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.'"

Comments

Re:seriously..?

[digitallife]

The sad thing about the whole green movement is how it is so directed at private individuals, who are supposed to massively inconvenience themselves by buying green cars and bicycling and recycling and buying green clothes and green food and using CFL's (god those are ugly) and use all of there disposable income to help Mother Earth! But in reality it's the corporations who are telling us we should be green, while corporations are responsible for 95% of all carbon emissions. Yes, 95%. If every person in the world stopped using their car, it would make virtually no difference to carbon emissions. The biggest single source is industry and energy generation, which accounts for the lions share.

This is true world wide and in developed nations (US http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/co2_human.html).
However in developing nations industry is even worse.