Originally Posted by
GGDub
While its commendable that you're riding your bike (and making the world a little better doing so), how exactly are you boycotting the oil industry while riding machine which was created with fossil fuel energy and contains petroleum products and then using a computer (again made of petro) to ask people to boycott it? We like to vilify these industries as the cause of all problems on this planet, but in reality, we're the ones to blame.
Hmmm... Let's look at the amount of oil necessary to manufacture and run a bicycle over a ten year lifespan versus the amount of oil needed to manufacture and run a car over the same time period. What do you think the ratio is? 1/10,000? 1/100,000? 1/1,000,000? Okay so the bicycle requires SOME petroleum, but if it requires 0.001% of the petroleum that a car requires, well... that's close enough to a boycott in my book. Besides, the less oil we dump into our cars, the more oil we have to build bicycles, computers, and infrastructure tools required by a society which will live on renewable energy sources in the long run.
BTW: Some interesting facts and figures about the benefits of an EV, even considering a coal-heavy grid, can be found on the PHEV entry in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_hybrid
And I know that "real" cyclists love to throw their noses up at electric bikes, but they embody many of the best characteristics of both electric vehicles and bicycles. I'll toot my own horn with this link:
http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1111
Yours,
FBB