Dear Umbra,
A couple of your recent columns have been about this novel idea of biking as the end-all in green transportation, but how green is biking, especially when you go out to buy a new one? If you switch to biking as the main source of transportation, you will be rewarded with the fantastic extra energy only exercise can bring, but won't you need to consume more calories? And if you eat more meat as a result of all the wonderful exercise, aren't you eventually going to add more carbon to your footprint? Also, aside from a homemade bamboo bike, isn't the bicycle manufacturing industry pretty dirty? I ask this because I have increased my bike commute over the last months, and have become a hungrier commuter than I used to be. I also bought a new bike to better suit my needs during my 20-plus-mile round-trip commute. How long will my newfound transportation take to become less of a carbon source than my car or my B20-burning local bus?
Parker
Seattle, Wash.
Dearest Parker,
Hey, hey, let a person be a little enthusiastic about bicycling every once in a while. Normally, I hardly get any questions about bikes unless I prime the pump. What is there to ask -- bikers are usually pretty darn happy, and low on the guilt burden. But we have indeed seen a burst in biking questions lately. So let's be happy about biking, and let me say this: I think your bicycle was less of a carbon source than your car before you rode it once.
Shall I compare thee to an SUV?
In these situations, one can get all bogged down in math. That's why I called in my pal Mr. Carbon Consultant to help me out.
Mr. CC and I went crazy on the math, using numbers from the Carnegie-Mellon Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment model. In the EIO-LCA model (not to be confused with the EIEIO model), one can determine the environmental impacts of a manufacturing sector, by dollar of value. Briefly -- because this could otherwise make for a long, dry article -- bicycles produce 0.912 metric tons of carbon equivalent per $1,000 of manufacturing costs, and cars produce 0.628 MTCO2E per $1,000. So mayhap bike manufacture is dirtier per thousand dollars, but it's certainly not dirtier per bike than it is per car, when we look at the total value of each. Which means your bike is already far less of a carbon source than your car when it comes off the assembly line -- and that's not even touching tailpipe emissions, the impacts of gas exploration, and so forth. I claim writer's privilege and do not want to deal with the bus right now, as it'll make the answer too long; but seeing that buses are also big, metal, expensive machines, I think we can guess where their EIO-LCA number would fall on a manufacturing basis alone.
As to the problem of a hearty cyclist's increased caloric intake and the greenhouse gases associated with meat production, we can neatly sidestep this one. You obviously are hyper-aware of the urgent climate change problems facing us all, and the high emissions connected to meat production. Good for you! So why would you make all that effort to reduce your carbon footprint by bicycling, yet add more meat to your diet? And why would you improve your fitness and overall health by biking 20 miles a day, then eating four steaks? Don't eat more meat. It's not good for your health and it's not good for the planet. The amount of meat you already eat is enough. If you must add foods due to your insatiable bike-derived hunger, let them be vegetable-based.
This reasonable answer may not satisfy your hunger for data, I know, so Mr. CC helped me with a bit more math on your behalf. We took numbers from a recent document by the Pacific Institute addressing the folderol about meat-based walking potentially producing more greenhouse-gas emissions than driving. Mr. CC figures that on a 100 percent ground beef diet (bleagh), a person driving a car emits 730 kilograms of carbon equivalent per 1,000 miles, while a cyclist will emit 410 kg over the same distance. More reasonably, if the person is fueled by the typical American diet, those emissions shift to 670 and 87, respectively. Certainly these are ballpark calculations, but they support the inclination of logic as regards these matters.
All this to say, biking is still great. Hooray.
Spokily,
Umbra
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Comments
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rrrandy Posted 2:39 am
02 Jun 2008
http://www.electricrider.com/
Convert your bike to a sweet (and very efficient) DIY EV craft. Charge at home and/or work, cruise the city streets at up to 35 mph. One enthusiastic EV biker built a cart, which he uses for cargo transportation around town (up to 150 lbs, I think). Basically, this means switching out your current front (or back) wheel with one that has stronger spokes and an in-hub electric motor. You'll add a throttle control, a power controller, some batteries and some wire -- pretty straightforward for anyone with moderate technical abilities and a bit of interest.
Randy
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Pat Walters Posted 3:34 am
02 Jun 2008
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racc Posted 4:07 am
02 Jun 2008
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traveler Posted 4:32 am
02 Jun 2008
Get out there!
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sustainablemer Posted 4:44 am
02 Jun 2008
i have a small fold-up electric trike. it weighs almost 50# and moves at about 18mph. it carries me and a few bags of groceries and has cut my car usage drastically. if it is less than a mile, i walk. if more, i bike. the car is now used an average of 75 miles a month. :-D emmer
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rawarren Posted 5:01 am
02 Jun 2008
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gwood Posted 7:44 am
02 Jun 2008
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BlackBear Posted 10:55 am
02 Jun 2008
Myself, I'm saving my pennies for a cargo trike so that I can sell my car and cancel my gym membership for good!
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kind1 Posted 1:15 pm
02 Jun 2008
Granted the jist is the same, cars are way more harmful based on there intended use. The bigger issue is how bikes are made and how people that make them are treated. There are a few bike companies trying to address this very issue (Dahon, Kind Bicycles) but it is a long road.
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:03 pm
02 Jun 2008
Drivers, clear a lane; bicyclists are taking to the road in record numbers in Massachusetts.
In Cambridge, ridership has soared 70 percent in five years, the MBTA is launching a "Bike Coach" to let riders bring their bicycles to beaches this summer, and across the state bicycle shops are struggling to keep up with demand.
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redambrosia99 Posted 1:35 am
03 Jun 2008
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:57 am
03 Jun 2008
The photo in this article just about sums up the continued viability of mixing cars and bikes on the roadway (you might want to read Romm's discourse on Newton to understand what momentum is)
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/06/02/mexico.biker ...
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BlackBear Posted 3:18 am
03 Jun 2008
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2wheeler Posted 4:03 am
03 Jun 2008
While I am out and about riding to work or whatever, I pick up at least 10 pieces of trash per day. I focus on the non-biodegradable items, and try to recycle as much of it as I can. I know where the trash cans and recycle bins are along my daily commute route, and have agitated for more recycle bins in the lobby at my office. Most of the time I don't stop at 10 items... it is very empowering knowing I am making a difference each day, even if I don't pick up every single piece of trash I see. People in the neighborhoods have noticed and offered their thanks for what I am doing. I tell them, "You can do it, too!"
Usually I end up with about 6-12 plastic beverage bottles and 3-10 aluminum cans on my 5 mile ride through town.
I put them in a plastic grocery bag, of which I usually carry a couple stuffed underneath my bike seat. The bags double as a seat cover if it is rainy out where I park the bike. I've noticed that the grocery bags are constantly blowing off of the local store parking lot... many get trapped in the fence by the edge of the lot, and others are hung up in the vegetation alongside the river where my bike trail passes it. I catch them before they get into the waterway which empties into the ocean where the plastic bag graveyards float at the midocean gyres...
Bonus: aluminum cans recycled save 95 percent of the energy required to make a new one. Bikes are made up largely of aluminum these days... Thus, it is entirely feasible to ZERO OUT out the carbon footprint of one's bicycle's manufacture by picking up and recycling aluminum cans and plastic or glass solid waste litter.
In addition, this reduces water pollution since trash in the curb gutter usually is washed into the storm drains which feed to creeks and rivers every time it rains.
I say: try it, and the health benefits of cycling will combine with the psychological benefits of visibly helping the planet-- and take your environmental commitment to the next level! If enough of us adopt this empowering approach, pretty soon most of our toughest problems (which seem to demand local solutions to be effective) will be solved.
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Ian Hanington Posted 8:49 am
03 Jun 2008
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ajazzfan Posted 9:56 am
03 Jun 2008
I also disagree with the implication (in Umbra's answer) that veggie eaters are somehow more environmentally friendly than meat eaters. This is simply not true. Vegetables need to be planted and harvested with machinery (for bulk farms), some farms use manufactured piping for irrigation, and there is also the problem of pesticides and fertilizers--not all farms are organic. So there really is NO food, or transportation, source that is 100% environmentally friendly!
So what do we do? Should we all go naked, walk to work (and everywhere else), and only eat grass and roots? Because that's the only way that I can see to achieve a "zero" carbon footprint.
This is an imperfect world, there is only so much we can do! It is like a "limit line", you can get close to zero, but you can never actually achieve it.
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sustainabull Posted 10:53 am
03 Jun 2008
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Payton Chung Posted 3:24 pm
03 Jun 2008
Even a heavy bicycle weighs less than just the (poisonous) raw nickel in a Prius' battery pack. You won't get a lot of mileage, so to speak, out of bicycle manufacturing's environmental footprint. The act of bicycling produces zero toxic waste, quite unlike driving (which is largely responsible for urban air pollution and a major source of urban water pollution).
Traveler writes of "the major area that comes to mind" -- for me, it's, well, the area of a car. One car driving in town requires as much road space as 30 bicyclists. Not only is that road space very valuable (and expensive to build and maintain), but all that extra pavement has immense ecological and social costs.
Another major difference: cars don't just kill people indirectly, through pollution or obesity; they kill people directly, too. Cars kill more Americans than guns do, whereas beds kill more Americans than bicycles do.
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ispeakforthetrees Posted 7:36 pm
03 Jun 2008
The World Naked Bike Ride is coming up. On June 7th in the Northern Hemisphere there is going to be a massive naked bike ride to celebrate bikers' rights to be free of car emissions on the road. Come join!
http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/
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redambrosia99 Posted 4:44 am
04 Jun 2008
First off, growing vegetables requires much less energy than growing meat. If you want to talk about the way its done now, you could look at it this way:
To grow your typical cow, first you gotta grow several fields of corn and/or other grains. then you gotta keep regrowing all those fields cause the cow will eat it. And since the cow it eating it, the cow will be pooping, so you gotta figure out a way to get rid of that (or you could just leave it there and let the cow stand its own poop they way a lot of feedlots like to do). So you're taking a whole bunch of grain products, feeding them to a cow, and getting a relatively small amount of meat for the use of your grain.
And it pretty much works that way for whatever sort of farm grown meat you're getting.
So, it's much less energy intensive to just go ahead and eat the grain (or other vegetable) as is.
Of course, it's a whole different matter if you're talking about growing cows the old-fashioned way: letting them wander around eating grass. But then you have take things like over-grazing and erosion into account. You also have to consider than beef would be much more expensive and not nearly so common if they did it the old fashioned way, because there's simply not enough room to let the number of animals we have cramped into feedlots wander around being real cows.
Once again, the same goes for pigs and chickens and such.
There is enough land in the world to provide everyone who's here now with a good diet... made of vegetables. (and assuming the food and land was distributed equitably and such). But there isn't enough to feed everyone the kind of diet that cow eating people in America seem to think is their god given right.
And let's face it, cows just don't taste that good. Moooo
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rafasan123 Posted 1:18 pm
08 Jun 2008
The way I see it, riding a bike is a win win win situation because you save money on gas, you get in shape, and it's better for the environment.
I have a hard time with any eco-argument against riding a bike.
I mean, yeah it's definitely not as glamorous or comfortable as driving your car, but anyone who's conscious about the current state of affairs in our society will be more than willing to make that small sacrifice.
Just my 2 cents.
Rafa
http://seattlegreenobserver.com/
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