"As a cyclist, you claim to care about the environment, yet you consume food. Checkmate libs!"

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).

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.

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.)
Talk to a bike courier if you get the chance to. The amounts of calories they burn in a shift is ridiculous.
- 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

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.
- He assumed this ridiculous beef-only diet. Potatoes or pasta would be around 0.5 kg.
  He included CO2 in the production of the beef but not of the gas. That would amount to another 50% or so.
  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.
  He assumed 4 people but cars on average carry around 1.5.
  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.
  There are also some hard to calculate benefits for public health in cycling.
  Cycling for travel might substitute other sports activity that would have used the same amount of food.
  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.
- 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.
Absolutely. It’s quite funny.
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

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.

Wow that feels like an exercise in the absurd
lol that’s so dumb. If you want an actually good breakdown then I’d recommend this video to share with people!

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

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.
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

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
- Aren't electric bikes stupidly dangerous though?

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!

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.
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.
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!

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."

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

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.

NO WAY!!!! We better cancel all sports!!!!!!1!1!11!1one
- No more sex!
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

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

I've got to upvote you for "climate couscous". Sounds delicious.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is...certainly a take.
- 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

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

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!

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

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.

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

Speak for yourself. My main greenhouse emission is methane. Lactose intolerance is a huge deal.
/s
- We will all die in a fireball at the ice cream parlor in the summer!

Oh no they have so good logic!

Me: laugh in order of magnitude

Trains are very energy efficient. Is this person advocating for putting trains on every road?

Ohh noooo. I guess if it's the only way.

I am Dutch, have 0 cars, 2 bicycles, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I've only recently came across the first situation in which I felt like car access would be usefull.

A couple I'm friends with were pregnant and they don't have a car either, but since they wanted to be able to go to the hospital quickly and indepently, they rented a car for a week or so. This would't work for me because I don't have a drivers license. People often ask me 'but what if you need to do this or that...' and never do I feel like they're pointing towards a problem that I have. Just some minor inconvenience, if one at all. But in this case I thought, yeah if my wife were pregnant it would be damn usefull to be able to transport her by car, by myself. If it ever happens I'm sure we'll find a solution though. But I found it interesting that it was only the first situation in which it actually seemed usefull to me to have car access.

Yeah, if you bring up cycling, all of a sudden everybody needs to transport a fridge to another town in the rain.
- Skill issue.
- And people need to drive in mid-town Manhattan because Wyoming ranchers exist. Carbrain is a helluva drug.
I wonder if in a society such as yours, where this is all more common.
Could you have taxi companies that take a small fee up front to guarantee you a rapid taxi to hospital when the time comes. I'll assume ambulances are fine for accidents and emergencies. A regular taxi (and the wait) is fine for unexpected trips where you are unable to cycle for some reason.
But a reasonable fee to say, I want a "rapid" taxi for this instance.
- I think that "reasonable fee" would be a quite high one. You're basically asking someone to be available 24/7 for a specified period of time. And besides, depending on where the person is when you call them it might actually be quicker to just call a cab.
I only got my driver's license because my wife insisted on it. She didn't want to be the only one to shuttle the kids around. So I got my license and shuttle them around on my cargo bike, and then teach them to ride their own bike. I still rarely use the car. When we go anywhere by car, she insists on driving.

Guarantee that person has a BMI over 40.

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.

Yeah let's say there was a global calorie daily limit - I suspect the truckers will feel it harder than the bikers

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.

So, who's gonna tell them the human body burns about the same amount of calories every day, regardless of exertion?

Yeah, the amount of extra calories consumed is not that great and does not require that much extra food.
Just did a quick calculation for me, biking 30 min to work would have me burning an extra 170 kcal. I could add 1 and half tablespoons of butter to a meal and cover it easily.
- One of the most disheartening things is using one of those exercise machines that tells you how much calories you burned and then how exhausting it is to burn one snickers bar.
Basal metabolic rate is different than active metabolic rate. You absolutely burn more energy when you’re active. You probably want to read up on human nutrition if you believe otherwise.
- Oh buddy, if there's anyone that needs to "read up" on anything, it's not me.
  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-exercise-paradox/
  The human body burns a set amount of calories every day. Your average man burns 2600 kcal a day, your average woman 1900. You exercised and burnt an extra 300 kcal? Great, your body will slow down in the evening to make up for it, or decrease its energy expenditure on random inflammations. Granted, if you're not active, and active in this sense is a very very low bar, you do burn less calories, about 200 less. So if you want to catch me on a technicality, go ahead.
- You will burn more but not that much more.

Haha lol, assuming people in cars count calories and or operate on minimal / in a deficit. Regardless of the car argument, people riding bikes are more likely to be counting calories and in a calorie deficit, as they're more health conscious. People driving cars wouldn't care as much, on average, and would consume more calories than necessary, probably triple the "cycling" extra calorie needs. Omfg. I could debate either side, if I had to, that's the stupidest take I've ever heard. It holds absolutely no water. Where's the data showing people in cars consume less food / calories.

I'm pretty sure overweight tommy incel the reddit mod eats more than twice what I eat and has never touched a bike in his life

This actually would be an interesting study.

Yeah, their comment is a joke, but it does mention real things that are real problems with our food supply chain. Some of which could be mitigated by growing locally. Because somebody at some point made a problem with vehicles, and they "solved" it with vehicles.

Growing locally isn't the panecea one might think. The extra energy that goes into trying to get crops to grow outside of their ideal region can entirely offset the transportation energy savings. One semi truck driving cross country would release a ton of CO2, but you can pack literally tons of apples into one semi truck for example
- Okay, now you're doing what the OP was joking about, but seriously. Why wouldn't we simply grow local crops that grow well locally, and think of those crops that don't grow well locally as luxury items that need to be imported?

How many calories do Mountain Dew and Cheetos have

I see someone's read Reiner Eichenberger's nonsense (and remembers about half of it).

we are already overproducing food and throwing it away, so even if there was logic in the idea, it would not actually require additional farming, manufacuring, transportation, etc

What you actually need are walkable cities, transit (trains/buses) friendly neighborhoods, that would make it easy for people.

I am guessing this person was being facetious, but you can never tell with absolute certainty nowadays.

I've straight up had people ask me "[citation needed]" for a car coming from the factory with a higher CO2 production cost than a bike. So, so much bad faith and poor thinking around this.

First thought is this is sublime shithousery.

Being that stupid isn't natural. You know they do the opposite of reading a book and putsome efforts to lower their IQ that much.

The human brain uses a lot of calories; maybe he's so concerned about this that he turns it off before going online

I have personally wondered about that. Not in a car vs cyclist thing, but cyclist vs public transport.

Not even sure how to do the math on it.

Still, both are surely way better than driving.