I hate to be that guy, but this is true. Before you pull out your pitchforks, read this explanation.
I take a bicycle to essentially all of my local errands, so I thought it would be cool to write an app that calculates how much CO2 emissions you’ve saved based on the number of errands you’ve run by bike (by distance). I wanted to consider everything, like food intake, emissions associated with manufacturing, etc. To be clear, the exact emissions varies wildly depending on what numbers you plug in, but it almost always comes out in favor of a passenger car. This only considers CO2 emissions, and ignores noise pollution, microplastics, and other potential environmental issues.
Long story short, if the following things are true, you’ll probably release less CO2 by taking a car:
- You drive a reasonably efficient car (30 mpg+)
- You drive your cars for a long time (150,000+ miles)
- You get most of your food from the grocery store (not local, like a farmers market)
- You are not vegan
These assumptions do make quite a few concessions, but I think it’s fair to say the majority of Americans fit these criteria.
In order of CO2 emissions per mile using the same assumptions as above (lowest to highest):
- E-bike
- E-scooter
- Bus (divided across all passengers)
- Gas passenger car
- Electric passenger car (again, considering manufacturing, ~150k miles of ownership)
- Bicycle
- Truck
- Walking
This is not me suggesting cars are better for the environment overall, but it’s an uncomfortable fact that humans are wildly inefficient at converting chemical energy into kinetic energy. Just think about the fact that when you burn 1000 extra calories per day, a significant portion of those calories had to be driven hundreds of miles on a diesel truck after spending months/years being grown on a farm.
Here’s the factors I considered. Let me know if you can think of anything I missed and I’ll re-run the numbers:
- Calories above baseline for driving/cycling, and the associated food production
- Emissions associated with use (tailpipe emissions, cyclist exhaling)
- Emissions associated with manufacturing
- Emissions associated with maintenance
Here’s some things I did not consider:
- Emissions associated with building/maintaining infrastructure
- Emissions associated with car dependency sprawl (i.e. everything is farther apart to accommodate cars)
- Proximity of air pollution (cycling has practically zero air pollution locally, which is good for cities)
- Tire microplastics, disposing of vehicle parts, etc.
- The benefits for the environment, healthcare, and public resources associated with reduced obesity from cycling
- The increased tendency to shop locally with improved micro-mobility from walkable/bikeable cities
I guess the moral of the story is that being vegetarian is significantly more impactful than cycling to work (I say as a non-vegetarian cyclist).
I read a carbrain article a while ago that tried to argue that cyclists create more CO2 than a car.
So to compare that they assumed that
- The cyclist eats exactly as much calories as required, so that extra exercise directly requires an increase of caloric intake. They did the same for the driver.
- The cyclist exclusively covers the added caloric intake via imported japanese Kobe beef steak cooked on a wood grill.
- The car was the lowest-consumption electic car they could find.
And with that setup the cyclist actually created more CO2.
The author seriously booked that as a win for the car, claiming that cycling is not always better for the environment than driving.
Wow that feels like an exercise in the absurd
lol that’s so dumb. If you want an actually good breakdown then I’d recommend this video to share with people!
My understanding is that humans pretty much use about the same amount of calories a day, whether sedentary or not. If you spend more on exercise, your body spends less on other things.
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why
The amount your body uses just to stay alive dwarfs what you’d burn from adding cycling to your day.
Edited to add the “much” that I somehow deleted.
One other interesting thing is brown fat. Dr Karl told this story loads of times on the 5live science podcast, so it’s bound to be in one of the 2010 or 2011 episodes.
Iirc: a group of women went to Antarctica and put an a lot of body fat beforehand. But even after that, the cold was so enough to make their bodies turn their white fat into brown fat and they lost a ton of weight.
Not the Dr Karl episode: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5nrBw8X5NhXxv04J7H1vn2J/the-body-fat-that-can-make-you-thin
So the answer is live somewhere freezing for a bit if you want to lose weight.
(In my case, for some reason eating chocolate helps keeps my tummy fat down. I ballooned after giving it up, even though the rest of my diet was the same.)
Talk to a bike courier if you get the chance to. The amounts of calories they burn in a shift is ridiculous.
Most people are way above the amount of calories they need. Doing more exercise just burns that excess and you need to do a ton more exercise to actually get to the point where you need to eat more to cover that surplus consumption.
So if you do an 8h cycling shift you might need to eat more. But if you just commute to work for an hour per day (half an hour per direction) you will not need to take in more calories.
I think what it means is that yes, you can burn more calories in a given active session (working out for example) but the amount of calories you expend over a year for example, divided by the number of days, ends up being about the same regardless.
I guess one of the more popular reasons as to why is because your body is capable of compensating for high intensity sessions when you’re not as active, and being extremely active for long ends up burning you out so you can’t do it anymore (and you get sick or injured).
But from what I’ve seen, exercise is still really good for you, it’s just not exactly for the reasons we used to think. I know in my (very anecdotal) case, I actually eat less when I’m working out regularly just out of instinct. Maybe it’s my body’s way of going “we need to stay light because we have to run again tomorrow”?
There is a video from kurzgesagt on this very topic: link
This has to be satirical
Unfortunately it does not have to be satirical. We have this idiot professor of economics, Reiner Eichenberger, in Switzerland who calculated the same kind of shit for an article in a business newspaper (Handelszeitung).
He said an efficient car using 5 l or 12 kg CO2 per 100 km with four people is more efficient than a cyclist who needs 2500 kcal per 100 km, so they have to eat 1 kg of beef which emits 13.3 kg CO2. Therefore the people in the car are 4 times as efficient per passenger kilometers.
People got quite cross, there were replies by other professors in other magazines to tear him and his shitty assumptions to shreds.
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He assumed this ridiculous beef-only diet. Potatoes or pasta would be around 0.5 kg.
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He included CO2 in the production of the beef but not of the gas. That would amount to another 50% or so.
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He assumed a more efficient than average car for Switzerland, 7l would have been fairer. And on shorter distances it gets worse, e.g. on daily commutes.
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He assumed 4 people but cars on average carry around 1.5.
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He ignored grey energy in the car and bike production, which would make the bike look way better. Whenever he’s railing against EVs he includes grey energy because then it makes traditional cars look better.
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There are also some hard to calculate benefits for public health in cycling.
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Cycling for travel might substitute other sports activity that would have used the same amount of food.
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Cyclists generally cover less distance than drivers. A 1-to-1 comparison the same distance might not be sensible in the first place. If you cycle you try to find nearby destinations, so from a public policy perspective encouraging more cyclists also implies less total distance traveled.
Cyclists generally cover less distance than drivers.
My partner recently had her car MOT done and I can confirm I cycle more than she drives in a year. Would be very interested to know the average speed of each though as I can often cycle past cars that are waiting at the lights but the bike path is flowing freely.
Also, the driver and passengers still burn calories while just sitting in the car.
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As ridiculous as this is, especially with the dumbass assumptions, it would actually be kind of a fun interesting calculation. Not that it has any environmental merit, because what about people who drive to the gym, or me who takes the tram to the pool to swim laps there, etc, but just sorta fun.
E-bikes sit in a weird spot where the amount of human effort saved is substantially higher than the carbon footprint of the components.
Which implies the optimal transportation mix would be electric trains+trams with e-bikes to go the last few miles.
Can you elaborate on the first bit? It’s counter intuitive, considering electricity needs to be produced somehow, so I’d love to learn the background.
Usually using electricity in something like an electric car requires more emissions to generate the power than would be emitted from the food and respiration required to walk the same distance.
Bicycles are interesting because they improve efficiency so much that it offsets the emissions needed to make the bike, and e-bikes are able to leverage that high efficiency to get 80+ km of travel per KWh (compared to ~6 from something like a Tesla)
That is super interesting, thanks! Granted, public transport transports more than one person, so if possible, it’s still much more efficient, and batteries are made of very finite resources, which is a whole different issue to consider.
True! A fully loaded train is about the most efficient way to move humans from one place to another, and has been for over a hundred years.
Lithium is limited, but you can make 150 e-bikes with a single electric car battery. If we could figure out some sort of solid state sodium battery chemistry it wouldn’t even be an issue.
Absolutely. It’s quite funny.
Or at least a dig at someone being overly pious. My brother for a while was unbearable about his 2 x EVs saving the world while living in a city with at least 6 public transport alternatives within 100m
If this is true, then support a carbon tax without exceptions. All the extra food cyclists use will be taxed extra.
If you drive in a 25 miles per gallon vehicle (pretty standard) you will burn the equivalent of 1100 calories per mile. Assuming an active person who rides their bike a lot eats around 2500 calories a day, and they ride to work every day, and they live 5 miles away. In the car you would burn about 11,000 calories a day, in the bike you would never burn more than 2,500 and that ignores the fact that actually most of those calories have nothing to do with the biking.
Also, one year of an average American driving (around 14,000 miles) would have the equivalent calories of giving 16,000 people a proper meal.
Wait until he finds out how many calories gasoline has
That’s why I drink a can of gasoline before every run
You should see how many calories are in plutonium and uranium. If you eat a pellet of either one it will be the last meal you’ll ever need in your life!
I drank a bottle of gas years ago and I’m still running off it.
Yeah when you drink gas, it usually lasts for the rest of your life
It really is the ultimate drink.
Fake news by big libs. /s
That’s cute. No other personal vehicle beats the caloric efficiency of a bicycle, and it’s not even close. They’re very literally one of the most impressive feats of engineering that human kind has ever invented.
Electric bikes are more efficient one.
I couldn’t believe how little energy I used to cycle the 35 mile round trip to work on an ebike, it’s bonkers
That’s depends on the car drivers that surrounds you.
Aren’t electric bikes stupidly dangerous though?
Only if you ride them stupidly dangerously.
That depends on the car drivers that surrounds you.
That depends on a whole bunch of factors. Maximum velocity is a big one. In Germany (might be EU, not sure), motor assistance is capped at 25km/h for the vast majority of e-bikes (there are some that go to 45, but they are not allowed on bike lanes), which I find to be a decent compromise between safety and speed.
Age plays another role, in that e-bikes allow older people to cycle, whose reaction times or other capabilities may be worse than average. Some training might be required to adjust to the unfamiliar power, too. But I’ll take an elderly cyclist over elderly SUV drivers any day.
And then there’s the infrastructure. Biking can be anywhere from outright suicidal to very safe depending on the existence and state of proper bike lanes. This is the biggest difference between places like the Netherlands and let’s just say elsewhere.
how? the electricity in them just assists you in pedalling up hills and stuff
Only if it’s a fatbike.
I fucking hate fatbikes.
Per mile, there are more fatalities, but in the US, something like 39/40 deaths from bicycles and 4/5 deaths from motorbikes is due to cars; presumably decreasing the number of miles driven by car would lower the number of pedestrian, bike, and motorbike fatalities they cause.
You know you’re on the right side when you’re arguing against humans exercising more!
They’re always more concerned about being right, instead of correct. :p
No one tell them how many calories are in a tank of gas
Alright, I’ll take the bait. Let’s do some recreational math
This web page contains average passenger car fuel efficiency broken down by year. The most recent year available is 2016, so we’ll use that: 9.4 km/L or 22.1 miles per gallon. A gallon of gas has about 120MJ of energy in it. So, an average car requires about 120,000,000 / (1/22.1) = 5.4MJ per mile
This web page has calories burned for different types of exercise. I separately searched and found that the average adult in the US weighs around 200LBS, so we’ll use the 205LBS data, and I’m going to assume that “cycling - 10-11.9 MPH” is representative of the average commuter who isn’t in too much of a hurry. That gives us 558 calories per hour, or 55.8 calories per mile (using the low end of the 10 to 11.9mph range). That’s equal to about 0.23MJ per mile (as an aside, it’s important to note that the calories commonly used when talking about diet and exercise, are actual kilocalories equal to 1000 of the SI calories you learned about in school.)
Moral of the story: an average bike ride consumes around 20x less energy than an average drive of the same distance.
We also gotta keep in mind that cycling makes people healthier, so it has that benefit, and that it can also potentially replace some exercise people would be doing otherwise, in which case you’re basically moving for free since you would have expanded those calories anyways.
You mean I don’t have to drive to the gym anymore if I cycle to work?
Worth noting that cars can fit more people in them than bikes can.
So with that in mind, clearly the true moral of the story is that clown cars are the most efficient method of travel.
You joke but are kind of right. But it only starts making sense when you quite literally start moving bus loads of people.
Very true. It’s a shame we haven’t invented any form of transport that can fit a bus load of people inside at once.
(Source: am american)
Holy shit what kind of cars does that study take into account/what type of vehicles do people drive‽ (Granted I do not know how fuel [in-?]efficient worries/trucks are but O.o)
And yes I am aware that 2016 is 9 years ago now, but I know I am driving badly when my car consumes slightly more than half as much fuel as this average and I am rapidly thinking about just how much money some people/companies are spending on gas!
And yet cyclists still consume less per day than that 400 lb dude in an F150.
Now imagine what this guy would eat if he was cyclist. Checkmate again. You libtards are so easy to burn.
Sounds like a boon for that fat guy’s local economy
You don’t get it, a healthy menu consumes much more volume of food that needs to be transported, per capita. Imagine if everyone ordered a head of lettuce instead of a sneakers bar. How many lettuce trucks we’d need??? It’s just not sustainable.
My cabbages!
If the the Dutch are so climate couscous maybe they should invent energy-free travel
I’ve got to upvote you for “climate couscous”. Sounds delicious.
I’d like to see his diet and shape, but already have an idea about it
Well one of those is very likely “well rounded”
“I’m in shape. Round is a shape too.”
Cyclist burn more calories
So does jogging, swimming, dancing, and…sex? Anything that isn’t sedentary lifestyle gonna burn more calories. But OOP doesn’t need to worry about any of those.
I can’t remember the name of the philosopher that pretty much said that because existing is so toxic to our environment, we should stop existing (i.e. stop having children, not commit genocide to be clear).
I can’t fault him for being right.
Anything that lives creates things that are toxic to itself. It’s a waste product. Or shit.
The problem isn’t our existing, not even just the scale at which we do, but the methods we choose to use to do it. I’m pretty sure we could have 8 billion people sustainably and comfortably living here, maybe even many more, but we do it by investing in solar and wind, maybe nuclear, maybe whatever isn’t burning coal and gas. And we, as a society, are simply choosing not to.
Besides, life will go on for a while without us, at least a few billion years probably. Even if some of us survive, I wonder what the trajectory is for human intelligence during a mass extinction event. Will we still be interested in the stars? Or maybe a more good natured intelligence evolves here from like octopuses or something and decides to look up. It’d be cool if a descendent of Earth could survive the Sun dying, anyway
