lifecycle carbon footprint of having a child. Over their lifetime they would probably produce ( directly and through the products they consume ) more carbon than the parent. Assuming the parent has the child in their low twenties ( average ) then one quarter of their carbon producing years are behind them. Not having children would in the long term be much 'greener' than living a back to the earth, off the grid, carbon neutral lifestyle with two or more children. Take that Al Gore ;-)
Well, I know I tend to fart more when I'm walking than when I'm sitting in a car seat, but YMMV.
The logic behind the calculations often appears fundamentally flawed to the extent that conclusions are very obviously completely wrong. They explain as much in the article and then carry on regardless due to "convention". It's "convention" because conventionally the calculations are being performed for purposes where the basis is reasonable, unlike for the purposes of the article.
A rise on public transport produces negligible *marginal* emissions, until the point whereby an extra bus is required. Taking total emissions and dividing by the number of passengers makes no sense because the bus was travelling anyway. Some people have neither car nor bike, or the ability to operate them, thus the empty bus emissions are a "sunk cost" and thus irrelevant. Only the incremental emissions caused by the additional weight and stopping & starting to collect and decant a solitary passenger count.
Where buses are fulfilling a requirement of the transport link the emissions are unavoidable and irrelevant. Buses produce more relevant emissions during peak times because this is when extra buses are on the roads to cope with demand. This is still only relevant to transport planning decisions, it still isn't relevant to the decision of an individual.
Oh yes. They allow for road wear but then forget to allow for roads. As in, take off the peak time buses and put those passengers in cars and you will need more roads, there will be more congestion slowing all cars (more emissions per mile for everyone) and there will be need for more parking spaces. Come to think of it, you will need more cars.
If you take a bus journey the emissions are trivial. If the transport planning authorities make decisions affecting buses, that's another story.
Unless you're also drinking gasoline to maintain your metabolism, I'm not sure the comparison is really fair. Certainly, there is cheaper food out there but one could argue that its long-term costs in terms of health issues outweigh the benefits of cheaper production.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
So calculating the food/sustenance carbon cost is only applicable for those walking or bicycling?
Obviously people driving cars don't eat. Good to know.
If you are trying to present your AGW idiocy as science at least make some effort to make it looking like science and not an elementary school class assignment.
Why the road maintenance impact is not counted? Bikes might not be damaging the pavement as much as semi-trucks during normal operation but on the other hand they tend to create messier accidents than cars.
Where is the account for the showers bikers take at work? Hot water does come (carbon) free.
What about carbon making all the fancy bike gear? I'd imagine some fancy synthetic fiber that goes into $200 biker shirt is not spun from grass.
What about bikers buying bigger cars so they can take their bikes to a trail a dozen times a year?
The carbon footprint thing is overrated, but not useless.
No it is useless because of the lack of consistency. For example in this study did they consider the food usage of someone sitting on a bus or driving a car in their study - I would guess not. In fact since generally our food usage is in excess of our body requirements the difference between a cyclist and passenger is probably not that great, not to mention the health benefits of cycling which will reduce health care needs and so reduce the carbon footprint of that. Hence you end up with some apparently scientifically accurate numerical value such as "250kg" of carbon which has no objective scientific basis whatsoever.
The only way this can change is if there is some agreed upon standard which everyone follows to calculate these numbers. Until then such comparisons are likely to just reflect the political views of the person doing the study and so they really are useless.
So building a car has a zero initial carbon footprint?
The study assumes car ownership, as replies to this post point out. When there are 59 days a year that the buses don't run (Sundays and major holidays, according to fwcitilink.com), there are sometimes 60-hour stretches with no buses, from the time the buses stop running at 6 PM Saturday night until 6 AM Tuesday morning when they start running again. This means one can't always rely on a bus. And a lot of places have routine stretches of days or months when the weather is generally unsuitable for cycling. This means one can't always rely on a bicycle. Therefore, one must own a car to travel anywhere past a nominal walking distance.
What is the carbon footprint of 1 / 8,000,000,000 of humanity? Who the fuck cares!
I've read a paper from about 1997 extolling the virtues of the bicycle sand it's three wheeled cousins, the pedicab and the cargo trike. According to the paper the bicycle was by far the most efficient form of transportation available. This is a claim that I do not actually dispute. Before a back injury I used to bike all over the city for commuting, shopping and pleasure. Of course, the shopping aspect was limited to the things that I could bring home on my bike and if things were needed that were larger or needed more quickly than what could be achieved using the bicycle then I'd use the car. BUT ...
Given that the bicycle is so much more efficient than our mass transit system whether it be buses, rail or whatever, why are we putting bike racks on the front of our buses and making room for people to bring their bicycles on the subway? Isn't that going to raise the carbon footprint of the bicycle to whatever the carbon footprint is of the bus or the subway car? And, since there are more bicycles on the road, or should I say off the road since they're riding on the subway, doesn't that take up room for the people that, like myself, or for whatever reason cannot ride bicycles.
I can just see our future, cars and mass transit outlawed in favour of the king of efficiency, the bicycle, and anyone who cannot ride a bike dependent on pedicabs to get around and cargo trikes to bring us our groceries. What a wonderful world this will be. Might as well live back in the middle ages. Be born and then live out your life and die within 7 miles if where you were born.
"Per passenger-mile" is a fucking stupid metric that needs to die. It naturally tends to favor long trips because all forms of mechanized transport are more efficient on long, high-speed trips. The thing about a bus is that it works well in dense urban areas where people simply travel shorter distances. You can't have dense urban areas where everyone has a car. You _can_ have dense urban areas that rely on the bus, streetcar, or subway. You need to account for not only the full-cycle efficiency of each mode of transport, but also for the external effect of the landscape that relies on each mode. What is the per-capita greenhouse gas emissions in Atlanta? In Manhattan? No contest.
12 miles round-trip to work. Oh yeah, I like to idle my SUV during lunch. So what's my footprint?
One of my professors at college told me an anecdote about when he was teaching math and science at a lower level, earlier in his career. I think it was ninth grade or something like that. The students were working on some exercises, one of which was to calculate the actual size of bacteria, given their apparent size and the characteristics of the microscope they were seen in. He looked over the shoulder of a student who had written down the answer 80 metres. "That's a big bacterium" he said to the student, who responded "yeah, that must be wrong" and erased the zero.
I buy Gatorade in bulk ($35 for 2 canisters of powder - 36 qts/canister) and until a little while ago it cost more to use a gallon Gatorade than gas (I travel long distances and water only is not an option).
Of course that is a useless statistic in and of itself. As others have pointed out without proper references it's just another form of statistics (and damn lies). I think Fox had a wonderful news article where it showed it cost more to ride a bicycle to work that it did to drive to work. A number of couch potatoes at work decided to show me the article (basically shoved it in my face). I pointed out the holes but to no avail (horse, water, drink). Now that was a masterfully crafted bit of propaganda for the non-thinking masses! And they felt better about driving that huge SUV.
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
Sushi is more expensive than gasoline, so are most "lean and trendy" foods that I tend to see the bike commuter crowd eat (at least at my work). I sincerely doubt they are saving money on gas, as they are replacing it with the kinds of expensive food that you can use to sustain exercise.
Eating Sushi has nothing to do with exercise, it has more to do with being a "lean and trendy" type. Oats, pasta, vegetables, grilled meat, and fish is the exercise diet of choice amongst non-trendies.
Am I missing something?
Couldn't food production be carbon neutral if it weren't for the use of fossil fuels in fertilizer production, transportation, etc.
Couldn't bicycle production be carbon neutral if it weren't for the use of fossil fuels in the manufacturing process.
Cow farts and methane? If cattle eat grass(not corn feed which is fertilizer heavy hence fossil fuel heavy) doesn't the grass capture green house emissions.
This just seems like nerds playing with mathematical calculations and global warming deniers taking stuff out of context to spread disinformation. The problem is fossil fuels or the taking or stored carbon and releasing it, not whether you ride a bike or not. I could be off base here, as I have done little research of my own into this topic, this all seems like a bunch of hot air or cow farts.
Co2 is plant food, and we haven't got enough of it.
CO2 does NOT make the temperature go up. We have been increasing CO2 for a long time, and the temperature has recently started to GO DOWN.
The whole thing is a big green scam, which is now being found out.
Use all the energy you want to. That will force manufactures to make it. If we distort the market by trying to use less, we are just impoverishing ourselves, and making energy companies needlessly rich, since they can just charge huge prices for energy without having to build a generating and transmission infrastructure to sell as much as the real demand requires...
There's more reason to question clean energy than that strawman though. Alternatives to gas and coal are expensive and difficult. Realistically solar and wind can only ever provide a fraction of what we need, hydro is regional and situational and has its own environmental issues, as does nuclear, and many such as tidal, thorium and geothermal are a long way from being effective. The easiest way for a western economy to reduce their CO2 output today, right now, is to go nuclear or to build modern coal fired plants which are far cleaner burners than the existing installed base. Both of these options are polictically unpalatable to environmentalists though, so don't expect them to happen anytime soon.
You make the same mistake TFA does - you assume that food intake has no cost. For this type of analysis, you have to take into account the energy needed to produce the food consumed. TFA assumes food intake is constant between the car/bus rider, walker, and bicyclist, which is rather silly if you're going to be using your bike to replace your car on a 5-10 mile daily commute. All that energy for pedaling has to come from somewhere.
I suspect most car drivers and most bicyclists don't actually eat differently. Instead bike riders burn a few more calories and are a bit trimmer and car drivers are a little bit fatter. Most bike riders don't go flat out on their trip to work, they travel at a pretty relaxed pace. They are on a busy road not a race track.
The amount of calories biking at an easy pace uses is more or less insignificant when compared to a normal western diet.
Since virtually nobody rides to work on dirt roads, don't forget to add asphalt and concrete to the tally, LOL
There's a study I've seen that came to the result that an electric-assist bicycle was actually optimal beyond a certain distance, as all-human power increased caloric consumption worth more than the cost of the electricity (and the batteries that stored it), whereas the e-bike provided just enough exercise but not so much as to change dietary needs.
That said -- if the bike commuter crowd at work is eating luxury foods (trust me, you don't need sushi to commute by bike), in greater quantity than they would be consuming if they didn't have an active lifestyle, and are able to afford to do so via the money they don't spend on gasoline (and insurance, if they pay by the mile or avoid owning a car)... well, can't that be taken as part of a better quality of life?
This nation (USA) is the greatest on the face of the earth despite Obama and the libtards trying to ruin it. We carry the planet on our backs as far as helping other countries.
You really believe that don't you?
Try watching or reading foreign news sometime, it's always educational to get a few different viewpoints on things.
...we're creating even more carbon emissions!
When autos drive slower they consume less fuel, which means that not only are those cyclists reducing their own carbon footprint, they are reducing the footprint of the drivers as well.
A blog about stuff.
You make the same mistake TFA does - you assume that food intake has no cost. For this type of analysis, you have to take into account the energy needed to produce the food consumed. TFA assumes food intake is constant between the car/bus rider, walker, and bicyclist, which is rather silly if you're going to be using your bike to replace your car on a 5-10 mile daily commute. All that energy for pedaling has to come from somewhere.
The 'extra' calories you use by walking or cycling for transportation is/should be equaled by the 'extra' calories you use in daily or weekly exercise. And if you don't get that exercise, then your carbon footprint will be lowered via a shorter lifespan.
And this is why the global warming freaks are crazy. Ultimately taxing carbon is like taxing breathing. Everytime you breathe you expel carbon. Everytime you piss or shit you expel carbon. Everytime you eat food you're freeing sequestered carbon. Anytime you are LIVING your life you are participating in this cycle and you're not algea or plants, you do the other part of it.
The most ridiculous thing in the world is to think that it's A.O.K. to limit and tax and blame people for living their lives.
'Walking is not zero emission because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place'
Seriously, what the fuck? Why don't you tell people to just go off themselves. Stop eating, stop walking, stop breathing. Just off yourselves. Is that what you're really getting at? If someone comes out with transportation that has a lower "carbon footprint" than walking, let's say growing living bamboo into a vehicle that sequesters carbon as you ride, are you going to try to guilt people out of walking too? Then you have to eat less because you didn't expend all that waste energy walking and we can ration everyone's food too right?
Well, before someone posts: "yeah man you should off yourself", I'll tell you this, if it comes to that I'd much rather kill YOU.
But until then, let us live our lives without this fucking preachy-ness.
Liberty.
He still uses epoxy to join the frame tubes. At first he was using carbon fiber and/or fiberglass to bind the joints. Now I guess he's switched to using the fibers after he cleans the hemp for his joints. :-)
No, your assumption is incorrect for the situation of following slow moving bicycles in traffic. Ever notice how a vehicle's mileage is stated in two ways, city MPG and highway MPG, and that city MPG is always less than highway MPG? All the reasons that make city MPG less efficient are present when the drivers have to follow the bikers.
Every time they have to hit their brakes, they waste the energy that went into accelerating the vehicle. Any revolutions the engine produces while idling (at stop signals, or any time the driver has his foot on the clutch or any time the automatic transmission's torque converter clutch is slipping, etc.) is burning energy without effect. Any other incidental energy that's strictly time-based (lights, cabin fans, air conditioning, radio) is wasted by the extra time its being operated. Having to electrically power the engine cooling fans to run when the car is moving slower than the surrounding air can cool the radiator is an additional waste.
There is an optimally fuel efficient speed for every vehicle. Faster than that speed and air resistance wastes fuel. Slower than that speed and it's burning the extras I just mentioned.
John
That is a poor rationalization. If everyone rode bikes, it certainly would not be safe to walk on the same infrastructure. In fact, if half the people just decide to run everywhere, it would not be particularly safe for people to walk on the same infrastructure. Of course, you are still going to need a majority of the infrastructure for the cars, as delivering all the things needed for society to continue isn't really feasible for bicycle delivery.
If anything, the cyclists are not paying their fair share as it is.
What do you do for the other 10,000 miles a year most people travel? And let's apply some logic to the facts in the summary (dangerous, I know)...
and
In other words running off peak buses is twice as bad as having people drive sedans. Which is more or less what I've been thinking every time a see a honking huge bus go by with 2 or 3 passengers on it. How many full load trips does it take to make up for one trip where the bus is more or less empty?
And bicycling doesn't take any food energy?
What I notice in my city, which has spent many millions of dollars creating bicycle lanes, is that there aren't that many bicycles using them to begin with and when it rains, which it does with great frequency, the usage drops by a factor of about 10. On one bridge I regularly went over, with fairly steep up and down slopes, the pedestrians outnumbered the cyclists about 4 to 1 and that was on sunny days, on rainy days it was much higher. I'm not anti-bicycle, I use one myself, but I wish the religious aspect of it would go away so an actual fact based assessment about bike lanes, pedestrain walkways and car lanes could occur.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
in three years when I move to the next job then I can perhaps move back where I started. Or somewhere else.
Yes, you'd either rent a place to live near your next job or telecommute. As CronoCloud wrote in this post: "if you want to be a star on Broadway, you're going to have to go to New York City."
I will have torn my children out of their school and away from their friends
There are online schools and online means of interacting with friends, though due to the United States' COPPA regulation, they're a lot harder to come by if the children in question are under the age of 13.
made my wife's commute to her job longer
Pundits would suggest that you quit your job and work closer to where your wife works, or that she quit her job and work closer to where you work.
and I'll have sunk thousands of dollars in commissions to the realtor who sells my house
Pundits would suggest renting instead of owning unless you also own a business.
If that's what the pundits are suggesting, then they're even bigger fools
And if so, I want to expose them as such. That's why I relate their suggestions to you.
What about the carbon footprint of thinking and learning about the carbon-footprint of things? Thikning is not zero emission because we need food energy to power our brain.
When there are 59 days a year that the buses don't run
When there are 59 days a year that the buses don't run you know you're living in fucking Somalia, North Korea or the USA.
As a fellow resident of Madison, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Over the past decade the number of bike paths on streets is easily 10x was it was, we have two days a year (soon to be one) where the entire downtown is shut down by bicycles not to mention other smaller cycle themed events. I would argue that our bike trail system is far better planned and better supported than our bus system which has gotten increasingly worse every time I've taken it.
The only issue I have with bicycles in that they have absolutely no respect for traffic laws, especially in the campus area. People are more than happy to "scream share the road" just before they blast through a red light at full speed in rush hour traffic.
(I am reminded of the time in college when as a grader in a physics class, the students were asked to find how high a pressurized leak on a water tank would shoot into the air. Two student's answers had the water at escape velocity speeds, sending them into orbit the earth.)
I get your point re: reality checking, but as an aside, any velocity straight up without a sustaining acceleration will eventually come back down. Escape velocity is the speed tangential to the surface of the earth (i.e. on the least energetic orbital trajectory) that is in excess of what gravity can keep pulled to the surface (g $lt; v^2/r). And you still have to fight against air resistance trying to decelerate you while you're inside the atmosphere.
Realistically, solar is the only 100% inexhaustible energy source available to us... if you limit the definition of 'inexhaustible' to 'lasting at least as long as the remaining lifetime of the Earth'.
Maybe fusion, if we ever figure it out, but everything else will run out on a long enough time scale... and so far as I'm aware those timescales are all shorter than the remaining lifetime of the planet. Just because some fuels are expected to last 10x longer than human civilization has so far existed doesn't mean they're unlimited.
I don't know about Portsmouth, but when there are cycle lanes on a (usually quite wide) pavement in London, there are almost always people walking in the cycle lane when there is plenty of space on the pedestrian side of the line. Yes, there are stupid inconsiderate cyclists, and stupid inconsiderate pedestrians, and let's not forget about stupid inconsiderate drivers. In fact you could say there are stupid inconsiderate people, and these people might walk, cycle or drive.
I live in the United States but want out. What country do you recommend, and how do you recommend to qualify for lawful resident status?
It costs $2700 because these are basically prototypes; from the article, the guy talks about how sales have been growing in "double digit numbers" - they probably make less than a thousand of these per year. If they increase production, the price will probably come down.
10x? What crappy bikes have you been buying? $2700 is middle high for bikes. It would get you a very good steel or aluminum frame with top of the line components or a lower end carbon fiber frame with medium components...
We need enough advancements in genetic engineering that we can produce a half human / half plant child. I heard they are good soaked in butter
what's slashdot's carbon footprint given its white background and several million users (and several dozen million pageviews) per month? Should we be reading some other website with black background instead?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
not just labor costs but there is also a novelty mark up!
Balderdash!
The author used energy for production of an aluminum bicycle from refined ore with frame, fenders and rack (I don't know about you, but my bike and the ones I see all day have neither fenders nor rack).
Aluminum and steel are heavily recycled because the cost of initial refining so very energy intensive recycled aluminum only takes 5% of the energy.
On another note, with care bicycles have long life. My 12 speed bicycle is 30 years old, I just put new kevlar tires on it, looks like I have to think about new brake shoes in the five years at current wear rate.
If you're desperate there's always Svalbard. It belongs to Norway, but due to international agreements every human on Earth has the right to reside and work there. I can't vouch for the bus service though...
Otherwise, how about Canada?
I'm sorry, but if they can make such an obvious biased mistrake, why should anybody give even a moment's thought to the rest of their study?
RTFA: sure, its a blog article, not a Nature paper, but it concludes that bikes have drastically lower carbon emissions than cars, so its hardly biassed. Its clearly implicit in the initial question that the author is considering buying a new bike for the daily commute, but already has a car. The later analysis does include the "carbon cost" of the car - that's why they needed to make an estimate of the car's lifetime.
Oh, yes, TFA does mention that cycling and walking consumes food but goes on to refute the idea that that is significant (unless you're on an "all-beef diet" - presumably all those cows grazing on slashed-and-burnt forests farting their asses off).
Moral of the story: buy a second-hand bike (and don't have it air-freighted).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
When I biked a lot, my tires typically lasted less than 1000 miles. There's quite a footprint in those. Also, those figures on lifetime don't add up to the average bike. They don't make that many miles or live that long, before they get discarded. Even in the Netherlands, where almost everyone owns and rides a bicycle, you don't get over a third or so of these lifetimes or distances traveled.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I don't do it for the carbon, I bike/bus to work because:
1. It's way cheaper: $41/mo for an unlimited bus pass vs. auto insurance (and however the costs break down to purchase a vehicle)
(We lost a vehicle due to a hit and run driver. Our insurance paid off the auto loan and a little more for our own pocket. We didn't replace the vehicle and just have one now.)
2. It's way more healthy. I've a desk job, and typically work 45-50 hours a week. Being able to bike all the way (4 miles one-way) to or from work a handful times per week is a great 25-30 minute workout. I've access to lockers and a shower at work and keep a handful of outfits at work (I mostly bike all the way home, not on the way in since exchanging clothing requires a car trip.
3. I can relax and watch 20 minutes of reading and/or a show on my Nook while riding the bus. I don't have to worry about other rude drivers - so my resulting stress level is reduced (instead of kept the same in increased).
I gave up $35K/year to stay local, but I also don't have a 3-4 hour daily commute to the Bay Area. The net result is that I actually earn more per hour use for "work" (commute time may not be productive for my employer, but it sure is a loss for me). I've got "admin time" which is like flex time - I can earn and then later use, which is nice as in the past year I haven't used a day of vacation time, but just been using "admin time" for my days off.
So I hardly move ... I'm doing my part for the environment... my doctor disagrees but I think he owns oil stock.
the cost of extra clothing, you can't ride in the same clothes that you ware in your office job, and then there the more frequent showering for cyclists. The building of special cycle-ways, including the removal of trees and flora. As for '15 years' most of the people that I know that are serious cyclists change bike every year or two. They need to have provision of public transport for those rainy/snowy/icey days when riding is not an option. There are a lot of factors that need to be included in a 'life cycle analysis'.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
...but as an aside, any velocity straight up without a sustaining acceleration will eventually come back down.
No, escape velocity is an initial speed that will "escape" without a need for additional acceleration. You can escape a gravitational effect without achieving escape velocity as long as you have some form of continuous propulsion providing acceleration, but the definition of escape velocity itself assumes no additional acceleration.
Err... no, a velocity exists such that the falling acceleration will never over-take the residual velocity. They're both inverse squares.
...it is still going to save the rider in gas money (provided they're riding the thing whenever they can, obviously a bike rotting in a garage does no one any good).
I see a lot of people screaming left and right about how all these technologies like mass transit and solar power and such are "just as bad", but the end result is always the assertion that "we should just do whatever because nothing we do will ever help so screw it". Here in Madison, WI, where there are a fair number of cyclists, there are still those people that go out of their way to prevent them from riding.
Madison was a biker's dream when I went to school there. Nearly (if not all) of the buses had bike racks, there was a plethora of bike lanes, and I felt safe biking about 99% of the time (the only non-safe times were on E Washington Ave during construction time.) Everywhere else I've lived lacks all of these features and more.
Also, Madison consistently ranks in the top bike-friendly cities with Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Portland. As a result, the bikers there were generally good at obeying the rules of the road (red stop lights triggered by sensors be damned.) Elsewhere in the country, many college students are annoying as hell on the roads; swerving in and out of the lanes just to piss off car drivers, &c.
It beats me why TF you "need" cycle lanes. Bikes were designed to be ridden on the road and historically wre using roads before cars were. In the UK there were large numbers of cyclists in the 1930-1955 period during which there were few "cycle facilities" and the few that existed were boycotted by cyclists because they were inferior to the road (and still are).
.. the sort of statement one might have expected from the most extreme Jag-driving type, not a friend of cycling.
Don't tell me it is necessary because traffic has got busier - motorised traffic has actually got slower in town (where the cycle "facilities" are) in recent years. I used to commute to work in South London mostly down the outside of slow or stationary traffic jams - something cyclists today seem to be frightened to do, or feel that they are not entitled to do.
I actually gave up cycling around 1990 because of the increase in "cycle facilities" as I regard tham as dangerous, at least for a cyclist doing >10 mph. They are designed by officials with no clue about cycling. On one road near me a cycle lane in the suburbs is marked with little "Give Way" lines not just at every side road but every few yards AT EVERY PRIVATE DRIVEWAY. To hell with that.
Everything about "cycle facilities" encourages motorists to ignore the existence of bikes, from pulling out of driveways and side roads, to ignoring a cyclist they first see 200 yards ahead because it is assumed that they will be "out of the way" on a cycle lane (or on the footpath).
I once read a Friends of the Earth spokesman say "Our aim is to get cyclists off the road"
The corollary of providing cycle "facilities" is that you should not use you bike anywhere else - an attitude clearly displayed in many of the comments here.
Price is driven by supply and demand not energy or effort. I imagine it costs 2700 dollars because bamboo bicycle frames can't be mass produced (yet) and many rich californians are willing to pay for such a novel thing.
That selfish polluting bastard!
This whole concept of walking or biking to work assumes that you live within a couple of miles of your workplace, that you have acceptable weather, and that you don't have to transport anything big or heavy. If you live in a big city, maybe this is practical. For the rest of the world, it's totally unrealistic. The same applies to trains and buses.
I ride a bike 4-5x a week to work. My car often goes weeks - maybe a month - between drives. And I encourage everyone to do the same if they can.
But not because of CO2. CO2 is a trace gas comprising only .04% of the atmosphere. Humans emit only a small portion of the world's CO2, but it seems we must believe that the Earth can absorb and produce finite, unchanging amounts of CO2 such that any perturbation is disastrous. The climate data is not consistent, nor is the science predictive. Yes, pollution - as in things that dirty other things - is abhorrent. Yes, saving energy and money is great and we all need more exercise. But the CO2 obsession is a cult that insists everyone join.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
...it is still going to save the rider in gas money
And probably cost several hundred drivers more money in the process.
A couple of years ago, my daily commute took me down a busy single-carriageway road, one lane each direction with a 50mph speed limit. The lanes were fairly narrow, passing a cyclist safely would require straddling the centre line. Every day, on my way home from work I would have to slow down from 50mph to 15 behind a cyclist, drive a minute or two at a speed that is really inefficient, then accelerate hard to get around him in the short gap in oncoming traffic. I estimated it cost me about 10-20p (0.1 to 0.2 GBP) per day extra to drive past that cyclist. Over the 2 and a half years I did that commute, he probably cost me a full tank of fuel. What about the other couple of dozen cars that would have to overtake him?
The most galling thing is there was a cycle path on the other side of a 4m wide grass verge, but he never once used it.
I'm pretty sure you're going to eat that pound of olive oil or whatever whether you bike OR drive to work. Unlike a car, most people have to keep burning fuel all the time - people don't just start back up again on demand...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"Food production creates carbon emissions"
Yes, if it's livestock. Plants on the other hand act as carbon sinks.
This guy's simply talking out of his ass. Nothing to see or worry about here, move along and ignore the twit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Hemp. Joints.
Ohhh.... I get it...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
If it costs $2700, that implies there's a fair bit of energy going into making it, whether directly or indirectly. If that's mostly labor costs, what do you think those employees do with that money?
If it costs $2700, the only thing it implies is that there's a hell of a lot of demand, relative to supply.
The things could cost 10c to grow, for all we know. But the sale price has very little relation to the cost of production. Ref: economics 101.
My kayak objects to assertion it isn't green. 6 miles a day, 3 each way...
Nothing is more green than creating more CO2. Go Green!
There are twice as many oxygen atoms in the molecule and carbon gets the bad name. It's like calling water hydrogen.
> And why so much hostility for green energy initiatives? Are we just going to keep on burning oil and coal for power? I mean, clearly we need to start coming up with alternatives, right?
The problem is that for years the greeners went unchecked, cheated on facts and generally cried wolf. The problem is that it is becoming more and more obvious that some of the stuff they claimed (like a lot of the global warming thing) is blown out of proportions, and some of the solutions they proposed (like promoting bottled water instead of soft drink, or fabric grocery bags instead of expandable plastic ones) are having some serious side effects. And what about Ethanol, a fiasco that probably caused as much damage to the economy as it did to the environment.
It's just like the ban on DEET - a bunch of greeners made it a much bigger problem that it was (allegedly 4 people died because of DEET) and the outcome of this "successful campaign" is the countless people who died of malaria, which was about to be extinct until western governments put pressure on third-world countries to stop using the evil DEET (whose actual danger has yet to be proven).
Environment issues are very complex, and the simple solutions proposed by the greeners are backfiring across the board. The truth is that cleaning the environment is not a realistic project; it's like a crash diet, with no chance of being a viable, long-term solution. What is needed is to create and support healthy habits - like the bikes rentals in Montreal - but without trying to demonize or destroy everything else, and without trying to fight lies and fud with lies and fud. Only with decades of continuous positive support of better habits can the world become free from pollution.
lucm, indeed.
Every carbon tax I've seen is for using sequestered carbon: oil, gas, coal. Nobody's talking about taxing your breathing, except FUD spreaders, such as this stupid study.
About a year ago I decided to ride a bicycle every possible trip. This decision has had a profoundly positive impact on every aspect of my life. This week I rode a bike 35 miles up a mountain, along with all my stuff for a week of family vacation; the next day was spent mountain biking. After all this I experienced no soreness. When I started driving my bike, I thought that I could never sell my car, at most I would put it in long term storage. Now my car is a really expensive and unnecessary burden, driven barely once every few months.
If we seek to optimize efficiency, safety, health, and cost, the car of the future is actually a bicycle.
the most powerful intellect is that unbounded by indubitable preconception
Bicycle commuters often easily ride 400 miles / 640 km in a short time. I commute about 3000 kilometers a year. I live in Norway and often skip a couple of the harshest winter months, but ride the rest of the year. I have bicycled about 21000 kilometers with my current cummute bike :)
Maintenance adds a bit to the carbon emissions, but a chain, casette, and other small parts is peanuts compared to cars anyway.
I'm pretty sure DEET is still legal. It's used as a mosquito repellent, and can be bought in camping stores in various concentrations.
Are you thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT ? DDT was used as an insecticide and is now pretty much banned worldwide. And if I remember correctly, The issue was not necessarily immediately toxicity to humans (although it IS known to be an endocrine disruptor, and has other documented negative effects on humans) but that it had the nasty property of being slow to break down, and accumulating in the food chain. This had different effects on different animals occupying different niches in the food chain, but the higher in the food chain, the greater the bio-accumulation. So as well as accumulating in humans, it also affected other predators, such as birds of prey, directly affecting their ability to breed.
So, just because it hasn't directly killed many humans, doesn't mean that it's safe to spray the stuff around with reckless abandon. Also note that it HASN'T been banned as a disease vector control, but has been restricted so it's not sprayed around like crazy as it was in the 1950s. Also note that there is a plethora of other insecticides out there, so equating malaria deaths with a reduction in DDT use is over-simplistic.
The wiki link above is very informative.
sustainable living
In addition to their carbon footprint, cyclists here force drivers to waste energy to slow down to a crawl until it is safe to pass them, then resume normal speed.
I suggest you put some gusto into it. Bikes don't pedal themselves.
That was already addressed way back here: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2379032&cid=37088242
Essentially, you and every other car on the road takes up the space of 4 people. Other cars (the ones next to you and the ones in the opposing lane) are keeping you from going around the bicycle, not the bicycle.
As to the airlifting, you're more likely to get airlifted as a result of an auto collision than a bicycle collision.
Even if you assume that muscular effort is the same efficiency as an engine and that converting petrol into food is 50% efficient, provided that the bike requires less than half the energy per mile to move (due to lower weight, lower rolling resistance, lower speed) then it will still come out ahead.
Well ahead.
I started biking to work most everyday (less than one day per week on average I drive). I also began training for a 184 mile bike ride coming up soon, so I have been biking 50+ miles every weekend. I have barely changed my diet at all and if anything I'd say I eat less now as I've been watching my diet more. The only change has been I drink a sports drink on my long rides and tend to have one a protein bar or shake when I am done. The average American diet has way MORE than enough calories to get you through most of the exercise we were designed to be doing anyway.
If we were seriously concerned over carbon footprint and over all environmental impact Telecommuting would be heavily promoted.
Other then the fact the carbon footprint calculations typical done are obviously flawed by not only not taking into consideration all the variables they also highly depend on the value of those fairly random variables. In any case, the FACT is a typical 2.5 mph walk burns about 10-20% less calories than a typical 5.5 mph bike ride. Bikes require far more people to create and a far greater amount and variety of materials to create. Bike tires wear out faster than shoes (assuming you even wear shoes). Biking is the clear loser at face value. When I walk I see no change in my dietary habits. When I bike I not only see it but I feel it. I am hungry far more often. Additionally my waist line doesnt lie. Regarding walking vs driving. You have got to be kidding me. Did they even count all the hydrocarbons wasted each time you start the vehicle? I think not. Initial starting of a cold engine and running it is one of the most inefficient times of use. How the fact that a large number of accidents happen in short distance. How often do you see a pair of shoes having to have a body shop repair or dump anti-freeze all over the ground? Additionally, even with a combustion engine being more efficient than the human body there is no way it uses less energy to haul around 4000-6000 lbs as it is 165 regardless of how you are do it. Car loses, period.
...the world is simply overpopulated.
A friend of mine, who works for an electric motorcycle company and is thus biased, says that electric bicycles (which they don't even sell, mind you) are more efficient than eating burritos to produce bicycle power. I have little problem believing it when you consider just how efficient electric vehicles can be on the output side.
Even a gas-powered bicycle is about as efficient as running...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
kill yourself. Even taking care of one's basic needs uses a large amount of carbon. If you're not a scientist or engineer who is working on reducing the basic amount of carbon that our society needs to function, then you are part of the problem and are using (or causing the use of) too much carbon no matter what. Even if you personally live in some environmentally harmonious way on 60 acres in the middle of nowhere, overpopulation means that this is not a viable option for everyone on Earth. Also, in order to do that safely (without a personal army) you need the social and military apparatus that keeps you safe from thugs and madmen, and I'd wager that your share of this social benefit produces way more carbon than driving a car.
All this depends largely on what your normal day looks like. If you get zero exercise at work, which is not that abnormal these days, you should have an electric assist bike. If you get enough, then you should get a full-electric bike (one you don't have to pedal) for maximum efficiency, because it's so more efficient than you are at giving back the energy it takes in.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Unfortunately, some sort of force is needed to overcome the tragedy of the commons.
A sentiment that, I imagine, has inspired its share of autocrats over the course of history.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Also note that it HASN'T been banned as a disease vector control, but has been restricted so it's not sprayed around like crazy as it was in the 1950s.
My mom told me when she was young they used to drive up and down the streets spraying a fog of that crap and all the kids used to run behind the truck and play in the fog...I can't even imagine what kind of damage it did to their bodies. It can't have been good, at any rate. I mean, we're not talking about calcium here...
Yes, it's called "capitalism". That's how it works. If you don't like it, then you'll have to get it overthrown.
Major bugs in the assumptions of this paper: they assume the
average commuter can do 14 MPH on an unassisted bicycle,
that personal time is valueless, and that bicycles are as safe
as cars.
I ride in Cambridge near MIT, and when I was in *decent*
shape (i.e. doing half-century rides back-to-back) I was lucky to
peak at 17 MPH and maintain an average of 10 MPH during traffic.
I'm sure a Tour-de-France competitor could maintain 14 MPH in
traffic, but I don't think an average Cambridgeite could come close.
They further assume that the person's time is valueless, so walking
at 3.5 MPH and bicycling at 14 MPH have no impact on the overall
quality of life. Similarly the time you "recover" (reading on the bus
or subway, listening to the radio in the car) is zero-value as well.
Nor do they factor in the (significant in Cambridge) medical
costs due to the high rate of bicycle-to-car and bicycle-to-pedestrian
accidents. Since a single accident with an associated E.R. visit
would cost ~$1000, that would completely invert the ranking
and make the bicycle the most expensive transportation
available.
All that carbon you are? It's locked up like it was locked up in coal, oil and gas. Unlike coal, oil and gas, and like that CO2 you breathe out, it's part of the carbon cycle.
Try thinking rather than just spouting what you've been taught to believe.
That selfish polluting bastard!
Yeah, think of all the burnt plastic used to make these. And all the trees cut down to print Dan Brown's drivel... why couldn't he just have died and faded into obscurity like the rest of the 15th century
Here in Madison, WI, where there are a fair number of cyclists, there are still those people that go out of their way to prevent them from riding.
Such douchebags exist in Minneapolis as well. I see it as my civic duty to make their commute as painful as humanly possible. Bicycles allowed full lane, motherfucker. And I've got all fucking day to get home.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
The problem with subsidizing mass transit isn't the fact that "no one ever rides it" -- no one ever rides it because "it's either damn near full or standing room only" or the bus never runs on time or runs infrequently or will leave its passengers stranded when it breaks down in a remote part of town and the next bus isn't for another 45 minutes if it is on-time or it whizzes on by if the union-protected driver doesn't feel like picking up passengers (this happens alot). Maybe that's just where I live, but a couple of years ago LA County (myself included) voted for a tax increase to provide Los Angeles Metro more funding to improve its services -- and, that was on top of a rate hike. It seems the money went into our version of the Big Dig -- aka the Silver Line expansion -- so that government cronies could get their pockets aligned with greenbacks.
If the goal is to encourage more people into using public transportation, LAMEtro should be offering up more routes instead of throwing money into the sinkhole -- which goes against LAMEtro's current thinking of spending $1billion/mile of train while cutting routes left and right, and in the process decreasing ridership for the reasons listed above.
People think it's better to have a car than to be dependent on unreliable transportation.
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
Also accident rates are spectacularly higher for bikes
Don't lie.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Going with a second hand bike sounds like a good option to lower the footprint.
I think we should look at the resource allocation of art. Is it worthwhile to have as much art as we do? DaVinci is a bad example, as he seemed to be doing some science and engineering as well, but what about Picasso? Did Picasso create anything useful in his whole life? What is it used for? Think of all the breathing, eating and farting Picasso did, was it worth it? How about for that chick no one else heard of that lives downtown that tries to make her living off of grants for sculpting? Could those grants have gone to feed Africans instead? How about the museums with their climate control and staff?
What's the carbon footprint for the bus overall, peak and off peak? How would it compare to a trolley?
The energy consumption of cycling a given distance is the same as for walking one fifth of that distance, so cycling is 5 times more efficient than walking, probably meaning that walking has a higher CO2 footprint than cycling, especially as modern food production is more "addicted" to fossil fuels than your average suburbanite motor commuter.
Fact is, if I didn't cycle, I'd be dead from some disease of affluence or other, and the fact that I don't own a car means I'm wealthier than if I didn't cycle, too. I rankly don't get how stupid you puny humans are to drive. If common sense prevailed, nobody would want one of those noisy smelly and expensive contraptions.
Thanks. I put plenty of gusto into my exercise rides. Daily.
You did read what I wrote, didn't you? Because, yeah, mountain bikes don't pedal themselves up hills.
Given a "typical U.S. diet," you would have to ride your bike instead of driving for around 400 miles to cover the bike's initial carbon footprint.
Although it was probably not something he envisioned, consider the substantial number of tourists who have used fossil fuels to power their vacation trips to (and through) Paris to see his painting.
The valuation is somewhat reflective of that.