Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The thing here, one "regular" person trying will have little impact. For example, I have bicycled to work for almost 40 years, depending upon weather. But at times that was impossible due to traffic design and public transportation in the US being close to useless.

We still have large countries pushing fossil fuel and opening up new oil wells. Coal is just being replaced by Natural Gas only because it is much cheaper.

Want to make things better ? Stop all Fossil Fuel subsidizes and at least triple the price of Auto Fuel. Then you will see real impacts. But the very second Gas Prices raise, the Gov does all it can to lower the cost of fuel. It does not matter what party is in office.

So yes, it is close to too late because no real action has taken place. We are seeing adoption of green, but that is being eaten up by AI and *coins and other factors.

The youth of the world will suffer because of our inaction.

End result, people voted in an admin that will increase Fossil Fuel use because of raising prices.

There are some variables to consider, but even using grid energy mix most EVs -including cars- have a smaller co2 emission per mile than bikes, due to agriculture having quite a big eco footprint.

https://archive.ph/YgEe8

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

I'd dispute some of the reasoning with those - the first one is assuming the cyclist is fueling themselves with fruit, something quite expensive with limited calories rather than the real stuff people fuel up on like bread or potatoes.

The math is indeed off in the tweet, as fruitarian should be 2.5x worse instead of 1.5.

I don't think the 5g/kcal is expensive according to the chart, it is a good average for omnivores, consider the biker being fueled by cheeseburgers on the other end of the spectrum. If you have a more efficient EV (smaller car, even scooter for commute), put in whole family instead of riding alone in a car, or have more efficient means to charge the EV like surplus renewables you can't store/use at home the difference is getting quite staggering. One could argue the manufacturing of the EV emits more co2 than manufacturing a bike and we should control for miles drive/rode during their lifecycle but if both are available using the EV is most probably the environmentally friendlier option. That said, I won't give up my bike either because I enjoy the exercise, but it is a lot less green than one would imagine without looking at the numbers.

Bread/potatoes are about 0.6g/kcal which would put the cyclist at ~30g/mile vs 100g for the car. Not that people live on that alone but with exercise you often have more potatoes with the steak etc.

I've been using an ebike which is one of the lowest emission things, and fun.

Someone here ran some numbers with bikes better than cars/busses including the cost of making them https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-enviro...

> no real action has taken place

No real action, except for the approximately 1 trillion dollars a year the world spends on solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com