Lawmaker says bicycling not good for environment, or tax revenue

[Alan C.]

State lawmaker defends bike tax, says bicycling is not good for the environment

Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.”

This is according to comments he made in an email to a constituent who questioned the wisdom of a new bike tax the legislature is considering as part of a large transportation package.

We spoke with Rep. Orcutt to confirm the email’s authenticity and to get further clarification.

“You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car,” he said. However, he said he had not “done any analysis” of the difference in CO2 from a person on a bike compared to the engine of a car...

“You can’t just say that there’s no pollution as a result of riding a bicycle.”

. . .

“When you are riding your bicycle, tell me what taxes are being generated by the act of riding your bicycle,” he said. “Sales tax does not go into roads.”

Lawmakers.

They make laws.

[ribuck]

The original claim (that cyclists emit more CO2 than cars) came from this 2010 article in PJ Media's Daily Digest. The article includes the numbers, and the mathematics is correct.

But it misses the point. The car is producing carbon dioxide from carbon that was sequestered underground. The cyclist does emit CO2 - but matches it by the CO2 absorbed by the plants that the cyclist eats (and the plants eaten by the animals that the cyclist eats). So the cyclist is, overall, carbon neutral. The car is, overall, carbon-emitting unless you consider timescales of millions of years.

This reminds me of one of the more interesting questions that was asked at Google's old Google Answers service:

How many tyrannosaurs in a gallon of gasoline?

It turns out the answer is 460 gallons per tyrannosaur (assuming 100% conversion of the tyrannousaur's carbon content).