Is you car better for the environment than your bike?

Ibike2havefun has nailed it with the Bicycle, the bicycle is the most environmentalty friendly vehicle the human race has made. Plus it keeps you in good shape.
 
St-Gerard said:
Ibike2havefun has nailed it with the Bicycle, the bicycle is the most environmentalty friendly vehicle the human race has made. Plus it keeps you in good shape.
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Yabbut... bicycle riders consume way-yyyyy more calories than most of us.
So what about the kids starving in China, huh? Do y'all ever stop to think about them?
Or how about the 275 million children in the United States that go to bed hungry every night?
(Think I heard that on the news, or maybe in a commercial.)
Noooooo.
You skinny food-a-holics just munch away, subtly body-shaming the rest of the world, riding on your 6-thousand-dollar titanium frames with 42 forward gears in your lycra shorts and clip-in pedals.
It disgusts me.
But I'll bet most of you cyclists never slept with your stripped down bike in a tiny bunk onboard a nuclear submarine whilst steaming across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
(DISCLAIMER: the above was typed with tongue firmly in cheek. Except for the part about sleeping with my 10-speed on a nuke boat. My shipmate / roommate and I lived off base, and commuted 80 miles every day to work and back - 40 miles each way.)
 
St-Gerard said:
... bicycle is the most environmentalty friendly vehicle ...
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Quite controversial statement...

The traffic disruptions by blocking lanes, running lights, etc... (entitled one-person-demonstrations/civil disobedience...) and hereby forced congestion of urban traffic by push-bikers, causes a significant increase of fuel consumption in their vicinity, likely more as if they drove something in the class of an H1/Humvee themself...
And constructing those 'bicycle lanes' requires quite a lot of diesel for operating excavators, trucks, steamrollers, crushing rocks, cooking blacktop, etc...
That those either kill an entire car lane, or extinguish all parking zones along the sidewalk, doesn't help either; especially since the push-bikers still choose to rather block the remaining car lanes instead...
Not much different on rural roads though, where the entire flowing traffic, cars, trucks, coaches, semis has again come to almost standstill, stay behind agonizingly till there is finally a chance to accelerate again (great fun with a coach or semi...) to safely pass that sucker...

Had a similar hypocrisy debate with a former coworker, who claimed "... I heat my home climate neutral with wood pellets ..."
Right, because the 'dozer clearing the lumber-trails, the harvester cutting the trees, the lumbering truck, the sawmill, the machine pressing those pellets, the truck delivering them to your place, they all run on 'pure air'... also the cinder-blocks, concrete and fireproof steel-door mandatory to build your pellet storage space did require noooo fossil energy at at... right...
Not even if he goes 'full bio' by walking out into the woods with an axe to chop them trees down himself he'll be anywhere near 'climate neutral', since both, the draft horse required to move those trunks, as well as himself emit significant amounts of methane...

Seems that non of the achievements of the human race since leaving the plains of Africa some 2 million years ago, discovering fire, prehistoric stone tools, spears, bow and arrow, agriculture and livestock breeding was ever any 'good' for the environment...
 
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This argument sounds like, "Unless you use the same type of vehicle that I use, you are screwing up both the environment and traffic flow." Every form of transportation, except walking or riding a horse requires lots of petroleum to move and/or manufacture that form of transportation.
People need to get off their high horse and not worry about how others choose to get around.
 
ST1100Y said:
Quite controversial statement...

The traffic disruptions by blocking lanes, running lights, etc... (entitled one-person-demonstrations/civil disobedience...) and hereby forced congestion of urban traffic by push-bikers, causes a significant increase of fuel consumption in their vicinity, likely more as if they drove something in the class of an H1/Humvee themself...
And constructing those 'bicycle lanes' requires quite a lot of diesel for operating excavators, trucks, steamrollers, crushing rocks, cooking blacktop, etc...
That those either kill an entire car lane, or extinguish all parking zones along the sidewalk, doesn't help either; especially since the push-bikers still choose to rather block the remaining car lanes instead...
Not much different on rural roads though, where the entire flowing traffic, cars, trucks, coaches, semis has again come to almost standstill, stay behind agonizingly till there is finally a chance to accelerate again (great fun with a coach or semi...) to safely pass that sucker...

Had a similar hypocrisy debate with a former coworker, who claimed "... I heat my home climate neutral with wood pellets ..."
Right, because the 'dozer clearing the lumber-trails, the harvester cutting the trees, the lumbering truck, the sawmill, the machine pressing those pellets, the truck delivering them to your place, they all run on 'pure air'... also the cinder-blocks, concrete and fireproof steel-door mandatory to build your pellet storage space did require noooo fossil energy at at... right...
Not even if he goes 'full bio' by walking out into the woods with an axe to chop them trees down himself he'll be anywhere near 'climate neutral', since both, the draft horse required to move those trunks, as well as himself emit significant amounts of methane...

Seems that non of the achievements of the human race since leaving the plains of Africa some 2 million years ago, discovering fire, prehistoric stone tools, spears, bow and arrow, agriculture and livestock breeding was ever any 'good' for the environment...
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I should have said it is the most energy efficient vehicle, in response to the Video. I do agree, every thing humans make has a environmental cost.
 
st11ray said:
This argument sounds like, "Unless you use the same type of vehicle that I use, you are screwing up both the environment and traffic flow." Every form of transportation, except walking or riding a horse requires lots of petroleum to move and/or manufacture that form of transportation.
People need to get off their high horse and not worry about how others choose to get around.
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You touched on one thing. Horsehockey was used by NYC to push the sales of motor vehicles.
 
cruise_carter said:
I have:

- 3 motorcycles
- 1 truck
- 1 car (EV)

so yes, my car is currently more environmentally friendly.
It took more resources to initially make though.
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A curiousity.... So an EV need recharging..... but from that recharge comes from the electric power station.... so are we shifting the emissions now from an ICE to the power companies? More environmentally friendly?
--- Food for thought... hmmm
 
mello dude said:
A curiousity.... So an EV need recharging..... but from that recharge comes from the electric power station.... so are we shifting the emissions now from an ICE to the power companies? More environmentally friendly?
--- Food for thought... hmmm
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I don't yet own an EV but if / when that happens it'll be zero / zero footprint as long as I charge it at home, since my power is wind- and solar-generated.

Naturally charging at commercial / public facilities may still cause emissions somewhere upstream. The object is to avoid that as much as possible.

Materials extraction, while not good for the environmentas a whole, has impact on climate emissions only insofar at the equipment to do the extraction and processing produce emissions.

Those are one-time emissions, though, for any given unit produced whereas ICE-powered vehicle emissions happen each time the ICE is operated in addition to the impact of initial material production.
 
ST1100Y said:
Far worse: at first it needs to be build... and for some reason they always keep very discreet about that footprint...

The most sustainable "anything" is the one you don't need to produce...
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Have to agree here- we have 3 cars: 2012 Cadillac SRX, my MR2 Spyder and the 93 300ZX- so they have been around quite a while- maybe not the best mpg with the Cadillac and the Z (~ 20 mpg overall), but built long ago, so no CO2 footprint to build replacements (I drive each of the 2 seaters maybe 1500 miles per year and the Cadillac maybe 6K miles per year), so those are definitely more environmentally friendly. My bikes each get ~ 50 mpg, so there’s that as well.
 
ST Gui said:
That means being a barefoot pedestrian.
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As I wrote earlier:
ST1100Y said:
Seems that non of the achievements of the human race since leaving the plains of Africa some 2 million years ago, discovering fire, prehistoric stone tools, spears, bow and arrow, agriculture and livestock breeding was ever any 'good' for the environment...
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Back in the 70ies, while this rock was inhabited by just about 3.7 billion people, it still seemed like a perfect world...
These days we've like 8.3 billion people, and problems with no end in sight...
 
ST1100Y said:
Back in the 70ies, while this rock was inhabited by just about 3.7 billion people, it still seemed like a perfect world...
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In that perfect world rivers caught fire, the smog filtering the sun to a nice “beautiful” brown tone, dead fish floating down rivers, high mercury levels in fish caught……
Somehow perfect seems different to me.
 
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