But I also flew about 100,000 km per year in the time before COVID and am still on track to fly about 30,000-50,000 km this year. This puts me right back among the people with the highest carbon footprints in the whole world.
There are lots of different things that people might be asked to sacrifice, not just one. And the general trend of development and rising wealth is a trend of greater energy intensity. You can find exceptions and substitutes where you can reduce energy intensity in some area without major sacrifice, but if you have to do it across the board over and over again, that's really a loss of material standard of living.
You were going to fly 30k-50k km regardless of if you biked or drove.
The fact that you biked cut your emissions quite a bit.
A cut in emissions is still a success.
And before anyone says, but what about my electric car!?
1) it produces a ton of carbon to build your car (a year's worth of emissions for a Westerner)...
2) for at least the next 10-years, in most of the US and the EU, your car is charged by ~50% fossil fuels.
The average person's emissions are almost ~1/10th just from building their car...
Can I ask why? I struggle to think of a legitimate reason anyone would need to travel that much.
Please don't say it's for meetings.
This year is family visits and vacations.
My travel patterns were still rather low for self-conscious "frequent flyers", who would, for example, feel an absolute requirement to fly at least 50,000 or 100,000 miles on a single airline each year in order to "maintain status" so that that airline would reward them with various perks. I have "only" ever done this once. Of course, I expect even approaching the low end of a frequent flyer status is probably the top 1% carbon footprint in the world.
No, I haven't. And I fail to see how being out-of-shape is a comfort and not a discomfort.
I do agree that we can't force morbidly obese people onto bikes.
But the narrative amongst healthy people has got to change that their life would be DRAMATICALLY worse if they biked instead of drove a stupid $80k SUV.
Only ~28% of urbanites are obese in the US, btw. Compare that to ~60% in most rural areas and suburbs. In most walkable urban areas - this number is ~20% or less.
It's almost as if the car and the design of our cities makes us fat, and maybe we should change that, instead of saying that the car & roads & parking makes us comfortable.
Let's also not forget that the US pretty much has no bike infrastructure. You can say "well, that's your fault," but it's not the fault of the SUV drivers; it's the fault of city planners who plan for anticipated demand by cyclists, rather than leading with infrastructure to encourage cycling. This predictably leads to a lack of people wanting to cycle, for fairly rational reasons: roads built for and dominated by cars are not very safe for people riding bikes. So, the demand doesn't materialize because the infrastructure isn't here, which inhibits demand.
Oh, and yeah, the auto manufacturers had a bit to do with it as well. [0]
In any case, your ire is aimed in the wrong direction, and the "fat, out of shape American" stereotype has very little to do with it.
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[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/cycling-boom-us-streets-infr...
Netherlands doesn't have a huge biking culture in the middle of nowhere, Netherlands.
Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)
Companies need to see where people are commuting from and set up a small office to capture those people.
Who thinks it's a good idea for hundreds of thousands of people to burn fuel to sit in an open office with half the company WFH that particular day?
Commuting culture is insanity.
It's almost like we should invent a train or a bus or something - working from home, moving closer to work, getting a different job, plus more options than I care to enumerate.
Who says you need to move?
~50% of the US population is urban, and that number is rising quickly.
Miami & Los Angeles could be biking paradises with minimal effort from the city.
But voters view bikers as subhuman.
No one did. That’s why “or being taxed to upgrade infrastructure” is the very next part of my statement.
It's also okay to be a little uncomfortable. A lot of us are quite obsessed with avoiding discomfort, but it's often exactly what we need. I like riding my cargo bike with my son to his school, getting soaked and blown around in the wind. Sometimes he hates it, sometimes I dream of dry sunny days, but when I get home or to the office I'm in love with my awesome bike and all the cool stuff we do with it. Camping, shopping, errands—it's awesome, and totally worth the discomfort.
Like in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: on a bike, you're in your environment, not just watching it go by. You're a participator, not a spectator. You're in the weather, you can reach out and touch some tall grass or a low hanging branch. That aspect makes little parts of the day so much more immersive and interesting. I love that, and I'll take getting hot and sweaty or cold and soaked over driving my car 95% of the time.
I know it's only my perspective, and many will never consider it, but I hope a lot more people do. Bikes made my life so much better.
For what it's worth, I'm out of shape and a bit overweight, so I'm not some fit and out-of-touch athlete telling people they should just go ahead and do a difficult thing.
I'll admit though, there are definitely financial barriers. If you take the bus for economical reasons, an electric cargo bike probably isn't an option. If you own a car and need it, and you can barely afford it as it is, an electric cargo bike also isn't a realistic option. It's definitely a privilege in a sense, and I won't shame someone for relying on a car in those circumstances. Well, I won't shame anyone regardless.
The car's role in family life is hard to overstate, though, when you have more than one kid, and you need to get somewhere all together while also bringing some cargo like a stroller.
We get by with renting a car occasionally, but installing two car seats and bringing them back up to the flat again is getting really boring.
Actually I'm dreaming of buying a used RV...
This seems to ignore that we've been thinking of the cars for a century and it really hasn't worked out all that well for cities, where most people live.
We need to do it differently, and more cars/space for cars isn't the solution. It doesn't need to be bikes either; plenty of people can't even ride bikes. All access lanes seem be the best solution I've seen (wide enough for mobility scooters, room for passing, on and off ramps, etc).
Most people are pathetically weak with such an extreme aversion to minor discomfort or the denial of indulgence and acute pleasure. This counter intuitively makes their holistic life experience more miserable than if they had the foresight to sacrifice a little today for a much better future.
Aversion to exercise and eating healthy resulting the obesity epidemic is the classic example of this.
Enlightened hedonism is the way.
The same Netherlands that still can’t say goodbye to its beloved car. Traffic is back and surpassed pre-covid records. We still have to keep speed restrictions during daytime to reduce emissions because we just can’t help it to live in one part of the country and work in the other.
I'm growing tired of the idea that riding a bike instead of driving a car is a discomfort equivalent to being a Neanderthal.
Biking works out just dandy for Netherlands.
It's not about comfort. It's about aversion to change.