Bicycle riders worse for the environment than car drivers?
Bicycle riders worse for the environment than car drivers?
mongabay.com
July 22, 2006
A new paper argues that bicycling may be more damaging to the environment than driving a car, but not for the reason you might think.
Karl T. Ulrich, a professor at the Wharton School of the Business at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that there are environmental costs associated with increased longevity of those who engage in physical activity. Ulrich reasons that because cyclists live longer they will produce more carbon emissions over the course of their extended life.
“Substituting bicycling for driving is frequently promoted as a means of reducing energy consumption
and the associated degradation of the environment,” writes Ulrich. While bicycles have “dramatically lower energy requirements” than cars, “the environmental benefits of human power are, however, strongly coupled to the environmental costs of increased population, due to increased longevity of those who engage in physical activity… Human-powered transportation is therefore less an environmental issue and more an issue of public health. The interplay between longevity and environmental impact is a central feature of the conflicting societal objectives of improving human health and increasing environmental sustainability.”
Despite this stance, Ulrich concedes that his theory might be undermined in practice due to increased environmental awareness among people who trade their cars for bikes.
“Those who adopt the bicycle as a means of transportation could potentially develop an increased awareness of the environmental impact of their actions and may over their lifetimes reduce energy consumption substantially in their other, non-transportation activities,” he writes.
Ulrich’s paper — still a work-in-progress — has been criticized by bloggers including Andrew Leonard in his July 18 “How the World Works” column in Salon. Nevertheless, his work provides an interesting comment on the environmental impact of lengthening human life spans.
See for yourself, read the paper [PDF]
END NOTE: Ulrich, an avid bicyclist who rides to work on his bicycle “every day, in the snow, rain, or sweltering heat”, founded a carbon offset program at the University of Pennsylvania. Within its first year the program, called TerraPass, registered over 2,400 members and reduced 36 million pounds of CO2 emissions.
This article used quotes and information from “THE ENVIRONMENTAL PARADOX OF BICYCLING” by Karl T. Ulrich.
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