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
That’s why I drink a can of gasoline before every run
You should see how many calories are in plutonium and uranium. If you eat a pellet of either one it will be the last meal you’ll ever need in your life!
I drank a bottle of gas years ago and I’m still running off it.
Yeah when you drink gas, it usually lasts for the rest of your life
It really is the ultimate drink.
Fake news by big libs. /s
You know you’re on the right side when you’re arguing against humans exercising more!
They’re always more concerned about being right, instead of correct. :p
I’d like to see his diet and shape, but already have an idea about it
Well one of those is very likely “well rounded”
You mean he is optimized, because there are no corners to cut?
“I’m in shape. Round is a shape too.”
And yet cyclists still consume less per day than that 400 lb dude in an F150.
Now imagine what this guy would eat if he was cyclist. Checkmate again. You libtards are so easy to burn.
Sounds like a boon for that fat guy’s local economy
You don’t get it, a healthy menu consumes much more volume of food that needs to be transported, per capita. Imagine if everyone ordered a head of lettuce instead of a sneakers bar. How many lettuce trucks we’d need??? It’s just not sustainable.
My cabbages!
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.
I can’t remember the name of the philosopher that pretty much said that because existing is so toxic to our environment, we should stop existing (i.e. stop having children, not commit genocide to be clear).
I can’t fault him for being right.
Anything that lives creates things that are toxic to itself. It’s a waste product. Or shit.
The problem isn’t our existing, not even just the scale at which we do, but the methods we choose to use to do it. I’m pretty sure we could have 8 billion people sustainably and comfortably living here, maybe even many more, but we do it by investing in solar and wind, maybe nuclear, maybe whatever isn’t burning coal and gas. And we, as a society, are simply choosing not to.
Besides, life will go on for a while without us, at least a few billion years probably. Even if some of us survive, I wonder what the trajectory is for human intelligence during a mass extinction event. Will we still be interested in the stars? Or maybe a more good natured intelligence evolves here from like octopuses or something and decides to look up. It’d be cool if a descendent of Earth could survive the Sun dying, anyway
This has to be satirical
Unfortunately it does not have to be satirical. We have this idiot professor of economics, Reiner Eichenberger, in Switzerland who calculated the same kind of shit for an article in a business newspaper (Handelszeitung).
He said an efficient car using 5 l or 12 kg CO2 per 100 km with four people is more efficient than a cyclist who needs 2500 kcal per 100 km, so they have to eat 1 kg of beef which emits 13.3 kg CO2. Therefore the people in the car are 4 times as efficient per passenger kilometers.
People got quite cross, there were replies by other professors in other magazines to tear him and his shitty assumptions to shreds.
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He assumed this ridiculous beef-only diet. Potatoes or pasta would be around 0.5 kg.
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He included CO2 in the production of the beef but not of the gas. That would amount to another 50% or so.
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He assumed a more efficient than average car for Switzerland, 7l would have been fairer. And on shorter distances it gets worse, e.g. on daily commutes.
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He assumed 4 people but cars on average carry around 1.5.
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He ignored grey energy in the car and bike production, which would make the bike look way better. Whenever he’s railing against EVs he includes grey energy because then it makes traditional cars look better.
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There are also some hard to calculate benefits for public health in cycling.
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Cycling for travel might substitute other sports activity that would have used the same amount of food.
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Cyclists generally cover less distance than drivers. A 1-to-1 comparison the same distance might not be sensible in the first place. If you cycle you try to find nearby destinations, so from a public policy perspective encouraging more cyclists also implies less total distance traveled.
Cyclists generally cover less distance than drivers.
My partner recently had her car MOT done and I can confirm I cycle more than she drives in a year. Would be very interested to know the average speed of each though as I can often cycle past cars that are waiting at the lights but the bike path is flowing freely.
Also, the driver and passengers still burn calories while just sitting in the car.
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As ridiculous as this is, especially with the dumbass assumptions, it would actually be kind of a fun interesting calculation. Not that it has any environmental merit, because what about people who drive to the gym, or me who takes the tram to the pool to swim laps there, etc, but just sorta fun.
E-bikes sit in a weird spot where the amount of human effort saved is substantially higher than the carbon footprint of the components.
Which implies the optimal transportation mix would be electric trains+trams with e-bikes to go the last few miles.
Can you elaborate on the first bit? It’s counter intuitive, considering electricity needs to be produced somehow, so I’d love to learn the background.
Usually using electricity in something like an electric car requires more emissions to generate the power than would be emitted from the food and respiration required to walk the same distance.
Bicycles are interesting because they improve efficiency so much that it offsets the emissions needed to make the bike, and e-bikes are able to leverage that high efficiency to get 80+ km of travel per KWh (compared to ~6 from something like a Tesla)
That is super interesting, thanks! Granted, public transport transports more than one person, so if possible, it’s still much more efficient, and batteries are made of very finite resources, which is a whole different issue to consider.
True! A fully loaded train is about the most efficient way to move humans from one place to another, and has been for over a hundred years.
Lithium is limited, but you can make 150 e-bikes with a single electric car battery. If we could figure out some sort of solid state sodium battery chemistry it wouldn’t even be an issue.
Or at least a dig at someone being overly pious. My brother for a while was unbearable about his 2 x EVs saving the world while living in a city with at least 6 public transport alternatives within 100m
Absolutely. It’s quite funny.
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.
That used to be true. But modern cars with modern engines have better thermal efficiency than humans.
This is from a purely thermal efficiency standpoint. Not taking any environmental factors into play.
Yup, but cyclists not carrying a ton of metal and plastic is also a factor.
Yes, cars’ physics might be more efficient, but when a ton of car is being used to carry just a single person, it becomes inefficient for the job.
That when Cyclist tags in their match buddy, Train.
Right since as soon as you start looking into how that car was made and how the energy that ends up in those batteries is produced, the legs win again.
Look. I don’t know what you think you mean. But you’re clearly not talking about thermal efficiency.
Thermal efficiency is a measurement of how much energy goes into work, and how much is wasted through heat.
Muscles will never beat an engine. Combustion or otherwise.
The fact that we “used to be” is a huge caviat, giving humans the best case scenario against the vehicles worst case. The moment we start to put in some effort to performing work, our thermal efficiency goes down, significantly.
That’s ok… thermal efficiency isn’t what you should be worried about.
Correct! I was exploring sustainability considerations outside of strict thermal efficiency.
This is…certainly a take.
It’s not a take. It’s factual. Thermal efficiency is a measurement of how much energy is wasted through heat rather than being used to perform work.
Muscles are fantastic in many ways. But what they’re not. Is thermally efficient. That’s ok.
Thats not my point. Its just not relevant to the overall efficiency of the bicycle compared to the car. Thermal efficiency isnt what we’re talking about here.
Thermal efficiency is exactly what the top comment was talking about. That’s where it started.
Not really. Thats how youre interpreting it. When you consider the primary goal is to move a single person (in most cases), the bike wins out. You’re wasting energy moving a large amount of mass.
The bike will in most cases use less calories to travel the same distance. Absolutely. But, That is not the same, as being energy efficient. Energy efficiency is a measurement of input (energy) to output (work).
If you’re driving a Reliant robin. You will probably surpass the muscle powered bike in both Calories consumed and energy efficiency.
That doesn’t mean the bike won’t be more environmentally friendly.
While this is probably true (I have no idea, so I just gonna trust you on that one) its still pretty stupid if someone would bring that as an legitimate argument
Agreed.
Couldn’t really find any sources, but honestly it sounds reasonable enough. Engines are way more specialized for their single mechanical task than our legs are.
Of course you also move around way, way more weight most of the time. The mass/payload ratio is way worse with cars than with bikes so the comparable thermal efficiency would need to be greater to make up for that.
Beyond being a curiosity it is a moot point anyways. Humans need exercise to be healthy, and as you said, there are other environmental factors like car construction, gas refinement, etc. That I imagine mostly favour bikes too.
So, e-bikes for efficiency, then?
Thermal efficiency is purely a measurement of how much of the energy you put in, goes to actual work, and how much is wasted through heat.
Mass only plays a part in that thermal efficiency might change depending on the load the work is performed on.
I can’t think of a single engine that have better thermal efficiency than an electric one. (Not taking into account how the electricity was produced)
You’re right about it being a moot point. There are far more important aspects than simply thermal efficiency. I just wanted to set the record straight. Because saying humans have better thermal efficiency than cars is just not true. Not even close.
We evolved sweat for a reason. Our thermal efficiency is so bad we had to develop external cooling or we would overheat.
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.
Electric bikes are more efficient one.
I couldn’t believe how little energy I used to cycle the 35 mile round trip to work on an ebike, it’s bonkers
That’s depends on the car drivers that surrounds you.
Aren’t electric bikes stupidly dangerous though?
Only if you ride them stupidly dangerously.
how? the electricity in them just assists you in pedalling up hills and stuff
That depends on the car drivers that surrounds you.
That depends on a whole bunch of factors. Maximum velocity is a big one. In Germany (might be EU, not sure), motor assistance is capped at 25km/h for the vast majority of e-bikes (there are some that go to 45, but they are not allowed on bike lanes), which I find to be a decent compromise between safety and speed.
Age plays another role, in that e-bikes allow older people to cycle, whose reaction times or other capabilities may be worse than average. Some training might be required to adjust to the unfamiliar power, too. But I’ll take an elderly cyclist over elderly SUV drivers any day.
And then there’s the infrastructure. Biking can be anywhere from outright suicidal to very safe depending on the existence and state of proper bike lanes. This is the biggest difference between places like the Netherlands and let’s just say elsewhere.
Per mile, there are more fatalities, but in the US, something like 39/40 deaths from bicycles and 4/5 deaths from motorbikes is due to cars; presumably decreasing the number of miles driven by car would lower the number of pedestrian, bike, and motorbike fatalities they cause.
fewer cars also means less pressure to drive at car speeds, which is dangerous on smaller vehicles where you don’t have a big metal cage around you, plus airbags and seatbelts
Only if it’s a fatbike.
I fucking hate fatbikes.
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.
We also gotta keep in mind that cycling makes people healthier, so it has that benefit, and that it can also potentially replace some exercise people would be doing otherwise, in which case you’re basically moving for free since you would have expanded those calories anyways.
You mean I don’t have to drive to the gym anymore if I cycle to work?
Worth noting that cars can fit more people in them than bikes can.
So with that in mind, clearly the true moral of the story is that clown cars are the most efficient method of travel.
You joke but are kind of right. But it only starts making sense when you quite literally start moving bus loads of people.
Very true. It’s a shame we haven’t invented any form of transport that can fit a bus load of people inside at once.
(Source: am american)
Holy shit what kind of cars does that study take into account/what type of vehicles do people drive‽ (Granted I do not know how fuel [in-?]efficient worries/trucks are but O.o)
And yes I am aware that 2016 is 9 years ago now, but I know I am driving badly when my car consumes slightly more than half as much fuel as this average and I am rapidly thinking about just how much money some people/companies are spending on gas!
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.
Talk to a bike courier if you get the chance to. The amounts of calories they burn in a shift is ridiculous.
my dad has tales of gymbro cowokers who can inhale like 3 pizzas in a sitting and still be hungry, yet they’re not in the least pudgy
Most people are way above the amount of calories they need. Doing more exercise just burns that excess and you need to do a ton more exercise to actually get to the point where you need to eat more to cover that surplus consumption.
So if you do an 8h cycling shift you might need to eat more. But if you just commute to work for an hour per day (half an hour per direction) you will not need to take in more calories.
I think what it means is that yes, you can burn more calories in a given active session (working out for example) but the amount of calories you expend over a year for example, divided by the number of days, ends up being about the same regardless.
I guess one of the more popular reasons as to why is because your body is capable of compensating for high intensity sessions when you’re not as active, and being extremely active for long ends up burning you out so you can’t do it anymore (and you get sick or injured).
But from what I’ve seen, exercise is still really good for you, it’s just not exactly for the reasons we used to think. I know in my (very anecdotal) case, I actually eat less when I’m working out regularly just out of instinct. Maybe it’s my body’s way of going “we need to stay light because we have to run again tomorrow”?
There is a video from kurzgesagt on this very topic: link
One other interesting thing is brown fat. Dr Karl told this story loads of times on the 5live science podcast, so it’s bound to be in one of the 2010 or 2011 episodes.
Iirc: a group of women went to Antarctica and put an a lot of body fat beforehand. But even after that, the cold was so enough to make their bodies turn their white fat into brown fat and they lost a ton of weight.
Not the Dr Karl episode: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5nrBw8X5NhXxv04J7H1vn2J/the-body-fat-that-can-make-you-thin
So the answer is live somewhere freezing for a bit if you want to lose weight.
(In my case, for some reason eating chocolate helps keeps my tummy fat down. I ballooned after giving it up, even though the rest of my diet was the same.)
Oh no they have so good logic!
Me: laugh in order of magnitude
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.
Just because I burn less calories on an e-bike doesn’t mean I consume less calories, just that I get fatter faster 🤣. All that fat will still turn into CO₂ once I start to decompose.
OTOH, if I get fatter, I’ll probably start decomposing earlier, so you might be right that in the long run I’ll save on CO₂.
We just need to calcify you for long-term storage to reduce your decomposing CO2 release
Well, the other part of it is the Exercise Paradox. See elsewhere in the thread for that discussion.
I seriously doubt that it would be better “even of you get your electricity from coal”.
I did a project on coal plants in college. Our research showed that a single coalplant in Germany (as of 2012). Produced more pollutants in 1 month. Than every single registered vehicle in Sweden combined, over a whole year.
I’m not trying to say driving a car is better If you could take a bike. Don’t get me wrong.
I just think you’re underestimating just how incredibly bad coal power is.
You would be better off charging your batteries from a diesel generator, than from electricity produced by coal.
You are conflating a pure CO2 calculation to a calculation of other, more harmful in the short term, pollutants. Also worth figuring that if all your electricity is coming from coal your farms probably aren’t burning clean stuff for power either.
I’m not. There are so many pollutants from coal, besides CO2.
Indeed, but the original point was a pure measurement of CO2 per mile, disregarding all other pollutants and factors.
Perhaps, but that is an awful way of comparing things. You simply cannot ignore all of the pollutants that accompany CO2 from exhaust.
Classic example. If we’re talking only CO2. Motorcycles are then more “environmentally friendly” than cars. But once you factor in all of the pollutants from their respective exhaust. Cars will be more “environmentally friendly”. This is mostly due to the lack of catalyzer on motorcycles.
Why would you burn stuff for power on a farm?
Just strap 10 cyclists to the flywheel of your combine and let them “exercise”.Instead of using trucks to carry your produce, use a cyclists’ relay, with each cycle fitted with a little container on the back (make sure it’s aero though :P).
Of course you would need to clean up the air near the roads though. I am not cycling in smoke filled areas.
I’m not sure a diesel generator is much better. In the US, petrol power generation is 2.46 pounds CO2/kwh and coal is 2.31 pounds/kwh. Maybe coal is less efficient in Germany, but I doubt it’s significantly worse than petrol.
And there are other negative emissions with oil, like forced methane production (burn, bottle, or release). Though coal has similar issues too (e.g. more radioactive release than nuclear power).
That said, there’s a disconnect in our debate. Coal plants are an energy source. Cars and ebikes are an energy load. You can’t really say “coal is worse than cars” because you cannot replace coal plant emissions by adding more cars. Similarly, you’ll have cars even if you replaced coal with zero-emission renewables.
The argument becomes interesting when you add bikes into the picture. You can replace a large portion of petrol-car kilometers with coal-ebike kilometers and gain far more kilometers traveled per kilo of CO2. This argument can also be extended for emissions related to calories in acoustic bike kilometers.
The “per mile” in “ebikes produce less CO2 per mile” is critically important to the argument.
There are, like you said. A lot of other pollutants than just CO2. Focusing on the CO2 only, is a huge disservice.
The point of our project was simply to show just how bad they are. We often hear that we should skip the car and take a bus for the environment. And while I agree that we can all do what we can.
It’s like fighting a forest fire by pissing at it. While someone else is literally, dumping coal on the fire.
I don’t have the research infront of me. It was a long time ago. But I know the pollutants from coal, was astronomically worse than any other form of power generation.
But regardless if an ebike is powered by coal is worse or not. It is a moot point. The solution isn’t to stop using bikes. The solution is to stop using coal.
And on that, I think we agree.
Yup, it’s better. You’re underestimating how inefficient biological processes are and how carbon intensive food production is.
https://eponline.com/articles/2023/01/13/environmental-impact-of-bikes-and-e-bikes.aspx
There are a range of numbers that depend on how you get your power and how you get your food. The high end of CO2 per km traveled for ebikes is the same as the low end for regular bikes.
This doesn’t account for all the other terrible stuff coal puts out, of course.
Now, again, the numbers are close enough that it’s barely worth quibbling about, but it is a difference.
Do you have a source on the production CO2 of an ebike? I’d like to see how they calculated the cradle to grave emissions.
The blog below cobbles together a few different sources. One is the European Cycling Federation, and the other is Trek.
https://eponline.com/articles/2023/01/13/environmental-impact-of-bikes-and-e-bikes.aspx
Dr Simon Clark put together a video in 2024 about CO2 and ebikes: How bad are electric bikes for the environment?
He lists 20 sources in the description, so go ham on reading up if you don’t want to watch his breakdown.
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!
Its good we have a study like this to put a number to the argument. However if you already eat to many calories anyway as many people in developed countries do, no additional food would be needed. It also just highlights again how eating meat is worse for the climate than plant based diets.
