Sorry Becky but with the current rage to be insainley green and carbon neutral it turns out that bicyles aren't any more carbon neutral than cars. As you need to eat more and live longer you create more carbon emissions.
Apparently the greenest thing you can do is kill yourself ........
Well, While I personally consider most of this carbon obsession to be so much doggie doo ( don's aspestos suit ) the greenies seem to think this is the new fundamental religion.
With luck the extremist's will follow their own advice.
Enjoy the bike riding, I managed without a car for several years in my younger days, It just isn't realistic with my current job as moving round computers by bike is fairly tricky. Still love my mountain biking tho.
"In a working paper entitled “
The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling”, Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennslyvania reports that shifting people from their cars to bicycles offers almost no benefit to the environment.
Bicycles do have large first-order environmental benefits over cars as a means of transportation. Ulrich’s analysis considers the case in which a formerly sedentary person begins bicycling 10 km per day, 5 days per week. In this scenario, about one ton of CO2 is spared every year in the form of reduced fuel consumption.
This reduction in fuel use is partially offset by the increased food consumption of a cyclist. Although typically we think of food as carbon neutral — because the plants at the bottom of our food chain regrow after we harvest them — this view overlooks the fact that most of us don’t feed ourselves by hunting and gathering. The energy required to grow, harvest, process, package, and transport food to your nearest Whole Foods significantly outweighs the actual caloric content of your meal, by a factor of almost six. In other words, only about 15% of the energy we consume when we eat is actually in our food. The rest is contained in the fossil fuels used to bring our food to us.
But increased food consumption is a relatively minor effect when compared to the overall gas savings of cycling over driving. The real culprit in Ulrich’s analysis is the increased lifespan of people who ride bikes. Regular exercise helps you live longer, which points to an unsettling fact. One of the single best things you can do for the planet is to limit your time here."
http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/everything-good