Leisesturm

Of course it wouldn't. So why do people think that that is the argument? "Oh we can't possibly go back to stone age tech because ... " IF we go back to stone age tech it will be because we are blasted back to stone age tech, or there is a pandemic or other Malthusian Event that decimates civilization. Which could very well happen if we do not at least slow our roll ... ... stone age? What about something like an Industrial Revolution Lite? What about enforcement of environmental regulations meant to keep the worst of cancer causing compounds out of our air, water, and soil? That would mean no fracking Fracking. Is that going back to the Stone Age? Electric Cars ... stone age? If the Grid goes down there won't even be any electric cars, we will be back to bicycles! If you can't ride a bicycle you will be on foot! It will be years, if at all, before there are enough horses for all the non-cyclists.

jon c. 

This is why we shouldn't be burning coal. If our technology collapses, we're going to need that coal. It will be our only readily accessible source of energy. It should be preserved in case future generations need it.

Maelochs

if the government were to collapse, and with it, its really stupid laws, hemp will be sprouting all over the freaking place---because it can grow like a weed in just about every climate and offers oil, fuel, feed and fiber. Coal won't be that useful because there won't be a lot of people equipped to mine it, and not a lot of people live near coal mines. Trees aren't sufficiently plentiful. What would be needed would be a fast-growing plant with a lot of oil .....

I am not one of those "hemp is the magic answer" people, but a tiny bit of research shows that it is a wildly underused plant, pushed aside so the wood-pulp and animal-feed farmers could control their respective markets.

livedarklions

Next up--a really heavy bike dangling from a rope attached to a fighter plane going Mach 2 twenty feet above Manhattan can do more damage and kill more people than a small tornado at sea.

unterhausen

This is why Harvard is such a second-rate school in STEM

rydabent

Another dumb college boy.

base2 

I'm a Prius driver & a cyclist. I'm not going to say my diet consists of "only" meat, but it's a rare day that my vegetable consumption is other than the odd fried potato. My diet just tripled in size if you realize beer is made from whole grain! Beer is good for the EARTH!

greatscott

Yeesss, and this is where a lot our politicians graduate from! Great isn't it?

Chris0516

More like, he has a screw loose.

genec

A few of folks in my neighborhood have massive solar panels, for their house, and charge their cars right from their panels.

SDGE has a solar education center in the neighborhood with a big array of tracking panels, and several car charging stations.
https://www.sdge.com/energy-innovation-center

Electric cars don't need "the grid," but ICE cars need gas stations and refineries.

Tesla is building solar charging stations too.

The folks most likely to have to go to bicycles in some apocalyptic future are those folks depending on petrochemicals.

Rollfast

Dude has never heard of entropy.

My guess, undergraduate.

blue192

Hmmm the cost of food for me to eat in order to bike vs the 1.20$ a litre (about 4.53$ of a US gallon) + carbon tax + 13% HST for fuel for a car..... I think I will eat more food and save a metric crap tonne of money not driving. xD

cyccommute 

DrIsotope

I've seen two adults on one bicycle more times than I've seen two adults in a single Prius.

Maelochs

New headline: Harvard Researcher Announces, "Oops, I Can't Do Math." Research results of equal or superior scientific value and far greater humor value. BF trumps Harvard yet again!

mr_bill

livedarklions

Fine, but it's still a pretty lousy analysis, now with enough qualifiers on it to make it a rather pointless exercise.

Basically, he shows that a vegan diet has a lot less environmental impact than a paleo diet, and that food production takes up more land than oil production.

Fuel production is such a small percentage of the land use requirements for car travel that it's hard to see why this is even in the article. There's nothing in there concerning parking, roads, shipping facilities needed for the import of cars, or land occupied by the mining of materials used in the construction of cars (a lot more than bikes, I'm pretty sure).

I didn't know this revision existed--the original paper received a lot of publicity, the revision did not. Having seen it now, I think it's pretty obvious they know the original was a misfire--they were trying to make a point about food, but got too cute with the example. As a result, they had to select facts to make the bike example work for the point, and it ended up sounding like someone bending over backward to make biking sound bad for the environment.

I still think they miss the obvious worst example of fuel and food use using their own analysis--driving a car to the gym for a workout. It challenges the whole assumption that drivers eat less than bicyclists.

Rollfast

Life is still 100% fatal. You have no control. It is vain and foolish to usurp the role of random fate.

Leisesturm

You aren't kidding. As I understand it, 51% of the land area of Los Angeles is parking lot! Just think of what housing costs could be if they could do more 'recent construction' there ...

rydabent

He probably weight 350 pounds and is totally out of shape.

livedarklions

If you figure that point to point transportation by car requires at minimum, a parking space at both ends of the trip, that 51% figure is not too surprising.

The whole analysis is premised on a comparison of the impacts of fuel costs, gas for the car, food for the bikes, but there's an overlap there--drivers also use food as fuel for at least their basal metabolism. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the parking lot of a supermarket usually bigger than the store itself? Driving to the store actually increases the land use impact of food as fuel.

The problem with the whole exercise is that the authors thought the best way to make a point about the environmental costs of food was to arrive at a "Freakonomics" style demonstration about why our intuitions are wrong--in this case, our intuition tells us that biking is less bad for the environment than driving. The problem with that was that our intuitions were, in this case, spot on, and so they had to pick data and assumptions in such a way as to make the thing look like it was created by a lobbying firm for driving in order to get to the "surprising" conclusion. By that point, they pretty much lost the whole "food has environmental impacts" plot, and ended up looking silly.

Probably would have been better off comparing the environmental impact of a vegan cyclist to a paleo one.

Maelochs

Perfectly summarized.

ThermionicScott 

Wonder if his folks paid extra to get him into Harvard.

Leisesturm

Rollfast

Saved that along with the cat watching the toilet flush and Judy Tenuta's It can happen. Comedy gems!