It’s marginal gains all the way here but genuinely if you’re an omnivore the E-Bike might work out more enviromentally conscious

  • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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    12 days ago

    Just because I am the type of person that I am I have to point out as to whether an e-bike weighs more than a regular bike depends highly on the regular bike and also the e-bike honestly. They made some heavy ass acoustic ones, they make some lightweight e-bikes. Latter with little range, mostly, to be fair. I say this to ask if somebody shipped some heavy ass steel bikes, would you be concerned as per CO2 Output?

    I know sea freight is very efficient, but there’s no reason not to account for the difference if we’re making the comparison?

    I mean it’s there, but it’s genuinely just marginal. Like 0,03% of the CO2 Budget of any given bicycle were it ridden.

    Now the resource extraction I don’t have numbers on and it probably sucks. People buying E-Bikes to ride them 200km over a 10 year period probably also isn’t great for CO2-output - in the context of bicycles - but if we assume what gets shipped gets used it doesn’t matter

    • prole [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      12 days ago

      I think you’ve mistaken my comments if you think I’m trying to make e-bikes sound bad or something. When I made that comment, I looked up how much a few bikes weigh and found several articles that said e-bikes typically weigh about twice as much. Obviously this isn’t applicable across the board to every bike, but there’s really no way to make that kind of comparison without using rough averages or doing way more research than I’m prepared to do.

      Again, I’m just saying if we are going to compare the emissions of e-bikes and bikes then we should make the comparison for everything. We’re already talking about a pretty small number, so even if it only requires 1.5 extra trips or whatever there would be a difference.

      Also, a container ship isn’t the only thing required to get a bike to people. Trains, trucks, and planes are used as well. If the truck going from Seattle to North Dakota or whatever has to make a second trip or 1.33 trips or whatever, that is an increase in emissions. I’m not sure why we are going back and forth on this because it seems incredibly obvious that this would have to be accounted for to make an accurate comparison.

      • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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        12 days ago

        I’m not sure why we are going back and forth on this because it seems incredibly obvious that this would have to be accounted for to make an accurate comparison.

        The frame of reference here, to me at least, isn’t the utopia where we get to squabble about the ecological merits of e-bike vs. acoustic bike, it’s where one car getting shipped anywhere from anywhere eats up the logistical CO2-equivalent of about 50 bikes (55 for e-bikes).