Dutch people cycle an average of 2.6 kilometres each per day. If this pattern was replicated worldwide, the study suggests, annual global carbon emissions would drop by 686 million tonnes.
This mammoth figure exceeds the entire carbon footprint of most countries, including the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
If everybody cycled as much as the Dutch, global carbon emissions would drop by nearly 700 million tonnes per year.
For context, Wikipedia puts annual global carbon emissions in 2023 at 39,024 million tonnes. That’s a 2% slash. I suppose if you find a lot of these it could add up, but without a fix for the original problem of unregulated capital expansion it’s just going to fill the void.
For context, aviation is also about 2% of emissions. So it really isn’t nothing.
But the lower-hanging fruit for me is all of the kerosene used to cook. That’s also about 2% of global emissions and it’s a good candidate to be fixed with solar panels and wind turbines.
By the Allfather id kill for a good quality electric stove for camping. At least on the same durability and reliability as my propane/ butane one.
Yeah, but unfortunately a lot of people are lazy shitheads who are so out of shape they can’t ride a bike. That’s ignoring the horrifying infrastructure that puts you in the middle of cars driven by angry idiots.
It’s a good fact, but I don’t think we’ll get there without the left taking power and forcing the issue, or somehow playing to the emotions of reactionary fuckheads. Facts don’t convince them so it has to be emotions.
Yeah, but unfortunately a lot of people are lazy shitheads who are so out of shape they can’t ride a bike. That’s ignoring the horrifying infrastructure that puts you in the middle of cars driven by angry idiots.
You’ve got your cause and effect backwards.
It’s a good fact, but I don’t think we’ll get there
we will get there,either voluntarily or need to after civilisations collapse from climate change.
There is NO solution to climate change that doesn’t involve a > 80% reduction in car use (and banning flying) Even the IPCC has said e-cars aren’t an answer (they embed urban sprawl).
There’s a persistent myth that we can’t inconvenience anyone, which is patently nonsense as the destruction of civilisation from climate change is way more than inconvenient
As great as that sounds there are many parts of the world (including where I grew up and most areas around my city) where biking 2.6km (1.6mi) would barely even get you 1/10th of the distance to the closest commercial building, which is likely a lonely gas station.
It’s a shitty situation, but there is nothing we can do about it out here. If we want to eat food and take our kids to school, we need cars. Most of us are poor too, so there’s no option (for those who would want to) to just move to a bike-able place.
On the other hand, around 80% of all people (worldwide) live in cities, so there is potential.
But at the end of the day this puts the blame on individuals. We need to take industries into account!
Edit: clarify world population
On the other hand, around 80% of all people live in cities, so there is potential.
Agreed, and that is a good point I hadn’t considered. I’m not anti-biking or anti-city, just anti-unrealistic-expectations for (what I guess amounts to) the remaining 20% of us haha. Those of us in cities who can bike (I now live in a sort of bikeable city. It’s dangerous atm, but they’re getting better) certainly should when feasible. When I can afford another, I plan to start biking to work again.
A question that comes to mind though is: Do suburbs (common in the USA, idk about other places) count as the “city”? They’re often within “city limits”, so one could say they live in the city of Memphis, TN, but actually live 5mi outside of commercial parts of the city.
But at the end of the day this puts the blame on individuals. We need to take industries into account!
100%! It’s on the state and on industry. They designed the system, forcing or otherwise coercing us into using it, so it’s on them to provide solutions like reliable public transportation and clean energy.
ETA: or we could, you know, abolish the state entirely, take over the industries, and do it ourselves 😁. might make a fun weekend
but there is nothing we can do about it out here
I’d argue you actually can, as it is usually (1) zoning laws that prevent commercial buildings to mix with residential use and (2) parking mandates mandates that make no sense. Both can be changed and have great effects locally
I’d be inclined to agree except that no one wants to build a commercial center in an area where the roads are dirt and and the population density is < ~150 people per square mile, regardless of zoning laws.
That said, I don’t mean to detract from the fact that you make a salient point for many areas of the world.
no one wants to build a commercial
population density is < ~150 people per square mileBoth are directly related to zoning and parking mandates.
No one builds because they can’t. Low density because they can’t build higher density, and I’m not talking about high rises, you can’t even build ADUs (accessory dwelling units), home businesses, multifamily housing, gentle density. It is literally missing the middle due to laws
Strong towns goes into great details about it, if you are interested, see this article as an example:
Interesting, I will read more into this, thank you!
no one wants to build a commercial center in an area where the roads are dirt and and the population density is < ~150 people per square mile, regardless of zoning laws.
If the “nobody wants to build that anyway” argument were true, density-restricting zoning laws wouldn’t have been ‘necessary’ in the first place. You can tell their supporters are operating in bad faith because their arguments are self-contradictory.
I don’t know how swearing at pedestrians walking in the bike lane more would help reduce my carbon emissions. Satisfying though.
Well in the USA that wouldn’t be a problem because people don’t walk, either
Even if they did, they’d be hard pressed to find a bike lane to walk in
Having to only go as far as the Dutch for travel would be helpful for transitioning to bicycles. The moment American city distances ( hundreds of km) are applied, everyone scraps bikes. Buses and trains and cars and planes become the conversation - bikes aren’t realistic for actual travel but nice for local commutes like groceries.
10-20 km is an easy bike commute distance if the infrastructure allows it. Especially with electric bicycles. I’d guess that most people in the US don’t travel more than that for their daily routes.
95% of people that work in the town where I live commute from over 32km away, and many commute from 80-100km away. Some do actually do it on EBikes since we have the infrastructure for it, but the vast majority dont
In the city where I grew up, commutes are most commonly 20-30km. But there is no bike infrastructure (or reasonable metro/bus system for that matter), so its all cars.
Even in places with bike infrastructure in the US everyone is driving or taking buses for the most part. Hardly anyone lives 10 minutes biking from their job, which is probably what it would take for people to adopt biking en masse.
The town where I live now basically invented the problem, or was the earliest formal case study of it. The vast majority of people in the US do not live where they work, which is truly the underlying problem. Most people work somewhere far away from wherever they live. No place tends to pay enough for anyone to live in the same area where they work. That and also white flight from urban areas, which occurred much earlier and more commonly affects jobs that pay enough for people to live wherever they want
I wouldn’t say easy. 20 km takes me an hour or more, although I am slow and don’t have an electric bike (yet).
I mean… It’s not like Dutch people use their bikes to go between cities (maybe sometimes, but they got buses and trains, too). The bikes are for local trips, which make up the vast majority of trips you’ll do. It sure helps that cities in Europe are laid out in a less spacious manner, but that’s not an unfixable situation for the US.
The car desert that is suburbia can be split into micro cities (perhaps with bike friendly trains) with a few local food supplies and necessary services. Far from impossible with a cultural mind shift.
I have regularly commuted by bicycle when living in The Netherlands, England and Germany and bicycles are really only for traveling inside the city not for going between cities.
Back when I lived in The Netherlands at one point I had a bicycle at home and another parked at the train station on the city where I worked, so I would commute to the train station nearest to were I lived using my home bicycle, leave it there, travel by train to a different city, pick up the bicycle I had there from the train station and use it to do the last leg to get to work. At the end of the day I would do the reverse.
Even having a bicycle to cover just 1 or 2 km is quite a time saver (easily turning a leg of a journey that takes 15m walking into one that takes 5m).
That said, I could do it like that because in The Netherlands there are proper parking places for bicycles at all train stations plus trains are pretty good.
When living in London (which at the time seriously lacked good conditions for cycling) I just used my bicycle to go from home directly to work, which was maybe 4km, took me around 23 minutes and was actually faster than using the Tube (the subway), whilst in Berlin it was sorta the same length of ride but from where I was living to were I was studying.
Obviously in all those places the bicycle was also useful for things like doing my weekly shopping (just get some bicycle bags).
Mind you, having a bicycle doesn’t exclude also having a car, though I never really got a car in Germany (I was there for 3 months only, living and studying in Berlin) whilst in London I actually ended up selling my car because it was just a massive money drain (especially because in the last place I had to pay for a garage) which I barely used since even without a bicycle, public transportation is excellent when living inside in or near the core of the city (so, Zone 1 - 3).
The Netherlands is also one of the flattest countries in the world. We should still all cycle more, but it would require much more effort to cycle 5km in San Francisco or the Himalayas than in the Netherlands.
It’s also very rainy and windy.
And come on, not every city is like SanFran – it’s disengenious to imply so.
Spreading out like that was a deliberate choice on the part of American city planners. It was an unnatural experiment that failed, and which can and should be undone.
https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburban-experiment
Cars have only existed for ~150 years, American cities are mostly older than that. Spreading out was a choice but it wasn’t because of cars.
At one point in time 100 years ago you could take commuter rail systems all the way from NYC to Cincinnati. Those systems were removed 1950s and then the bus companies that removed them ‘mysteriously’ stopped having so many routes (many were owned by GM…).
What complete nonsense. The suburban sprawl of the US is a relatively recent phenomenon that definitely happened after cars had become widespread.
So I live in one of America’s oldest streetcar suburbs, from the 1890’s. They had horse-driven streetcars since the 1860’s or so, steam from the 1870’s, and electric ones from the 1880’s. LA’s urban sprawl is entirely due to their historic streetcar system. The person you’re responding to is basically correct…
150 years ago, most cities were a bunch of unconnected small towns surrounding a central smaller city. They slowly grew together into the sprawl we have today.
The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 and again that’s not even talking about the commuter rail systems that I was mentioning before. You could take a train from New York to Philadelphia in the 1830s. Car companies want you to forget just how connected we used to be.
Uh…you can take a train from New York to Philadelphia today and it leaves like every 20 minutes. Two a day from New York to Cincinnati, but 19 hours. Car would be half that, airplane a fraction. I think it’s less conspiracy and more convenience…
Are you suggesting time travel as a solution?
Bike lines to commuter hubs for mass transit is the answer I’d go with, personally.
No, I’m suggesting zoning law reform. Right now, it is very often literally illegal to build in a sustainable way, and that has to stop.
I agree with that, but sorry I don’t understand how thats related to biking more and mass transit, other than a complete rework of the layout of towns and cities across the country that would take decades or more to have an impact.
The rework is the suggestion, I think A gradual rework would already help and wouldn’t take that long. It’s just that somebody would have to start that, and I am not sure if the will for that exists.
I would have to disagree on it taking that long (as in so short) - not the change to zoning law, but the actual existing building infrastructure.
Cities are one thing, and often have better infrastructure in place (though absolutely not a guarantee), but general suburbia you wouldn’t find much shift in a short time. For one, availability of sites for new construction, and two, its the most likely place for quick capitalist change (new expensive clothing store rather than say, a small grocer).
Its going to get harder the further rural you get, there is more space but won’t be as much appetite. Small businesses had already been squeezed out by the likes of Walmart and their ilk, and wouldn’t sensibly be able to return without other changes (like being low cost enough and affordable to the local folks to go there instead of a Walmart Super Center or whatever those giant warehouse mini mall ones are called), which means financial incentives and lower and middle class folks having more money to spend.
Which you’d need to start having people stay more local for work to grow the local community.
Its a part of a solution, but it isn’t a solution by itself IMO. And its going to take time to have an impact. Time that will be on a decades-long scale, considering many towns have been around for a hundred years or more that isn’t a staggering timeframe, its sensible.
It definitely can’t be done in the same kind of timeline as bike lines and bus infrastructure.
(Edit: stupid mobile keyboard)
You might be surprised at how much pent-up demand for density there is in the inner suburbs (the ones old enough to still have been built on a reasonable grid system instead of cul-de-sacs).
People really gotta start saying what they mean by “density”, because I’ve had 4 people in 700sqft, and cannot imagine people actually want to live like that.
When people complain about lack of density they’re complaining about 2 people living in a 4500+ sq ft suburban house with an even larger yard.
I’m not, I just don’t think there is that much by comparison to the huge swaths of the rest of the country.
For the record, I’ve lived in city, suburb, and more rural, and have spent long periods of time in really rural (like a town of 200 people that my mom has family in, and a not-even-a-town where its just 50+ acres of woods between everyone’s home and its only 20 minutes by car, on roads with no speed limit, to reach the highway).
The time scale for those sorts of changes is long, and need other changes to make it work.
It is true that the US has a loooong way to go. It’s insane to me that even the most progressive among y’all don’t even see the point of starting this journey.
I suggest fixing what you can to stave off an even worse climate catastrophe. It’s that or go extinct. I am sure the USAians will make the sensible choice.
But how much “actual travel” do you do? Most of my travel is urban, where cycling tends to be the fastest and most efficient option when you factor in traffic, parking dilemmas, etc.
I’d say outside of 2-3 months in the winter, I make around 80% of trips by e-bike. The car is still there when I need it. I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s not an either/or proposition.
For me, actual travel is 35 miles every day. Uphill elevation change over that distance is 800ft-1500ft depending on the direction.
Most places in the US never considered biking as a valid travel method when being designed.
Is that 35 miles round trip or one way? If it’s round trip, that’s actually not so bad. You’d clearly need an ebike to handle those climbs though.
Also, I don’t know your situation in terms of whether you could take trails or cut through parks to reduce the distance? I sat down with google maps and figured out a shorter route for my commute. It actually involves more climbing because there’s a ravine trail I follow now, but that’s not an issue for the ebike.
That’s round trip mileage.
An e-bike would be nice, but would definitely add commute time. I commute via motorcycle most days.
Let’s be real, we have long since given up on USAians coming to their senses. But the rest of humanity might like to save themselves still.
Cycling like the Dutch would cut the world carbon footprint by far less than replacing our entire power supply with renewables like the Dutch.
Meh. The Netherlands is doing better than we were (all new houses have to have solar panels, for example) but we still get a ton of electricity from gas, and even some from coal still. Most cars are still ICE (internal combustion engine), and efforts to reduce flights to Schiphol (are main airport) keep getting scuttled.
Countries with elevation are greener, because they have hydroelectric power (Sweden, Switzerland). France gets a special mention for being mostly nuclear, which is really good for carbon emissions.
Looking at the year by year emissions at this site is informative:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/NL/all/yearly
Wow! Terrific link.
How about we do both?
It’s also fun. I always have a smile on my face when riding back from a grocery run or dinner out. Driving a car used to just make me aggravated.
Yeah I’ll often walk a mile or two (and back) for an errand or appt because it’s more pleasant than the driving/parking. Drivers are always stressed (kinda reasonable when you’re operating a dangerous and expensive machine, but not pleasant).
Would also make people much healthier.
And that means a lot of indirect reductions in carbon emissions from health-related industries
I dunno how much carbon would need to be compensated when leveling a mountain
Or - we could just say it’s illegal for these billionaire crybaby warcrime shitheads to fly like they do. Same emissions savings, and the world gets infinitely better.
redesigning cities to be more bikeable (and less car centric) would have an infinitely better effect on your quality of life than stopping billionaires from using private jets tbh
not that we shouldn’t do both, obviously. we should prevent billionaires from existing in the first place even
Yeah there’s like 25 000 private jets in the world. This is scandalous, this should be 0 one way or another, but it’s not to scale with the problem.
Why is it always Taylor Swift and not like other top 100 billionaires which I’m pretty sure use way more than her
- Woman
- Celebrity
- Not a Nazi
So she’s a target
I will gladly use another meme if you provide one.
https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ it should be easy to change the name yourself
That’s not providing another meme.
It’s an and not an or type of situation. Stop clinging to your car like a baby to its pacifier.
Weird personal attack. How do you know I even drive?
Relax weirdo
But how do you capitalize a 200 year old technology?
You sell bikes.
They did improve on the bicycle not too long ago. The evolution is called an e-bike.
Of course, then we’re back to “but what if the electricity comes from filthy coal plants?” etc.
I need to just deal with it and learn how to ride a bike in the snow, because that’s the only thing stopping me. But it’s so scary!
I hear ya. I basically give up when there’s a lot of snow on the ground. Where I live, it gets pushed up to the edge of the street and onto sidewalks, so that’s less than ideal. (We do have sidewalk ploughs that come along eventually, but bikes are not allowed on sidewalks anyway.) There are cities where they actually remove snow rather than just pushing it around. sigh
But this doesn’t mean I can’t cycle when conditions are better. I do, and it saves a ton of gas and makes me start shedding the winter weight.
That’s a good point. Perhaps I’m looking at this all wrong.
Living in a country that is less then half the size of Virginia would also cut the carbon footprint in the US.
How many USAians not living in the border of their state do regularly travel outside their state?
I doubt many do.
More the urban sprawl thing then state to state travel. The idea of living cheek to jowl with a large number of others makes my skin crawl. The noise and pollution would be unbearable (for me). So, it is what it is.
The air and noise pollution is 99% car-made.
Also, good anti-noise windows are really good. If they’re closed they leave basically no noise in.
The future won’t have personal cars and will be mostly local – and US is running out of time to rebuild itself for that new reality.
People shit all over 15 minute cities. I miss it moving to Canada from the UK.
Why do they shit on them? I love them.
Because they think it’s a conspiracy to eventually lock people down into their 15 minute block and not let them leave. Once 15 minute cities have been established, they’re going to create another “plandemic” like COVID to initiate another lockdown.
Not kidding. Source: my family
I don’t even understand the logic behind that one. Although looking for logic might be optimistic.
It’s not something people reasoned their way towards, it’s constructed propaganda from the Fox News or Prager U crowd (I forget which). They discovered a long time ago that if they want their audiences to hate something that they can just straight up lie about what it is.
You’re right of course, this kind of media is starting to flourish outside of the US and although they’re not as prominent, the trend is there and it’s looking bleak.
My guess is not enough bathrooms.
