Emissions

Here I was, thinking that Trump/MAGA crowd had a lock on science denial or sheer irrationality.  And that the Swiss education system inculcated its charges with scientific literacy and critical thinking skills.

But it seems that you don't have to belong to tRUMP end of the elephant party to come up with something as ludicrous as "Kung Flu" or the notion that climate change is a "Chinese hoax." (And here I was thinking that Donald Trump's racism extended only to Blacks and Mexicans.)

You see, a professor and researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland wrote something that translates into something like this:

Today everything is climate.  Many want to replace the car with public transport and bicycles.  They believe that the latter burden society less and are climate-friendly.  That's wrong.

Photo by Toby Jacobs

It appeared in a column the professor wrote for the German-language Swiss newspaper Handelszeitung. The esteemed writer and thinker goes on to make the claim that official data show bikes, trains and buses to be better than the environment because of "creative accounting" and "official tricks."

He bases his claim on the following:

Although the whole debate is about energy and climate, the bicycle is treated as a perpetual motion machine. But cyclists need additional energy. For this, they have to eat more, which puts a strain on the climate.

Economical cars need 5 litres of gasoline per 100 kilometres, causing 12kg of CO2 emissions, i.e. 120 grams per vehicle kilometre – and 30 grams per passenger kilometre for a four-person occupation.

Cyclists consume around 2500 kilocalories (kcal) per 100 kilometres during normal riding. They have to compensate for energy and muscle consumption through additional food intake. So, they would need about 1 kilo of beef for the 2500 kcal. This causes them to produce 13.3kg of CO2.

Meat-eating cyclists therefore cause 133 grams of CO2 per passenger-kilometre – four times the number of well-occupied cars. If they obtain driving energy from milk, they emit 35 grams of CO2 per passenger-kilometre, which is still almost 20 percent more than the car. Unfortunately, this miserable record also applies to vegans.

  

First of all, he conveniently doesn't analyze the CO2 emissions of a vegan cyclist's diet. From what I understand, it's much less than that of a meat-eater.

Which brings me to my next point:  He doesn't mention anything about the diets of the motorists or their passengers.  If anything, I would expect them to be more likely consumers of meat--or any other food whose cultivation, processing and preparation produces high levels of emission--than cyclists.  So, if one adds the emissions produced by the diets of motor vehicle drivers and passengers, and adds them to the emissions created by automobiles (and what it takes to keep those vehicles on the road), how does it compare to what cyclists,  and mass transportation users generate?

Oh, and as one commenter to the article noted, if we follow the professor's logic (if we can call it that), "joggers and hikers are even worse than cyclists because they need more food" and "pedestrians are the climate killers par excellence."  

So...Is the author of the, um, interesting column an engineer,  environmental scientist, or any sort of expert on public health?  

Of course not.  Reiner Eichenberger is a professor of financial and economic policy.  

He reminds me of another economist who tried to deny science:  Peter Navarro, who famously claimed Anthony Fauci "was wrong about everything I have interacted with him on."  Professor Navarro defended his assessment thusly:  "My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I'm a social scientist."  Hmm...The university I attended wouldn't allow liberal arts majors to fulfill their science requirement with economics, political science, sociology or the like.  But the esteemed professor has a Ph.D. and therefore, he said, "I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it's in medicine, the law, economics or whatever."

Now, to be fair, I am sure that Professors Eichenberger and Navarro do indeed know how to read statistical studies.  Mark Twain said there are lies, there are damned lies and there are statistics.  In that vein, I will say that there are fools, there are damned fools and there  folks who quote statistics and there are folks who quote the folks who quote statistics."  In other words, just because someone can quote numbers, it doesn't mean they have critical thinking skills--or what's known in my old neighborhood as a bullshit detector. 

From Indian Summer To Climate Change

 When I was less enlightened, I called it “Indian Summer.”  That’s how most people in America referred to a series of unseasonably warm days in the Fall. I don’t know what to call it now. “Another sign of climate change,” as accurate as it may be, isn’t quite as catchy as “Indian Summer.”

Whatever one calls it, we had a dose of it on Friday, Saturday and Sunday morning.  The temperature reached 26C (79F).  But we also caught the tail end of Hurricane Nicole. She strafed us with wind and dumped a lot of rain.  One downpour woke up Marlee, who woke me to a view of…a cascade of rain.  It was so thick I couldn’t see beyond my window!

But, a couple of hours after eating my bagel with Saint Andre cheese, the rain stopped.  I took Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear bike for a spin with no particular destination in mind.

After wandering along the North Shore of Queens and Nassau County, I stopped in Fort Totten.  Although I brought my lights, I didn’t want to ride in the dark.  So I knew I’d be headed home when I saw this:

The days definitely are getting shorter.  The season is changing.  So is the climate.

It’s A Bike-Friendly City—As Long As You Can Keep Your Bike

 I have lived in New York City for most of my life.  I love it, including the cycling it offers, but I’ll admit that there are times when I was tempted, however briefly, to leave.

One of those occasions came during a long fall weekend, which included a lot of cycling, in Vermont. I’d take an overnight Amtrak train from Penn Station to Burlington.  I cycled there, and in the surrounding countryside, and slep in the state ski dorm—which served as a hostel during the off-season—near Stowe.

Much of the temptation to move came from seeing the most vibrant colors of the Green Mountain State’s Fall Foliage season. But I knew that if I were to continue the car-free life I’d been living, my relocation would take me to Burlington which, decades before cities were talking the “bike friendly” talk, seemed be spinning their pedals in that direction.  In other words, it was a kind of proto-Portland, if smaller.

Now Vermont’s largest city—which has about a third as many people as Astoria, where I live—is acknowledged as one of the nation’s most “bike friendly “ cities.  But, as in other velo havens, there is a dark side: bike theft.

As an article in today’s New York Times points out, although bikes are commonly stolen by professional thieves who know what they’re looking for, many others—and, it seems, many of the bikes swiped in Burlington—are taken, sometimes for fun, other times for profit, by drug addicts.

Some blame the very open-minded, welcoming atmosphere that attracted them to the city.  (Ironically, they are in agreement with outsiders, many with right-wing politics.)  This is the city that launched Bernie Sanders’ political career when it elected him as its Socialist mayor.  It’s also where latter-day hippies went to continue their lives away from the clatter and clamor of cities and corporations. Among such refugees were a couple of guys who started one of the world’s best-loved ice cream brands.  Such folks have long felt grateful to the place that welcomed them and pride themselves on welcoming newcomers like themselves.

But as in larger “bike friendly” cities like Portland and “liberal” enclaves like San Francisco, some arrive with no connections or prospects.  Also, those who come and manage to start businesses and careers, or attend the university, make it more difficult for those who were born and raised there but who can’t or didn’t go to college and who can’t get the kinds of jobs their parents had but don’t exist anymore.

The latter group of people are more or less like the kinds of people would-be gentrifiers encounter in cities like mine and are called “remnants,” “leftovers” or other less flattering names.  They, and the young people who get off the Greyhound buses from the Rust Belt or Deep South are vulnerable to addiction and their circumstances—often as residents of encampments or park benches—make them easy to be recruited as bike thieves or simply to steal bikes on their own.

Now, to be fair, some steal bikes for transportation.  That, of course, doesn’t change the fact that they are stealing. But, as one outreach worker pointed out, the “high” crystal meth users lead some to steal things—including bikes—for the thrill of it.

So, while being a “bike friendly” city didn’t cause Burlington’s problems, it caused those problems to manifest in a way that isn’t friendly to bike owners.