Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving
keith.seas.harvard.edu
keith.seas.harvard.edu
It is better to start with the most avoidable emissions first. Driving is obviously more avoidable than respiration, and coal fired electricity generation is likely even more avoidable. After that the next step will be to reduce the CO2 footprint of food production as well as changing to a diet with lower CO2 footprint.
Comparisons like the one in the article only give the message that it is really nothing you can effectively do about climate change, so why not continue as usual.
Whether or not the author's intent was to discourage biking and encourage driving they have done exactly that.
"An obvious solution to the problem, of course, is to simply give up raising cattle and eating beef. Gidon Eshel, professor of environmental physics at New York’s Bard College, in a recent research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calculated that each American who drops beef-eating saves us the annual emissions equivalent of burning 61 gallons of gas or 580 pounds of coal. Better yet, go vegan, since dairy cows not only produce more methane than beef cattle, but outnumber them by a ratio of 10 to 1 in the United States.
Or we could start adding a sprinkle of seaweed to livestock feed.
The crucial research, by Robert Kinley of CSIRO and Rocky De Nys, professor of aquaculture at Australia’s James Cook University, and colleagues, involved testing some 20 different species of seaweed in artificial cow stomachs—that is, a mix of rumen and microbes that mimics the behavior of a cow stomach in a bottle. When grass or feed is added to this in vitro tummy, fermentation takes place and the scientists are able to measure the resulting methane output. In the presence of Asparagopsis taxiformis—described by De Nys as “a real stand-out” among the tested seaweeds— methane production was cut by 99 percent. Experiments in sheep showed that if dried Asparagopsis taxiformis seaweed made up just 2 percent of total feed, methane emissions drop by 70 percent. It can be added as a sprinkle, De Nys says, just as you might add a smattering of herbs to roast chicken."
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/th...
Research paper: http://www.publish.csiro.au/an/AN15576
1) Road land use, a bike lane is narrower than a car lane.
2) The energy invested in building the car. Aluminium parts, which cars are made of, have very significant energy investments.
3) CO2 emissions of asphalt used to pave the roads that cars drive on.
4) CO2 emissions of the cars tires vs the bikes tires
5) Calorie consumption of the person driving/riding in the car!!!!!!!
6) Parking land use.
7) Land use associated with mining the materials used to build a car vs bike.
8) Land use of pollution barriers to protect residential areas from car intensive ones.
9) CO2 emissions associated with heavy raised roadways made of concrete and steel, such as highway overpasses.
Basically, this analysis is laughably absurd and is an insult to the Harvard name.
I'm just saying that this analysis in particular is simplistic, wrong, and harmful.
Personal vehicles are mostly made of steel.
You also have to look at refining (it takes a huge amount of energy to produce raw aluminum) and recycling (steel is really, really recyclable).
Plus, did I miss something, or was food not counted as a renewable resource? While agriculture is not carbon neutral, it's also not a 100% carbon source.
This weak attempt to indicate that transport choices do not substantially change carbon emissions is in line with their pre-existing position.
Besides the carbon footprint of transporting food, the food we consume is carbon neutral since the carbon in the food comes from the atmosphere. Therefore the CO2 gas we expel is mostly carbon neutral.
Cars are a different story since their carbon originates from ancient reserves(oil and coal) that has long since been removed from the carbon cycle. This carbon is now reintroduced to the carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint.
Put differently, if our food we eat consisted of carbon extracted from oil or coal, then we would be adding CO2 to the current carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint. However this is not true.
Just like cars, all of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. The only way you'll find carbon neutral foods is if you walk out in the woods, pick it off a wild plant, and eat it right there.
Generally, the total energy that goes into producing and transporting something is called "embodied energy." It's not necessarily 1:1 related with carbon footprint since it can hypothetically come from renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, but it's a very related concept.
Vegan diets are the product of intensive agriculture basically anywhere in the world. Paleo, depending on country, can be pretty low intensity, for instance, in Argentina where cattle roams free in the grassland.
While I easily concede that in places like most of the USA - where cattle is a product of intensive livestock exploitation - a paleo diet will produce a lot of CO2 compared to a vegan diet, that is actually not true in places like Argentina, or, to a lesser degree, in places like southern Europe.
Without denigrating the need for bike safety and separated lanes, I really wonder about the numbers on the carbon trade-off there!
It actually kind of reminds me of the old "nuclear deterent" theory. The idea that if you attack me, I'll create nuclear armagedon. If there was a way for Germany to produce so much CO2 that everyone would die, then maybe Germany could tell the US, "if you don't stop producing CO2, we'll produce a lot of it ourselves". Really, I don't know though. So far, I'm not optimistic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
One problem with just going by your impressions is that cars take up an awful lot of space and a road can look full of cars, even if they don't represent a majority of people. On the typical NYC (or Boston) street, pedestrians outnumber cars 10:1, but get much less than half the space. For another example, the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago has 7 lanes in each direction, and two subway tracks in the middle. The subway can (and likely does) carry more people than all the expressway lanes.
Another problem is that in urban settings specifically, the capacity of a road is pretty much always limited by conflicting traffic at intersections, and so the exact number of lanes doesn't actually make a difference as long as it's enough to feed cars through the green lights at an optimal rate.
Not all countries and people are the same, so what maybe be enough incentive for 1 person or culture (oh, they made bike lanes? I'm going to bike to work now! versus oh, the road still has cars on it? I'm not biking, because it's not safe!) is not enough for another.
Either way, the only one to blame here is the local government for either not doing enough research initially or not incentivizing people to use bikes over cars enough (e.g. we'll pay 50% of your new bike price up to $X )
So why did they take away the car lane, if not to make bike lanes? From what I've read, and observed here in Redmond, WA, is that the current fashion is to reduce four lane streets to three lanes (two directional, one center turn lane). The goal is to slow traffic in residential areas and...I forget what the other goals are. Anyway, it's a thing now. In your situation, perhaps they took away lanes to meet the current fashion, bike lanes just being the icing on that cake, or maybe they really did do it put bike lanes in.
On the whole it's clear to me that of we could get the vast majority of commuting traffic to turn into cycling traffic, or non-traffic (get more people working remotely) then we'd vastly lower our environmental footprint and increase air quality. Plus we'd all get more exercise. But, of course, the automakers are hugely invested in keeping us buying new cars and driving them.
I pretty much don't eat grains but almost certainly vegetables are more energy intensive than grains so maybe my paleo salads are killing the planet almost as well as the vegans eating processed soy products and baked wheat products all day.
Then again no matter how thinly you slice it theres not a lot of calories in a carrot so even if volumetric intake looks near vegan most of my calories might be coming from meat/fish/oil sources.
Protein doesn't directly fuel exercise. Most people on paleo type diets target a specific number of grams of protein for muscle maintenance and use carbs or fat to fuel the exercise. So biking more distance would mean eating more rice or potatoes or coconut oil for fuel. So the CO2 impact of the biking calories would be similar to the vegan levels.
I know that pasture raised cattle are not sustainable to feed the masses, but at this point I would just be glad to enjoy a guilt free steak every now and again. ;-)
Also Google Soil Carbon Cowboys.
There used to be many tens of millions of bison living on North American grasslands.
I definitely don't think this is (or even an attempt to be) an effective criticism of the environmental value of biking.
However, even with a biased setup like this, the fact that the numbers can be massaged into the same ballpark really shatters my intuition here. I think my take-away is that I've clearly been underestimating the climate impact of meat consumption, and that's interesting.
This is a solved problem: you generate electricity via Solar and commute via electric bike, lowering kcal consumption and increasing average speed and range at the same time.
The problems are cultural and infrastructural - it needs a critical mass of cyclists to become safe to ride electric bikes in the US, otherwise you risk being run off the road by the majority of drivers who are distracted using their phone.
The person in the car won't understand why you've done it, and will get all uppity and defensive, but will probably be jarred enough by the assault on his or her personal space to make stupid mistakes throughout the day.