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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."
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
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.
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 post has merit and should feel good about itself
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.
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!
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...
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.
Most of these claims often analyze the entire chain of producing asparagus, while neglecting to do the same for fuel the bus is using. So while superficially it is an interesting statement, the way it is derived is probably flawed. You can't compare the carbon footprint of asparagus vs. the emissions of a city bus. You also have to take into consideration the carbon footprint of the fuel the city bus is using.
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.
remember these are the people who wanted to ban dihydrogen monoxide...
To me, this all seems like a problem with cyclist education and your local laws.
In European cities, where cycling is much more common, there seems to be significantly fewer (although sadly still more than zero) idiots. I assume it's simply that because cycling is so much more common, both the cyclists and the vehicle drivers are more used to dealing with each other.
Beyond that, cyclists can and do end up taking the blame when they cause an accident. An acquaintance of mine here in Germany was cycling drunk one day, ran a red light and got hit side on by a VW convertible going 50km/h. He was thrown a significant distance and woke up in hospital, lucky to be alive. Upon being released from hospital, a couple of police officers had a nice chat with him about the accident and the end result was that he ended up paying two separate fines for cycling whilst under the influence as well as running a red light; AND he had to pay for the damage he caused to the car (normally there's a type of insurance here that covers that sort of thing, but being the relatively irresponsible type (obviously) he doesn't have it).
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I haven't read the book but I find that hard to believe for many reasons.
1. You are going to breathe some anyway, so you need to look at how much more CO2 you give off than if you were just sitting. And they need to compare a typical rider, not Lance Armstrong in competition mode. The bicycle is one of the most efficient forms of transportation ever made, in terms of distance traveled per energy put in. I rode a bike pretty much exclusively in college, and in a flat town, it's less work than walking. Pedal, coast. Pedal, coast. Pedal, coast.
2. If you're going to look at all the CO2 it took to make some asparagus, then you need to be fair and look at all the CO2 it took to make every single component of the car, and assemble the car, and all the CO2 it took to gather and refine the petroleum that's in the tank -- not just the CO2 that's coming out the tailpipe. I'd also be curious how he made his measurements -- like the saying goes, it takes a lot to build a factory to make one can of soup, but after you've done that, the next million cans are pretty easy.
3. I'd also like the see the footprints of more foods. There's probably a 10x, if not 100x, difference between the highest and lowest foods, and as you say, we don't all eat just asparagus.
4. And finally, are you talking about the entire bus, or just one rider's worth? The good Rep. Orcutt is talking about biking versus driving a car, and we all know that a bus with 60 people gives off less CO2 than 60 people driving.
If you're familiar with the book, I'd be curious to know the answer to any of those questions.
In any case, the representative is full of shit. When I'm walking my kid to school, and we get to the door, I can smell the exhaust of the dozens of cars sitting there. It does not smell like that from an equal number of people breathing.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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?
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.
In other news: Congressman tried biking in college, but didn't exhale.
Not to mention the fact that the people on the bus are still breathing, albeit not as much as while riding a bicycle. I bet that is ignored as well.