There are places in Florida where the water table is within 3 feet of the surface; 10-15 feet is common, and it's not a little water, it's enough water to pump and water your yard. No-way-no-how can a homeowner afford to keep that pumped dry (and the water management district people would come after you with sharp knives, if you pumped it into the sea). And power can fail -- see recent wind/snow/ice storms up here in the Northeast, or hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.
AC way up there did all the conflating. I don't think that there is necessarily any relationship, though chemically-produced nitrogen fertilizer is a known energy hog, so not using it is a net energy saver. Others, it depends. There's an additional, and mostly-independent, issue of whether the fertilizer sources are being mined (e.g., phosphate rock from the ground) or recycled (compost and manure, mostly). Letting all your topsoil rinse away down the Mississippi River is a not a long-term plan -- but all farmers care (or should care) about that.
organic |ôrganik| adjective 1 of, relating to, or derived from living matter : organic soils.
Chemistry of, relating to, or denoting compounds containing carbon (other than simple binary compounds and salts) and chiefly or ultimately of biological origin. Compare with inorganic .
(of food or farming methods) produced or involving production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial agents.
I'm not sure I get your question, but not-organic nitrogen fertilizer is generally created in a process that uses a lot of energy to create ammonia from thin air. It's a big deal, and a large part of why corn ethanol is a not a huge energy win. "Organic" fertilizer is not produced like that, and thus lacks that particular high-energy input. It is, however, not as cheap (no surprise). Standards stunts for organic nitrogen include waste recycling (urine is normally sterile, and contains urea, and at least one internet friend of mine has proposed pissing on compost heaps for exact that reason -- it's culturally icky, but the logic is completely sound), and planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops or off-season crops (legumes). The Indian planting hack (corn+beans+squash) is an example of this -- but it is labor intensive (at least, until some clever person figures out a way to automate it).
Note that use of nitrogen fixing cover and co-crops does not require onerous transport of heavy fertilizer.
AC above made a bunch of various claims about petroleum/resource use that looked to me like a bunch of (ahem) organic fertilizer. I was pointing that out.
Read the study (see edit/reply below). "Bees can be exposed in two ways: through nectar from plants or through high-fructose corn syrup beekeepers use to feed their bees." Those particular pesticides are systemic and appear in all parts of the plant.
"" Pesticides poison bees"" "not shown." Strongly suggested by experiments. Maybe not proven at the 100% level, but they've been studying CCD for a while and this looks like a stronger link than most.
I was told, also, by a professor of entomology at URI, that some common pesticides (carbaryl, aka "Sevin") are reliably bad for bees. It's not intuitive which are the killers -- malathion is a better choice because it kills bees dead in the field, before they return to the hive carrying poison.
"Organic farms are full of sloppy techniques, magical thinking, and poor quality product"
There are surely some organic farms that fit this description, but none of the ones I've seen. A distant relative runs an organic dairy in Vermont; it runs like any other dairy, but the cows are pastured on "organic" pasture (a lucky fluke, says the owner -- they just never used fertilizer or pesticides on it.) and fed organic feed.
If you're okay with the look/fit/not-always-dimmable-ness of CFLs, definitely use up the ones you've got. My wife has better color sense than I do, and some of them bug her (and there's reasons why this would be so, the light really is different). We also have a bunch of ceiling cans, and the ceiling gets plenty cold in the winter, and thus they are slow to come on bright then.
And hopefully, by the time you use up your CFLs, LEDs will be cheaper, and a hair more efficient. What I would do, if you do have some of those "pisses me off" CFL problems, is selectively replace those particular CFLs with LEDs, and then carry on. That's what I've done -- where the light matters to my wife, it tends to be LED bulbs.
I found the discussion at the cited article more convincing. And it seems to indicate that biblically, not a person till born -- at least, in traditional translations, including but not limited to the KJV, and in particular (if you trust the author) in the original Hebrew.
The problem with Linux (and I run a Linux box at home) is that there are far more options for pilot error, and fewer canned solutions (*). Mac box, I keep it up to date, I run Little Snitch, I keep/Applications protected, I disable the usual attack vectors by default (browser Java, Flash, Adobe Acrobat, auto-open of allegedly "safe" content). If things get suckier, I look into anti-virus. The steps to take are pretty obvious.
(*) No doubt there ARE canned solutions. I'm motivated and intelligent, but busy. They never showed up on my radar.
But Linux, I think I am no longer running the latest rev of Fedora (I'm at 14), but it's not offering to update. The autoupdate for the various software bits quit offering me new stuff (did I accidentally bork a configuration file, or is this just life with Linux?). I'm not running the latest Firefox, it downloaded an update, and now what? It doesn't self-install. It's just this blob of bits, and I'm supposed to do something with it, but what?
The second problem with servers is that they are by design exposed to the internet, and much of the software that speaks to the internet is non-friendly in its configuration (Apache docs are a mess. I'm not touching sendmail.)
You're NOT a typical American if that's your daily commute. There are many people with commutes that long, but they're not typical. The median commute distance (it's a hard number to find, at least last time I looked) seems to be somewhere between 11 and 16 miles.
And it's in your interest not to hope that this fails -- what's your plan, when fuel gets scarce and expensive, because all the people with shorter commutes are still burning precious gasoline?
Traditional biblical answer is that it's not a person till born. Check the pre-Happy-Meal bibles, Exodus 21:12-27 -- penalty for striking and killing a person, is death. Penalty for striking a pregnant woman and causing her to miscarry, is not death. Ergo, not born, not a person. Word-o-God, can't argue with that, can we?
But someone's also been fucking with the translation in recent years. Imagine that, politically inspired tinkering with the Inerrant Word. Seems seriously wrong to me.
Oh, please. 3rd trimester abortions are rare and expensive, and usually because of horrible problems that would preclude ever being born healthy. Says Wikipedia, in the US, estimated to be 0.08%, or about 1000 per year.
But not for much longer, unless Obamacare is repealed or court-deactivated. That's part of the quid-pro-quo with the whole mandatory insurance thing -- you must have insurance, they cannot refuse, set an outrageous price, or fail to cover pre-existing conditions. If it wasn't mandatory, we'd game the insurance companies and drive them out of business. If there were regulations on their behavior, they'd F us over but good on terms/conditions/pricing.
In addition, the requirements (the current ones) can be met with halogen lightbulbs (they're sufficiently efficient) which are not very different from incandescent bulbs in light quality (they are somewhat bluer). And, given modest assumptions about the price of electricity or how many hours per day you run a light bulb, the new LED lights (the one I tried was about $30 at Home Depot) pay for themselves quickly, and work very well -- they are on instantly, have better light, are durable, contain no mercury. I am sure that the much more expensive new Philips light has even better light quality, though it will not pay for itself as quickly. I've also read a good review of CREE EcoSmart LED bulbs. CREE is a good name (I use CREE and Philips LEDs on bicycles that live outdoors in Massachusetts; summing over all the bikes and all the LEDs, over 20 LED-years of weather exposure, with no failures).
I know this is off-topic, but you were just completely wrong, and on the internet, too.
I am not so sure of this. Into the late 70s and early 80s, B-52s were being retrofitted as cruise missile platforms (my dad worked on the guidance systems). I have no way of knowing whether this was just another boondoggle, or if this was intended to be a (second) credible deterrent to an overwhelming first strike (have B-52s with cruise missiles in the air, they survive, they launch retaliatory cruise missiles from a safe distance).
It WAS cross-platform (in theory). Apple was slow to release a patch, everyone else (who was up to the latest rev of Java) is fine, because non-Apple Java had a patch for this before the Trojans were deployed.
Java has a better in-theory story than most things exposed to the web because it is (by design) invulnerable to buffer overruns. In practice, however, it uses native libraries for some important stuff, and those have the buffer overrun problem. I don't know the details of this bug, however. I find the seemingly neverending stream of vulnerabilities in everything to be more than a little depressing.
from TFA: "if you’ve downloaded and installed the latest software updates from Apple that patch the Java vulnerabilities (or disabled Java), you’re safe" (for now).
How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition.
Costs are relatively low, especially if you are paying attention to human life lost. The high order bit in the US is electricity generation, and ditching coal is a net win. For transportation, reduced driving (more bicycling where appropriate, walking to mass transit, that sort of thing) means more exercise, which has a measurable (and large) reduction in the mortality rate. Eating less meat (not NO meat, but much less) reduces GHG emissions, and is probably a minor health benefit (we get a lot more protein than we appear to need, at least in this country).
Other GHG mitigation choices are not especially death-y. Driving in small cars is not significantly more dangerous than driving in large cars, if everyone drives in small cars (note that the total crash risk is dwarfed by the total lack-of-exercise risk; our actions suggest that we either do not really care about risk, or are grossly misinformed, or both). Insulating houses does not make them more unsafe. Turning the thermostat down in the winter may even be good for us.
One flaw with your metric is that observed behavior in the US suggests that we are not actually that interested in minimizing human life lost. We've got a mess of bad habits here, and a shorter life expectancy than many other countries. We could pay attention to this and copy what appears to work from them, or (ahem) not. Turns out, not.
Except - I live in a town where this was put to the voters, and one time they voted money for road maintenance (we're grossly behind) and another time they turned it down. Current thinking is that given inadequate funds, some roads should be allowed to decay to dirt, since repairing them at this stage will require a full rebuild anyway.
Everybody in town government knows how this works, one of the guys who made presentations explaining this years ago is now selectman, and another is a state senator. No amount of "competent management" can make $1million do the work of $10million.
We're also below state average and state median in per-pupil school spending. What we've got, is voters with crazy ideas about what it takes to run a government.
It would help if you provided a link to your studies. A simple back-of-the-envelope check on how much is added to our lives (2-5 years) and how much of our CO2 footprint is from "personal vehicle use" (out of 5718 Tg total in 2010, 1128.4, =.65 times 1736, pages 4 and 8 (pdf)) suggests that the answer is not so clear-cut.
(Your remark/snark about bike helmets suggests you are just casually quoting something you heard, and have not really looked into the issue. Other people have. Helmets are not a large factor in cyclist life expectancy compared to the health benefits of cycling itself.)
The high-end expected extra life is 7% (if you are male, and ride vigorously, assume expected life span of 74.7 years), but with "average" exertion, only 5% (3 years). Cycling extends female expected lifespan by only 2.7% to 4.7%.
20% of our CO2 emissions come from personal vehicle use. If you ride a bike instead of driving, your yearly footprint will not be as large, and thus the total footprint will not be as large, either.
Suppose you use a bicycle to displace 50 miles of "personal vehicle use" per week. That's 2500/year. If you assume the maximum extra life from cycling, and would otherwise drive your car 7500/year, it's a wash (7500/2500=3; 20%/7%=3). If only average (and 50mi/week is not that big a deal), then 10000/year, and it's a wash. For women, displacing 2500 a year with a bike puts them ahead if they would otherwise drive less than 10,600 to 18,500 miles per year.
For the male half of the population, cycling is probably a net environmental loss, for the female half, it is probably a net win. This is obviously crude -- we don't drive our entire lives (so the percentage added is larger), but we don't drive as much when we are old, as we do when we have a commute and kids and etc (so extra years are not as costly). The car miles displaced by cycling also tend to be the least efficient (slow, stop-and-go, short trips), which slightly favors cycling.
Human-fuel also enters into it, but on most foods our full-cycle energy cost is pretty good (equivalent of 780mpg on potatoes; 145mpg on skim milk; 1500-3000mpg on oats). Beef is not a good plan, but a steady diet of beef-for-bike-fuel would probably negate the health benefits of cycling anyway (too much protein for too long, not good for your kidneys).
This claim also assumes that people won't pursue other steps to live longer lives. If there was a pill that would extend people's lives by five years, and had good-sized health studies as evidence, it's a safe assumption that people would take it (provided, of course, that the pill did not make them sweat or have wind-blown or helmet-hair). And if/when such a pill is found, the extra-years environmental "cost" of cycling disappears (unless the pill and exercise have non-overlapping physiological benefits).
Slashdot Mirror
There are places in Florida where the water table is within 3 feet of the surface; 10-15 feet is common, and it's not a little water, it's enough water to pump and water your yard. No-way-no-how can a homeowner afford to keep that pumped dry (and the water management district people would come after you with sharp knives, if you pumped it into the sea). And power can fail -- see recent wind/snow/ice storms up here in the Northeast, or hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.
AC way up there did all the conflating. I don't think that there is necessarily any relationship, though chemically-produced nitrogen fertilizer is a known energy hog, so not using it is a net energy saver. Others, it depends. There's an additional, and mostly-independent, issue of whether the fertilizer sources are being mined (e.g., phosphate rock from the ground) or recycled (compost and manure, mostly). Letting all your topsoil rinse away down the Mississippi River is a not a long-term plan -- but all farmers care (or should care) about that.
organic |ôrganik|
adjective
1 of, relating to, or derived from living matter : organic soils.
Chemistry of, relating to, or denoting compounds containing carbon (other than simple binary compounds and salts) and chiefly or ultimately of biological origin. Compare with inorganic .
(of food or farming methods) produced or involving production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial agents.
I'm not sure I get your question, but not-organic nitrogen fertilizer is generally created in a process that uses a lot of energy to create ammonia from thin air. It's a big deal, and a large part of why corn ethanol is a not a huge energy win. "Organic" fertilizer is not produced like that, and thus lacks that particular high-energy input. It is, however, not as cheap (no surprise). Standards stunts for organic nitrogen include waste recycling (urine is normally sterile, and contains urea, and at least one internet friend of mine has proposed pissing on compost heaps for exact that reason -- it's culturally icky, but the logic is completely sound), and planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops or off-season crops (legumes). The Indian planting hack (corn+beans+squash) is an example of this -- but it is labor intensive (at least, until some clever person figures out a way to automate it).
Note that use of nitrogen fixing cover and co-crops does not require onerous transport of heavy fertilizer.
AC above made a bunch of various claims about petroleum/resource use that looked to me like a bunch of (ahem) organic fertilizer. I was pointing that out.
Read the study (see edit/reply below). "Bees can be exposed in two ways: through nectar from plants or through high-fructose corn syrup beekeepers use to feed their bees." Those particular pesticides are systemic and appear in all parts of the plant.
Strongly suggested by experiments, borked the link.
"" Pesticides poison bees""
"not shown."
Strongly suggested
by experiments. Maybe not proven at the 100% level, but they've been studying CCD for a while and this looks like a stronger link than most.
I was told, also, by a professor of entomology at URI, that some common pesticides (carbaryl, aka "Sevin") are reliably bad for bees. It's not intuitive which are the killers -- malathion is a better choice because it kills bees dead in the field, before they return to the hive carrying poison.
So I think it is shown.
"Organic farms are full of sloppy techniques, magical thinking, and poor quality product"
There are surely some organic farms that fit this description, but none of the ones I've seen. A distant relative runs an organic dairy in Vermont; it runs like any other dairy, but the cows are pastured on "organic" pasture (a lucky fluke, says the owner -- they just never used fertilizer or pesticides on it.) and fed organic feed.
Citations for claims, please. Production of "non-organic" nitrogen fertilizer uses a lot of energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#High_energy_consumption
If you're okay with the look/fit/not-always-dimmable-ness of CFLs, definitely use up the ones you've got. My wife has better color sense than I do, and some of them bug her (and there's reasons why this would be so, the light really is different). We also have a bunch of ceiling cans, and the ceiling gets plenty cold in the winter, and thus they are slow to come on bright then.
And hopefully, by the time you use up your CFLs, LEDs will be cheaper, and a hair more efficient. What I would do, if you do have some of those "pisses me off" CFL problems, is selectively replace those particular CFLs with LEDs, and then carry on. That's what I've done -- where the light matters to my wife, it tends to be LED bulbs.
One place where LEDs totally kick ass is underneath cabinets, to light counters.
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/more-undercabinet-lights/
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/undercabinet-lights-basement-kitchen/
I found the discussion at the cited article more convincing. And it seems to indicate that biblically, not a person till born -- at least, in traditional translations, including but not limited to the KJV, and in particular (if you trust the author) in the original Hebrew.
The problem with Linux (and I run a Linux box at home) is that there are far more options for pilot error, and fewer canned solutions (*). Mac box, I keep it up to date, I run Little Snitch, I keep /Applications protected, I disable the usual attack vectors by default (browser Java, Flash, Adobe Acrobat, auto-open of allegedly "safe" content). If things get suckier, I look into anti-virus. The steps to take are pretty obvious.
(*) No doubt there ARE canned solutions. I'm motivated and intelligent, but busy. They never showed up on my radar.
But Linux, I think I am no longer running the latest rev of Fedora (I'm at 14), but it's not offering to update. The autoupdate for the various software bits quit offering me new stuff (did I accidentally bork a configuration file, or is this just life with Linux?). I'm not running the latest Firefox, it downloaded an update, and now what? It doesn't self-install. It's just this blob of bits, and I'm supposed to do something with it, but what?
The second problem with servers is that they are by design exposed to the internet, and much of the software that speaks to the internet is non-friendly in its configuration (Apache docs are a mess. I'm not touching sendmail.)
You're NOT a typical American if that's your daily commute. There are many people with commutes that long, but they're not typical. The median commute distance (it's a hard number to find, at least last time I looked) seems to be somewhere between 11 and 16 miles.
And it's in your interest not to hope that this fails -- what's your plan, when fuel gets scarce and expensive, because all the people with shorter commutes are still burning precious gasoline?
Just spin up the home flywheel while you're out driving, spin it down to run the charger.
Traditional biblical answer is that it's not a person till born. Check the pre-Happy-Meal bibles, Exodus 21:12-27 -- penalty for striking and killing a person, is death. Penalty for striking a pregnant woman and causing her to miscarry, is not death. Ergo, not born, not a person. Word-o-God, can't argue with that, can we?
But someone's also been fucking with the translation in recent years. Imagine that, politically inspired tinkering with the Inerrant Word. Seems seriously wrong to me.
Oh, please. 3rd trimester abortions are rare and expensive, and usually because of horrible problems that would preclude ever being born healthy. Says Wikipedia, in the US, estimated to be 0.08%, or about 1000 per year.
But not for much longer, unless Obamacare is repealed or court-deactivated. That's part of the quid-pro-quo with the whole mandatory insurance thing -- you must have insurance, they cannot refuse, set an outrageous price, or fail to cover pre-existing conditions. If it wasn't mandatory, we'd game the insurance companies and drive them out of business. If there were regulations on their behavior, they'd F us over but good on terms/conditions/pricing.
Regarding "throw away your lightbulbs" -- I believe George Bush signed that bill.
In addition, the requirements (the current ones) can be met with halogen lightbulbs (they're sufficiently efficient) which are not very different from incandescent bulbs in light quality (they are somewhat bluer). And, given modest assumptions about the price of electricity or how many hours per day you run a light bulb, the new LED lights (the one I tried was about $30 at Home Depot) pay for themselves quickly, and work very well -- they are on instantly, have better light, are durable, contain no mercury. I am sure that the much more expensive new Philips light has even better light quality, though it will not pay for itself as quickly. I've also read a good review of CREE EcoSmart LED bulbs. CREE is a good name (I use CREE and Philips LEDs on bicycles that live outdoors in Massachusetts; summing over all the bikes and all the LEDs, over 20 LED-years of weather exposure, with no failures).
I know this is off-topic, but you were just completely wrong, and on the internet, too.
I drive a car with broken (removed) power steering. Works fine for me, parking and all.
I am not so sure of this. Into the late 70s and early 80s, B-52s were being retrofitted as cruise missile platforms (my dad worked on the guidance systems). I have no way of knowing whether this was just another boondoggle, or if this was intended to be a (second) credible deterrent to an overwhelming first strike (have B-52s with cruise missiles in the air, they survive, they launch retaliatory cruise missiles from a safe distance).
It WAS cross-platform (in theory). Apple was slow to release a patch, everyone else (who was up to the latest rev of Java) is fine, because non-Apple Java had a patch for this before the Trojans were deployed.
Java has a better in-theory story than most things exposed to the web because it is (by design) invulnerable to buffer overruns. In practice, however, it uses native libraries for some important stuff, and those have the buffer overrun problem. I don't know the details of this bug, however. I find the seemingly neverending stream of vulnerabilities in everything to be more than a little depressing.
from TFA: "if you’ve downloaded and installed the latest software updates from Apple that patch the Java vulnerabilities (or disabled Java), you’re safe" (for now).
But it looks like the good times are over.
How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition.
Costs are relatively low, especially if you are paying attention to human life lost. The high order bit in the US is electricity generation, and ditching coal is a net win. For transportation, reduced driving (more bicycling where appropriate, walking to mass transit, that sort of thing) means more exercise, which has a measurable (and large) reduction in the mortality rate. Eating less meat (not NO meat, but much less) reduces GHG emissions, and is probably a minor health benefit (we get a lot more protein than we appear to need, at least in this country).
Other GHG mitigation choices are not especially death-y. Driving in small cars is not significantly more dangerous than driving in large cars, if everyone drives in small cars (note that the total crash risk is dwarfed by the total lack-of-exercise risk; our actions suggest that we either do not really care about risk, or are grossly misinformed, or both). Insulating houses does not make them more unsafe. Turning the thermostat down in the winter may even be good for us.
One flaw with your metric is that observed behavior in the US suggests that we are not actually that interested in minimizing human life lost. We've got a mess of bad habits here, and a shorter life expectancy than many other countries. We could pay attention to this and copy what appears to work from them, or (ahem) not. Turns out, not.
Except - I live in a town where this was put to the voters, and one time they voted money for road maintenance (we're grossly behind) and another time they turned it down. Current thinking is that given inadequate funds, some roads should be allowed to decay to dirt, since repairing them at this stage will require a full rebuild anyway.
Everybody in town government knows how this works, one of the guys who made presentations explaining this years ago is now selectman, and another is a state senator. No amount of "competent management" can make $1million do the work of $10million.
We're also below state average and state median in per-pupil school spending. What we've got, is voters with crazy ideas about what it takes to run a government.
It would help if you provided a link to your studies. A simple back-of-the-envelope check on how much is added to our lives (2-5 years) and how much of our CO2 footprint is from "personal vehicle use" (out of 5718 Tg total in 2010, 1128.4, = .65 times 1736, pages 4 and 8 (pdf)) suggests that the answer is not so clear-cut.
(Your remark/snark about bike helmets suggests you are just casually quoting something you heard, and have not really looked into the issue. Other people have. Helmets are not a large factor in cyclist life expectancy compared to the health benefits of cycling itself.)
The high-end expected extra life is 7% (if you are male, and ride vigorously, assume expected life span of 74.7 years), but with "average" exertion, only 5% (3 years). Cycling extends female expected lifespan by only 2.7% to 4.7%.
20% of our CO2 emissions come from personal vehicle use. If you ride a bike instead of driving, your yearly footprint will not be as large, and thus the total footprint will not be as large, either.
Suppose you use a bicycle to displace 50 miles of "personal vehicle use" per week. That's 2500/year. If you assume the maximum extra life from cycling, and would otherwise drive your car 7500/year, it's a wash (7500/2500=3; 20%/7%=3). If only average (and 50mi/week is not that big a deal), then 10000/year, and it's a wash. For women, displacing 2500 a year with a bike puts them ahead if they would otherwise drive less than 10,600 to 18,500 miles per year.
For the male half of the population, cycling is probably a net environmental loss, for the female half, it is probably a net win. This is obviously crude -- we don't drive our entire lives (so the percentage added is larger), but we don't drive as much when we are old, as we do when we have a commute and kids and etc (so extra years are not as costly). The car miles displaced by cycling also tend to be the least efficient (slow, stop-and-go, short trips), which slightly favors cycling.
Human-fuel also enters into it, but on most foods our full-cycle energy cost is pretty good (equivalent of 780mpg on potatoes; 145mpg on skim milk; 1500-3000mpg on oats). Beef is not a good plan, but a steady diet of beef-for-bike-fuel would probably negate the health benefits of cycling anyway (too much protein for too long, not good for your kidneys).
This claim also assumes that people won't pursue other steps to live longer lives. If there was a pill that would extend people's lives by five years, and had good-sized health studies as evidence, it's a safe assumption that people would take it (provided, of course, that the pill did not make them sweat or have wind-blown or helmet-hair). And if/when such a pill is found, the extra-years environmental "cost" of cycling disappears (unless the pill and exercise have non-overlapping physiological benefits).