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State Rep. Says Biking Is Not Earth Friendly Because Breathing Produces CO2
terbeaux writes "The fact that Rep Ed Orcutt (R — WA) wants to tax bicycle use is not extraordinary. The representative's irrational conviction is. SeattleBikeBlog has confirmed reports that Orcutt does not feel bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have 'an increased heart rate and respiration.' When they contacted him he clarified that 'You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car...' Cascade blog has posted the full exchange between Rep Ed Orcutt and a citizen concerned about the new tax."
If you eliminated all the CO2, the plants would die. I think you mean limit it to some given level.
For those interested, I'd recommend the book How Bad is a Banana, which examines the carbon footprint of various foods (which varies greatly).
Fun tidbit: If you were to take your calories from asparagus (which has a big carbon footprint), riding a bike actually has a bigger carbon footprint than a city bus. Yea, I know we don't eat only asparagus, but the point is still valid: you can just look at the surface and ignore the externalities of your actions.
Does the House GOP caucus have a minimum stupidity requirement?
'Your brain is God.' -- Dr. Timothy Leary
I sighed while reading this, fatigued by the comments of the congressman. Sorry for the extra CO2 guys.
Waiting for you by the bridge
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely
Plants need CO2 to produce food. If you eliminated CO2 we'd die as a species, along with every other species.
Set up two sealed rooms with a glass wall.
In one room have a car outside the window with its exhaust piped into the room.
In the other have a cyclist on an exercise bike working out. Pipe his exhalations into the room.
Outfit the room with a nice desk and sofa and other accouterments. Then ask the esteemed congressman which room he would like to spend the day in.
For myself it would depend on if the cyclist had eaten garlic recently!
Silence is a state of mime.
By his own reasoning, Rep Ed Orcutt needs to lower his CO2 production by keeping his mouth shut. He would do both the planet and his colleagues a favor.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It's clear that he is just lobbying, and that's just not true. But the benefits of people commuting aren't only in helping the atmosphere, but our society, full of obese people that doesn't interact with others and act like retards with their cars.
Plants emit CO2 at night, let's have a tax on people who have plants too!
Both of these are true. The only one he is actually using to justify his position (that bikes should pay road tax) is the former, the second point is refuting the point that bikes are environmentally friendly. The second point is debatable: it's a question of what the basic comparison is. Cycling is more polluting than staying at home, less polluting than driving a car.
There are lots of valid reasons to mock Republicans, we don't need to make more up.
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This can be solved by a simple test.
Put several plants and some animals in a closed garage and ride your bike all day long. Take note of any sick or dead plants/animals afterwards.
After this if you are still convinced bikes are bad for the environment, do the same test using your car instead of the bike.
Did a representative of MY government just try and tell me that my breath is somehow more harmful to the environment than the Hummer exhaust I'm choking on?
Where is the damn toilet handle on Congress already...Will someone please go tell Nicolas Cage to go find THAT please? I could care less about a fountain of youth if the world is going to be run by this level of ignorance.
CO2 isn't a problem, it's part of a cycle for Carbon in the biosphere. Adding significantly more Carbon to the biosphere from sources which have been locked away hundreds of millions of years in the form of CO2 is a problem.
Even if people produced more CO2 than cars to travel the same distance (which they don't) it still wouldn't be a problem because the Carbon the cyclist is using is already part of the biosphere.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
...we'd die as a species
No more AGW, success!
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely.
No need to wait! Make a difference and stop exhaling today!
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely. ... The Congressman is just an ignorant jackass who has no understanding of how our biosphere works.
thank god we'll never fully eliminate irony from the planet.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
I think that maybe some people just find it too hard to believe that all the carbon in the plants actually comes from the air. This gives you an idea about how much the atmosphere weighs -- CO2 is merely 0.04% of our atmosphere! Heck, forget the plants that are alive now, just look at how much of this stuff was in the atmosphere long time ago. Every bit of carbon in coal deposits came from the atmosphere!!
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I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely
Plants need CO2 to produce food. If you eliminated CO2 we'd die as a species, along with every other species.
The Earth also needs CO2 to stay warm. We'd be in a permanent ice age if there was literally zero in the atmosphere.
Moderation. People have surprising difficulty with the concept.
This news looks like one of The Onion great news... but I just checked, and I couldn't find it.
Anyway, one should point out that biking produces less CO2 than walking or using any other vehicle, for a given distance.
We need the name of your biology teacher, pronto.
Don't be so quick to blame the teacher. You can lead a moron to knowledge, but you can't make him learn.
What is remarkable about this exchange is not that bike riders are enhanced CO2 producers, but that a republican legislator has acknowledged the CO2 needs to be recognized as a greenhouse gas, which in excess is bad.
It is a start...
I don't know why they don't just drag some trees from the back of aeroplanes. Or perhaps a small shrubbery on the roof. That'll get rid of the CO2 in the stratosphere, surely?
The difference between the CO2 you exhale and that exhaled by your car is that yours come from the food you ate: plants (even if indirectly you ate animals that ate plants). And those plants got it from the atmosphere. So you are just returning CO2 to where it came from. A car takes it from the ground where it's been slowly accumulating for tens of millions of years and dumps it into the atmosphere. It's NOT the same CO2.
Now if we go into externalities such as "how must CO2 from petroleum did it take to bring that food on the table", then it gets a bit more tricky.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Well yes, but not because its Asparagus, but rather because it's grown in Peru and imported at great CO2 cost using petroleum fueled ships and truck:
http://www.coopfoodstore.coop/content/what-price-asparagus
In fact, thin air is a strong CO2 producer..... if you bottle it in Peru and ship it to the breather in trucks.
Who is voting for this guy? It must be a corner of WA where stupid is a virtue.
An average car produces 5.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The average resting human produces 170,000 liters, or 340kg carbon dioxide per year. With a moderate level of activity, we can increase this to a conservative 500kg. There is simply no comparison. Clearly, this guy is an idiot masquerading as a "representative" of people's needs.
The "stuff that matters" is that Americans elected that kind of people to make laws based on his knowledge. Don't worry, probably have more clue than the rest.
And there is the real problem. People are elected into positions of responsibility not because they can do the job, but because they read good speeches.
Annual miles traveled x weight x lane width needed. Here's my nickel, kid.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
I'm struggling to see the relevance but if you insist: Your average politician prefers wearing 40 denier stockings under their trousers. Garters are optional.
Next he will be taxing running, walking, having sex, masturbation, all sports ... basically anything that raises your breathing rate.
Yes, this is correct, but what many people forget is that the calories you ingest as a first world eater include pretty substantial amounts of fossil fuel use in fertilizing, care-taking, and transport. More energy from fossil fuels, in fact, than you receive in calories(or so I've heard).
remember these are the people who wanted to ban dihydrogen monoxide...
We have these other things that store carbon compounds in 100' tall columns!!! Imagine how much carbon per acre they could store... Everybody's gonna want on on this tech!!!
That just means they should pay a smaller tax, thats all.
A 2000 pound passenger vehicle in use weighs 1000 pounds per axle. A 200 pound bicycle in use weighs only 100. Because road wear increases as the fourth power of weight per axle, ten times the weight implies roughly 10,000 times the road wear. How much do you charge each driver per year in road tax? And how much would it cost the state to bill each cyclist 1/10,000 of that?
Weeds are plants in the wrong place. And pollutants are chemicals in the wrong place. Dihydrogen monoxide certainly can be a pollutant. In times of flood for example. Or in my whisky.
Maybe the people who set up this vox-pop trap weren't as clever as they thought they were.
It's bad enough when people with degrees in Law or Political Science or Business Administration try to legislate on scientific questions. What's even scarier is the fact that this guy received an A.S. in Forestry from the University of Maine, and a B.S. in Forestry Management from the University of Idaho. Which I'm sure is a lot less biochemically rigorous a field of study than, say, Botany, but someone with that kind of credentials ought to have a better understanding of environmental science than he shows.
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That's the last of our problems- we'd all be dead within 72 hours or so. CO2 is required to make the human respiration system work, the breathing reflex is triggered by too much CO2, not by a lack of oxygen, this is why hyperventilating before holding your breath can make you pass out, you scrub lots of CO2 out of your system and then run out of O2 before your brain forces you to inhale. This is also the mechanism behind Cheyne Stokes respiration, where high altitude climbers don't breath enough while they sleep.
Erradicate all CO2 and you have to consciously breath, on purpose - if you forget, or fall asleep, you're dead.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I say we cut down the CO2 emissions... with a herring.
There are as many idiot on bike as in car. BUT and that is a really important point, idiot biker are far more likely to damage themselves than to damage other, on the contrary to idiot in car. In fact for many of the point you cited above , I saw in the last years at least one car doing it. Up to the point of having a geisterfahrer (guys which take the highway on the frigging wrong direction going coutner sense of the other car).
"- Let's speed down the middle of a one-way street, going the wrong way."
Have had car do that on me. At 40 mph in a city road because they were in a hurry.
- Let's ride down the middle of an actual highway... yeh, nothing bad will happen here. (Seriously, saw that and went WTF)
As said above see my paragraph about geisterfahrer.
- That red light (or stop sign) at the bottom of the hill is only for cars... I don't need to stop or even slow down
Was badly hurt by a car which tought red light don't count. There was no policeman so hey who the fuck care about red light, right RIGHT ? And I don't count the number of time where car think stops sign and "right of way" do not count if you ride a bike. And seems surprised when you fume at them ("You should not be in the road , it is for car only fucktard")
- Let's make a left turn here while on this 40MpH road without indicating or looking, I'm sure the car behind me can stop in time
My colleagues fumes about cars doing that all the time, never putting the blinker light. So I am guessing ehre it is actually a widespread "sport" of forgetting for everybody to put a indication. On the other hand nearly 1/3 of the time if I put my arm to the left, the guys whicha re up to 100m behind me REEVES their motor up the wazoo and accelerate to pass before I go to the left. I dunno for the US, but here once you put your harm to the elft, unless they were already engaged to pass over you, they should not accelerate , they should slow down and let the bike pass. As I said a full 1/3 of the population ignore that fully.
- Hmm, I think I'll dig in my pocket and look for my cellphone, then start talking on the cellphone, while weaving around like a drunk idiot
Like cars. Which is why there are so many law against driving with cellphone and so many fines distributed.
- Hmm, I'm obviously not a great cyclist... so let me ride carelessly on a 40MpH road, fall down in the middle of the road without a helmet, and nearly cause a bunch of accidents as they try not to drive over my head.
How often that happens ? get real.
Oh yeah and my all time classic. old driver thinking they will brake and accelerate instead
I was nearly killed by one guy and his wife parking in a sport car, thankfully a tree stopped the car right in its track and they were not wounded,, the car totalled, but there hadn't been the tree I would probably be in a hospital or gone.
At least old biker are not a menace to everybody else.
Facts is, I frankly think there are a higher number of idiot on bike than there is on car. But the idiots in cars provocate hundreds, thousands of death every year. Those in bike do not.
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I thought bullshit gave off more methane than CO2.
The "stuff that matters" is that Americans elected that kind of people to make laws based on his knowledge.
The politician cited in this story makes laws based on the wishes of his largest contributors, not his personal knowledge.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Average gasoline vehicle produces 19.29 lbs /gal CO2 emissions. An average North American mid-size car travels 21 mpg. So, in an average 21 mile commute the vehicle would travel 21 miles and release 19.29 pounds of CO2 emissions.
.074 KW = 500)
An average person’s respiration generates approximately 450 liters (roughly 900 grams) of carbon dioxide per day (CO2#Human_physiology). The amount of CO2 released by human per day is 0.9 kg/day or 1.9 lbs.
It is an absurd comparison because there is no way a human can produce the amount of energy in one gallon of fuel. In fact, one gallon of gasoline is equivalent to
1 Barrel of Oil = 5,800,000 BTUs Source: Louisiana Oil and Gas Association
1 Gallon of Gas = 125,000 BTUs Source: US Department of Energy
1 Barrel of Oil thus contains the energy contained in 46.4 gallons of gas (5,800,000 divided by 125,000 = 46.4 )
1 Gallon of Gas = 500 hours of human work output (37 KWH in 1 gallon of gas divided by human work output in agriculture of
1 Barrel of Oil = 23,200 Hours of Human Work Output (Energy equivalent of 46.4 gallons of gas per barrel of oil x 500 hours of human work ouput per gallon of gas = 23,2000 hours)
In other news: Congressman tried biking in college, but didn't exhale.
We really need to limit the stupidity - or ignorance of basic science - in our elected officials.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Most of the calories you eat are being made with lots and lots of fossil fuels both for fertilizer and even basic processing like separating wheat from chaff.
Sure a car is worse, but cyclists and all humans at this point are increasing net CO2 just by eating.
I would support this tax only if Rep Orcutt and his ilk all stopped producing any CO2 themselves.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Well, then, that's on them. (No pun intended.)
Seriously, if bicyclists want to flout the law -- and I speak as one of them -- then let them suffer the consequences. And if they survive, maybe they'll be more careful the next time they're rolling toward that red light.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
get with the times, pal. the catalytic converter turns most of the CO into CO2. As some farmers have found out, CO2 in high concentration is maiming or lethal, the carbonic acid will make your lungs bleed.