I hate to be that guy, but this is true. Before you pull out your pitchforks, read this explanation.

I take a bicycle to essentially all of my local errands, so I thought it would be cool to write an app that calculates how much CO2 emissions you've saved based on the number of errands you've run by bike (by distance). I wanted to consider everything, like food intake, emissions associated with manufacturing, etc. To be clear, the exact emissions varies wildly depending on what numbers you plug in, but it almost always comes out in favor of a passenger car. This only considers CO2 emissions, and ignores noise pollution, microplastics, and other potential environmental issues.

Long story short, if the following things are true, you'll probably release less CO2 by taking a car:

• You drive a reasonably efficient car (30 mpg+)
• You drive your cars for a long time (150,000+ miles)
• You get most of your food from the grocery store (not local, like a farmers market)
• You are not vegan

These assumptions do make quite a few concessions, but I think it's fair to say the majority of Americans fit these criteria.

In order of CO2 emissions per mile using the same assumptions as above (lowest to highest):

• E-bike
• E-scooter
• Bus (divided across all passengers)
• Gas passenger car
• Electric passenger car (again, considering manufacturing, ~150k miles of ownership)
• Bicycle
• Truck
• Walking

This is not me suggesting cars are better for the environment overall, but it's an uncomfortable fact that humans are wildly inefficient at converting chemical energy into kinetic energy. Just think about the fact that when you burn 1000 extra calories per day, a significant portion of those calories had to be driven hundreds of miles on a diesel truck after spending months/years being grown on a farm.

Here's the factors I considered. Let me know if you can think of anything I missed and I'll re-run the numbers:

• Calories above baseline for driving/cycling, and the associated food production
• Emissions associated with use (tailpipe emissions, cyclist exhaling)
• Emissions associated with manufacturing
• Emissions associated with maintenance

Here's some things I did not consider:

• Emissions associated with building/maintaining infrastructure
• Emissions associated with car dependency sprawl (i.e. everything is farther apart to accommodate cars)
• Proximity of air pollution (cycling has practically zero air pollution locally, which is good for cities)
• Tire microplastics, disposing of vehicle parts, etc.
• The benefits for the environment, healthcare, and public resources associated with reduced obesity from cycling
• The increased tendency to shop locally with improved micro-mobility from walkable/bikeable cities

I guess the moral of the story is that being vegetarian is significantly more impactful than cycling to work (I say as a non-vegetarian cyclist).

Wait until he finds out how many calories gasoline has

You know you're on the right side when you're arguing against humans exercising more!

I'd like to see his diet and shape, but already have an idea about it

And yet cyclists still consume less per day than that 400 lb dude in an F150.

Cyclist burn more calories

So does jogging, swimming, dancing, and...sex? Anything that isn't sedentary lifestyle gonna burn more calories. But OOP doesn't need to worry about any of those.

This has to be satirical

he's right, we all know that exploring, extracting, refining, distilling, and distributing petroleum and its derivatives doesn't cost anything

We're more energy effiecient than cars.

Alright, I'll take the bait. Let's do some recreational math

This web page contains average passenger car fuel efficiency broken down by year. The most recent year available is 2016, so we'll use that: 9.4 km/L or 22.1 miles per gallon. A gallon of gas has about 120MJ of energy in it. So, an average car requires about 120,000,000 / (1/22.1) = 5.4MJ per mile

This web page has calories burned for different types of exercise. I separately searched and found that the average adult in the US weighs around 200LBS, so we'll use the 205LBS data, and I'm going to assume that "cycling - 10-11.9 MPH" is representative of the average commuter who isn't in too much of a hurry. That gives us 558 calories per hour, or 55.8 calories per mile (using the low end of the 10 to 11.9mph range). That's equal to about 0.23MJ per mile (as an aside, it's important to note that the calories commonly used when talking about diet and exercise, are actual kilocalories equal to 1000 of the SI calories you learned about in school.)

Moral of the story: an average bike ride consumes around 20x less energy than an average drive of the same distance.

That's cute. No other personal vehicle beats the caloric efficiency of a bicycle, and it's not even close. They're very literally one of the most impressive feats of engineering that human kind has ever invented.

My understanding is that humans pretty much use about the same amount of calories a day, whether sedentary or not. If you spend more on exercise, your body spends less on other things.

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why

The amount your body uses just to stay alive dwarfs what you'd burn from adding cycling to your day.

Edited to add the "much" that I somehow deleted.

This is why ebikes produce less CO2 per mile than regular bikes. Even if you're getting your electricity from coal, battery and motor efficiency are so much higher than food digestion and muscle movement.

The ebike starts life from the factory with a higher CO2 cost, though, and it never quite catches up over its expected life.

Both are orders of magnitude lower CO2 than a car (both production cost and per mile cost). The lifetime CO2 cost of an ebike vs normal bike is so small, and the gulf between either of those and a car is so big, that anyone pointing to this in favor of cars is an idiot. If an ebike is what gets you to bike more, do it. Any movement from cars and onto bikes is a huge win, battery or not.

Oh no they have so good logic!

Me: laugh in order of magnitude

This is a real world issue actually!

This means we need accessible cities, and checking what we eat. And also calls for subsidizing electric bikes for everyone.

TIL: If you eat extra beef for the extra calories to cycle those kilometers you generate non-negligible CO2!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342009015_Fuelling_walking_and_cycling_human_powered_locomotion_is_associated_with_non-negligible_greenhouse_gas_emissions

It's even worse than that! The calories burned show up in the atmosphere as additional CO2! We need to urgently strap everybody to a chair or bed so they stop burning all those calories!!! /s

No one tell them how many calories are in a tank of gas

If this is true, then support a carbon tax without exceptions. All the extra food cyclists use will be taxed extra.

I read a carbrain article a while ago that tried to argue that cyclists create more CO2 than a car.

So to compare that they assumed that

• The cyclist eats exactly as much calories as required, so that extra exercise directly requires an increase of caloric intake. They did the same for the driver.
• The cyclist exclusively covers the added caloric intake via imported japanese Kobe beef steak cooked on a wood grill.
• The car was the lowest-consumption electic car they could find.

And with that setup the cyclist actually created more CO2.

The author seriously booked that as a win for the car, claiming that cycling is not always better for the environment than driving.

Every type of anti-environmental person seems to just have no grasp of numbers as a concept. I worked in wind for a while and one coworker was a guy taking a break from the oilfield. He really thought he had something when he was like 'golly is that an oil based lubricant? in a supposedly green energy? hyuk hyuk looks like oil isn't going anywhere.'[this is barely an exaggeration he was a walking caricature of a hick] Just absolutely 0 ability to perceive a difference between burning 100 gallons a day of something vs using 10 gallons a year.

oh man this type of thing annoys the hell out of me. Someone will take the calories of a person cycling per day and say its not great environmentally without taking into account subtracting out the calories required for someone to exist period.

If the the Dutch are so climate couscous maybe they should invent energy-free travel

When I was cycling to and from work I burned about an extra 400 calories a day going to spend from work. That's a protien shake.