Living Car Free - How far do I have to ride my bike to pay back its carbon footprint?

...my bad if this has been posted already.

http://www.slate.com/id/2300676?wpisrc=newsletter_rubric

Interesting.
I wonder how many of those x-mart bikes get 400 miles put on them?

Of course a bike is going to be more green than a car though. The first paragraph seems nonsensical.

I'm thinking about switching my daily commute from four wheels to two. But I'm concerned about all the energy it takes to manufacture and ship a new bicycle.

This kind of stuff does nothing more than keep a load of commentators, journalists and academics in jobs.

Putting a figure on how better something is or how long you have to do something with something to aliviate the harm done by manufacturing that something is just a first world exercise in self congratulation.

Thank god for this article. It should finally put to rest all the absurd claims (seen mostly on this forum, of all places) that bicycles pollute more than cars.

I hope so, anyway, The people who make such claims are notorious for not listening to reason.

The clown is driving a car?...and it worried about switching to a new bicycle? :eek:

Buy a used bike, the other guy has already ridden off the footprint :D Sheesh

Aaron :)

I'm trying to calculate how you can ride a bike, and say "I wonder if I'm polluting more than if I drove my car?"

Seriously

A bicycle's carbon footprint certainly is an interesting question, but it is actually not a very important one.

The carbon pollution problem is mostly one of power generation. And if you want to get right down to it, the crux of the climate change problem, on top of repowering almost the entire world with clean energy is, how do we remove around a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and safely store it?

All other considerations amount to worrying about what color of bow tie to wear to the grocery store.

Such articles are always entertaining. Reading the comments was fun for a while. Then they get repetitive. There are the people who support bicycles making plenty of positive comments and criticisms and there are the people who don't like bicycles on the roads who come up with many reasons bicycles aren't better than cars.

I did like the information about the cost of using a bus compared to a bicycle and car. It put figures to something I already believed, that buses aren't very efficient when the off peak hours are included. Of course this only took fuel into consideration, not road damage, manufacturing costs, and space requirements for a bus compared to perhaps several hundred cars that would be used by people instead of riding a bus.

The whole idea that buying a bicycle and using it instead of a car would be damaging to the environment seemed to be unfounded. Only a bicycle that would be bought and not used very much would be a temporary burden. Eventually unused bicycles are sold or given away which makes their existence worthwhile. They will be used for more than the number of miles worth of energy it took to create them. Even if they aren't used to replace car miles, the exercise benefits give value to the rider.

Such articles probably help some motorists decide to try bicycling to work, even it the article isn't well written. It shows that others are willing to do it, which makes it an acceptable thing to do.

A bicycle's carbon footprint certainly is an interesting question, but it is actually not a very important one.

The carbon pollution problem is mostly one of power generation. And if you want to get right down to it, the crux of the climate change problem, on top of repowering almost the entire world with clean energy is, how do we remove around a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and safely store it?

All other considerations amount to worrying about what color of bow tie to wear to the grocery store.

We could take it one step further. A bike with a carbon fiber frame has a negative carbon footprint. The carbon in the frame will be bound up for the life if the bike and considerably longer. IOW, that carbon in the frame isn't getting into the atmsophere any time soon.

Of course, it would be even better to just leave the carbon safely buried underground, where it hads been for hundreds of millions of years.

Such articles are always entertaining. Reading the comments was fun for a while. Then they get repetitive. There are the people who support bicycles making plenty of positive comments and criticisms and there are the people who don't like bicycles on the roads who come up with many reasons bicycles aren't better than cars.



There were many ridiculing the whole 'lifecycle' calculation exercise who may or may not have been anti-cycling.

I count myself amoung the later.

Interesting.
I wonder how many of those x-mart bikes get 400 miles put on them?


Saw on Sheldon Browns' site that the average life-span for a department-store bike, floor-room to dumpster, is 70 miles.

Sadly I think that's an over-estimate. Two of my neighbors in my apartment complex bought bikes after being inspired by seeing me riding mine 6 days a week. One of them rode the bike around the building once 3 months ago (0.1 miles), the other one has it chained outside and it hasn't moved since he bought it.

I'm trying to calculate how you can ride a bike, and say "I wonder if I'm polluting more than if I drove my car?"

Seriously

People who ride bicycles don't say that. Idiot conservatives/tea partiers say that. I seriously had a tea-party affiliated coworker rail at me the 3rd time I bicycle commuted to work, saying I'm a hypocrite because he heard on Rush Limbaugh that Liberals pollute more by riding bikes than by driving hummers to work. I simply could not form words to counter that diatribe due to the absurdity of it all. People like that never change their minds based on facts regardless (denies evolution, denies global warming, still believes in Reaganomics despite 30 years of solid proof it doesn't work), so it wasn't worth it to argue. I now just say "that's special", and walk away.

People who ride bicycles don't say that. Idiot conservatives/tea partiers say that. I seriously had a tea-party affiliated coworker rail at me the 3rd time I bicycle commuted to work, saying I'm a hypocrite because he heard on Rush Limbaugh that Liberals pollute more by riding bikes than by driving hummers to work. I simply could not form words to counter that diatribe due to the absurdity of it all. People like that never change their minds based on facts regardless (denies evolution, denies global warming, still believes in Reaganomics despite 30 years of solid proof it doesn't work), so it wasn't worth it to argue. I now just say "that's special", and walk away.

You're using a very broad brush here: 1. Conservatives, 2. Tea Party members, 3. Limbaugh listeners, 4. Evolution haters, 5. Global warming haters, 6. Reaganomics lovers...

It is sophomoric arrogance to assume a member of any of those groups must claim them all, or that someone who comes to a different conclusion than you must not have the facts or the capacity to process them. In fact, if you never see a good idea from the "other side", then there is a good chance that you have not taken the time to fairly consider all the issues.

More importantly, this is not the place for this kind of discussion. There is a P+R forum for a good reason. We should not make people feel unwelcome for holding different views about politics, economics or religion, even if they may be in the minority on this sub-forum. Posters often walk a fine line in here, but you surely crossed it.