07 March 2013

Bicycle riders are bad for the environment ?

Washington state Rep. Ed Orcutt (R–Kalama), a ranking member of the State Transportation Committee, argues that bicycling is bad for the environment and says bike riders should have to pay a tax to help maintain the state's roads. Orcutt made his comments in an email, which was posted by the Cascade bicycle club blog on Saturday. In the message, Orcutt states bike riders pollute the environment because they produce more carbon dioxide than car drivers. The email from the lawmaker, which was written to bike shop owner Dale Carson, goes on to say that because bike riders have an "increased heart rate and respiration," the act of riding a bike "results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider." "Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride," Orcutt wrote in the message...
Rep. Orcutt has subsequently apologized for his comments, saying that "My point was that by not driving a car, a cyclist was not necessarily having a zero-carbon footprint."

21 comments:

  1. Yeah, I'm sure it was just meant in jest.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know why people feel compelled to apologize for the simple truth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Except when the "simple truth" isn't true. He had to apologize for telling an obvious lie, and here "apologize" means "pretend he meant something other than what he said".

      Delete
  3. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot indeed. Is there no requirement for public officials to have completed at least high school?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. no intelligence requirement for elected officials or those who elect them.

      Delete
  4. Hmm, shame leaders like that haven't learned basic differences in things like that. Car CO2 comes from deep underground reserves being released and human CO2 comes from renewable sources - plants and such.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Something else to consider in a comparison between car drivers and bicyclists is while yes, the car driver produces less CO2 then does the bicyclist, his CAR produces far more CO2 (and often simple CO) then does the bicyclist.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Another way 'they' skew this argument is the ppm number. PPM is irrelevant, even when comparing engines of different sizes, because the volume of output per second is not measured. (one might only put out 1/10 the volume of the other so having double the ppm does not matter) - this is how they are fooling with the motorcycle/moped industry.
      As for comparing to car operators, most cyclists aren't smoking, using their cell phones, etc.

      Delete
  6. I just wanted to share a little calculation that I made, and I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong in my assumptions.

    The maximum possible ventilation during exercise, for trained athletes, is about 150 litres per minute. [Source]

    Exhaled breath contains about 5% (in volume) of CO2. [Source]
    So our athlete exhales about 7.5 litres of CO2 per minute.

    Assuming CO2 to be an ideal gas, its molar volume would be 22.4 litres/mol, with a molar mass of 44g, which gives 7.5/22.4*44 = 14.7 grams per minute.

    Let's say the cyclist is doing 30 km/h, which seems low for someone breathing that hard but hey, it makes calculations easy and let's take a worst case here. I don't do miles, sorry. Anyway at that speed 1km takes 2 minutes, so the result is 29.4g/km.

    An average car in Europe will emit something like 150g/km.
    So in his defense, he was only wrong by about 500%.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the calculations!

      Since the human in the car will still be breathing, what's his ventilation going to be? (And what's the total of that plus the car?)

      Delete
    2. Normal ventilation at rest, according to Wikipedia, is 6 litres per minute. That gives around 0.6 grams of CO2 per minute, which is pretty negligible in view of the approximations I made.

      But again, I took an extreme case for the cyclist. Average, non-trained people have a much lower maximum ventilation (90-100 L/min), and the 150 g/km figure is for new, more eco-friendly cars.

      I reckon the difference in the real world is more likely a factor 10 than 5, but let's be generous ;-)

      Delete
  7. Why should he be concerned? I see that rep. Orcutt is a Republican and they don't believe in global warming anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  8. And then figure out the extra methane that lazy people produce with all the partially digested fast food sitting in their gut...

    Silly.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Whether he was being an idiot or making a point in a weird way (the two do tend to look the same from the outside, don't they?), the whole statement is silly. CO2 isn't the cause of rising temperatures, but the effect. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 goes up after the temperature does. (And no, I'm not a climatologist. But I can read a graph. And numbers, too!)

    I followed the link to the article. It's ridiculous that our legislature here is talking about raising taxes to pay for roads and transportation, as they have a history of putting in a tax to pay for A, and then spending it on B,or C, or even Q. They put a toll on a major bridge here to pay for rebuilding it - but the toll money can be spent anywhere. They don't have to (and, going by their history, won't) spend it on the bridge. Sure, many of our roads are lousy and need repair. Interstate 5 south of Seattle is a great place to see how good your suspension really is. But if they'd fix the roads instead of spending billions on public transportation that doesn't get used, (or wherever else they spend it,) things wouldn't be so bad. There's a commuter train that goes into Seattle from Everett (next town north). Last I heard, it would be cheaper for the state to buy each commuter a Mercedes than to run the train.

    AND the same twerps who are supposedly so planet-friendly want to build light rail through a wetland/greenspace in Bellevue (east of Seattle).

    Stepping off the soap box . . .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. CO2 isn't the cause of rising temperatures, but the effect. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 goes up after the temperature does. (And no, I'm not a climatologist. But I can read a graph. And numbers, too!)

      Since you don't give us a graph to read too, I assume you refer to the one climate "skeptics" have been referencing for a while, which is figure 4 in this article.

      And it's true, it does show that the temperature rise in Antarctica (not global) leads the rise in CO2 concentration by about 800 years at the end of the last glaciation. Here's some of the text that accompanies that graph in the article:

      The best correlation (R^2 = 0.88) was obtained when we shifted the CO2 profile by 800 +- 100 years. Combining this uncertainty with the uncertainty introduced by ice accumulation, we obtain an overall uncertainty of +- 200 years, indicating that the increase in CO2 lags Antarctic warming by 800 +- 200 years.

      [...]

      This result is in accordance with recent studies but, owing to our new method, more precise. This confirms that CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation. Rather, deglaciation is probably initiated by some insolation forcing, which influences first the temperature change in Antarctica (and possibly in part of the Southern Hemisphere) and then the CO2. This sequence of events is still in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing.

      See, after a glacial period what initially drives temperatures up is a change in insolation, which in this case is most likely caused by the Earth's orbital properties (see Molankovitch cycles). This first increase in temperatures melts some ice, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere. This CO2 in turn, through greenhouse effect, drives temperatures up some more, which releases more CO2, etc...

      This is called positive feedback, and has been understood for at least 30 years. So the rise in CO2 concentration is BOTH an effect AND a cause of rising temperatures. I hope that's somewhat clear.

      Delete
    2. It is. "... CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation." So CO2 isn't the start of it. Then the article says "probably". What comes after that, then, is a guess. No matter how good a guess is, it's not data.

      I didn't link to the graph because I read it offline. What I read was not in the article you shared; I'll have to do some digging to find it.

      Delete
  10. Go Dan!! If you were here, I'd vote for you :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks mate ;-)
      I'm glad somebody actually read that.

      Delete
  11. It's really neat to consider that that we lose a tiny bit of weight with each breath due to the carbon we exhale in the form of co2. I did the math once (using figures gathered from the internet as a starting point...so the result is questionable) and came up with a weight loss of a couple hundred grams of carbon each day just due to normal breathing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Did you adjust your number for the weight of the oxygen you take in to generate the CO2?

      Delete
  12. I sure did. I converted the oxygen consumed into moles and halved that number to come up with moles of carbon consumed, then just plugged in weight per mole.

    I don't have the work to show, but if anybody else wants to try to confirm that would be rad.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...