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Comment by Ixiaus | Hacker News Reader

I'm someone who did a few things after reading a research paper attempting to quantify the detrimental effects of climate change.

I no longer own a car, I bike everywhere.

I work remote 100%.

I do not eat beef if I can help it anymore.

I use the train for long distance personal travel. I still fly when it is for my company, though.

I take transit when biking would be too slow.

I signed up for my city's green energy program. I pay more to receive 30% of my energy use from wind farms.

I cancelled Amazon Prime.

I buy items locally as much as possible.

I avoid online shopping if possible.

All of my food comes from local, small producers.

Cutting consumption behavior down has, unsurprisingly, saved me a lot of money and these behaviors are reducing the amount of carbon I emit.

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Pretty much the same as me. Although biking is quite natural in the Netherlands and I commute to work by bike like many others here.

The only thing you might need to look out for are the claims for local, small producers.

http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local...

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/04/how-green-is-local-f...

+ There are economies of scale.

+ There are also people against genetic engineering even if it would reduce pesticides or other pressure on the environment tremendously.

+ Food safety might be more efficiently regulated in a centralized manner.

+ Old-fashioned greenhouses might have large yields and might be properly scaled to reduce costs per produced crop as well as support recycling systems for CO2 and other "waste" products.

In other words, the situation around food seems more complicated than just "buy local".

I have to wonder how much of an effect local producers/sellers has. What is the cross over point for the benefits of economy of scale a large corporation operates at vs the cost/pollution of transporting the goods nationally or internationally?

In contrast,

I drive a car to work, because the summers are already too hot and humid for me to bike with a respiratory condition.

I work in the office 99% of the time because my bosses have a 19th century mentality

I fly at least twice a year to escape my miserable existence somewhere far away

I never take transit because I'm stuck in an endless suburban hell and the nearest bus stop/grocery store is over a mile away

I only shop online because traditional retail has a horrible selection and partly sells the same Chinese shit that Amazon does, just at a higher markup

I eat beef because food is one of the few pleasures I have in life

All of my food comes from supermarkets because it's cheaper.

This explains late summer in european part of Russia this year. Another couple of persons like you will freeze us to death. Can you at least ride a bike more frequently? :)

Apparently bikes are really bad for the environment being slow, low occupancy road vehicles? I think if are taking upon yourself to advise people you should advocate greener forms of transport such as existing public transit links, walking.

It must be my poor English. I've never said that bikes are bad for environment.

No sorry - I didn't mean to imply you had. I read a study on hackernews the other day. Unfortunately I cannot remember teh link as always. Single occupancy vehicles see, much better to have everyone in one clean bus instead - bikes are bad apparently.

I don't know what the numbers are like, but bicycling regularly increasing calorie requirements, which would have an environmental impact.

No idea how this compares to the scale of taking a bus or a solo car, but there is an increased cost. Growing food (often with fertilizers, harvest machinery, etc) in order to bring it to the market for you to consume and convert into motion doesn't seem like it's particularly energy efficient.

I bike a lot, it's better for me physically and mentally, but I do wonder how the carbon impact is affected. (Of course, this ignores the fact that petroleum is a limited supply.)

The main input to agriculture energy consumption is Haber-Bosh process ammonia.

A bike consumes much less pavement space then a car, increasing corridor capacity.

No it is the same. They cannot occupy the same space unless there are dedicated lanes. I guess even then it is single occupancy. A bicycle is a single space same as a car with only a driver. I wish I had the link now, sorry.

You don't have the link because it is wrong. More bicycles can pass a given plane in a certain width than cars can over a length of time. As for dedicated lanes we hand over lanes to parking.

Links to said research paper, if you still have it?

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

fermatslibrary.com gets the credit for introducing me to this paper.

Where I live dudes on bikes do the last mile of a lot of Amazon deliveries.

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