A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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
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
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.
I'd like to see his diet and shape, but already have an idea about it
If this is true, then support a carbon tax without exceptions. All the extra food cyclists use will be taxed extra.
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.
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.
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.
If you drive in a 25 miles per gallon vehicle (pretty standard) you will burn the equivalent of 1100 calories per mile. Assuming an active person who rides their bike a lot eats around 2500 calories a day, and they ride to work every day, and they live 5 miles away. In the car you would burn about 11,000 calories a day, in the bike you would never burn more than 2,500 and that ignores the fact that actually most of those calories have nothing to do with the biking.
Also, one year of an average American driving (around 14,000 miles) would have the equivalent calories of giving 16,000 people a proper meal.
No one tell them how many calories are in a tank of gas
he's right, we all know that exploring, extracting, refining, distilling, and distributing petroleum and its derivatives doesn't cost anything
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.
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.
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!
Oh no they have so good logic!
Me: laugh in order of magnitude
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