I read about this article on How the World Works (one of my favorite blogs). It’s a working paper by Karl Ulrich at the Wharton business school. He argues, essentially, that while biking reduces transportation emissions, that is offset by emissions due to increasing longevity from exercise, and combined, the effects are a wash. The How the World Works commentary does a good job of pointing out the absurdity of this comparison and playfully pokes a couple of holes in the analysis, so I won’t spend too much time on that.
I’ll just say that even if Ulrich is right, he’s still found that biking is a social good.1 Human life is a good thing, even though it may, in a sense, be bad for the environment. And indeed, much of what we do to protect the environment is ultimately about protecting human life.
It brings up a similar paradox that comes up when talking about energy efficiency and reducing consumption. One factor that Ulrich ignores that would work in his favor is that when money is saved by efficiency, it will get spent on something else. If I save on gasoline by bike-commuting, I have money to spend on something else that will generate emissions. I’ll be hard-pressed to spend it on something dirtier than driving a car (jet-skiing? helicopter tour?) but this will somewhat offset the initial energy savings. Similarly, if someone says increasing efficiency of electricity use by 10% is just as good as building 10% more power plants (which people often say), that’s not strictly correct. Consumers would spend less on their current electricity needs and then put the remainder toward other things which use some electricity. So maybe it’s like building 8% more power plants, or something.
Whenever you tell people to save resources by not to consuming something, you have to wonder what they’re going to spend the money on instead. Perhaps we ought to take a supply-side approach to controlling consumption. Of course, you could try reducing working hours and hence salary to reduce consumption. But beyond that, you could promote consumption of low-resource goods, like art, digital entertainment, expensive restaurant meals, hand-made and custom-made things. If you get people to spend enough money on high-cost, low-impact goods, they won’t have any left to spend on bigger houses and bigger SUV’s.
- Though, interestingly, he’s saying that the good accrues to the bikers and not to society, whereas I had always figured it was mostly the other way around (i.e., other people aren’t dying because of my avoided emissions). [↩]
#1 written by Moira July 20th, 2006 at 18:08
Best lines ever:
“For those who would rather not look at their bicycle and see the specter of drowning polar bears . . .”
“The body fat of the overweight population is actually a significant and environmentally beneficial potential source of energy for transportation.”
Ulrich also appears to assume that energy consumption will be constant throughout life, but if technology improves (or as the biker makes other greener lifestyle changes, as htww suggests might happen), his energy consumption might decrease in the future, making those extra three months per year-of-biking more efficient than any current three months.
Oh, and is Ulrich proposing that we pay sedentary people $1740 per year to ride their bikes?
#2 written by Moira July 20th, 2006 at 18:43
Oh, and I found that article that states that walking consumes more fossil fuel than driving. The gist is that walkers require more calories than drivers, and if they eat the typical American diet (which you’ve discussed before), those calories are coming from sources that consume more energy than cars (petrochemically fertilized grain-fed cows that are being shipped across the country). Of course, overfed Americans are going to eat a fixed number of calories per day whether they walk or drive, so there goes that argument. But it’s interesting.