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Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving

keith.seas.harvard.edu

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Re: Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving

#51

Post by wapz »

laughfactory wrote: post #50

Actually, recent research shows that a vegetarian diet has higher impact on the environment than eating meat. It's obvious too when you think about it. Consider how much lettuce you'd have to eat to replace the caloric content of one pound of beef. And there's a lot of resources which go into farming vegetables. On the whole it's clear to me that of we could get the vast majority of commuting traffic to turn into cyc…

You can't compare caloric content of lettuce to that of beef. Vegetarians don't stock up on lettuce to get calories. That being said, if every single person was vegetarian, I would bet we could get the efficiency of vegetable farming to beat the current efficiency of cattle through indoor farming.

Re: Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving

#52

Post by wapz »

heydenberk wrote: post #5
techman9 wrote: post #3

Can't I just bike to school and feel good about it? Is nothing sacred?

You can and you should! Carpooling in a very gas efficient car compares favorably to biking with the most CO2 intensive diet. Biking wins in all other cases. Also, if you don't eat an additional calorie for every one you burn while biking — I know I tend to burn off winter weight when biking around in the summer — these calculations are less applicable.

The article didn't mention a lot of other factors. If you drive to work you might go to the gym after work to burn the same calories the cyclist burned. Then you'd consume the same extra calories he did. Not only that, but the cyclist wouldn't have to go to the gym so they wouldn't even put in those miles.

Re: Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving

#54

Post by lyle_nel »

wlesieutre wrote: post #45
lyle_nel wrote: post #44

Emissions of CO2 on its own does not necessarily imply that there is a carbon footprint. 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 fro…

Oh but there's so much more energy in your food. There's the energy that went into producing fertilizer, energy to make pesticides, energy burned to run tractors, energy to process the harvest into what you get in the grocery store, potentially more energy involved in packaging. For plastic packaging, there's the oil used to make the carbon-rich polymers. Etc. Just like cars, all of that energy comes from burning fos…

Indeed, I did not take all of the above mentioned things into account.

Re: Climate Impacts of Biking vs. Driving

#55

Post by jbmorgado »

wlesieutre wrote: post #45
lyle_nel wrote: post #44

Emissions of CO2 on its own does not necessarily imply that there is a carbon footprint. 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 fro…

Oh but there's so much more energy in your food. There's the energy that went into producing fertilizer, energy to make pesticides, energy burned to run tractors, energy to process the harvest into what you get in the grocery store, potentially more energy involved in packaging. For plastic packaging, there's the oil used to make the carbon-rich polymers. Etc. Just like cars, all of that energy comes from burning fos…

Most of what you just said would actually reflect pretty badly on vegan diet values and improve paleo diet values.

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.

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