I read a carbrain article a while ago that tried to argue that cyclists create more CO2 than a car.

So to compare that they assumed that

• The cyclist eats exactly as much calories as required, so that extra exercise directly requires an increase of caloric intake. They did the same for the driver.
• The cyclist exclusively covers the added caloric intake via imported japanese Kobe beef steak cooked on a wood grill.
• The car was the lowest-consumption electic car they could find.

And with that setup the cyclist actually created more CO2.

The author seriously booked that as a win for the car, claiming that cycling is not always better for the environment than driving.

If you drive in a 25 miles per gallon vehicle (pretty standard) you will burn the equivalent of 1100 calories per mile. Assuming an active person who rides their bike a lot eats around 2500 calories a day, and they ride to work every day, and they live 5 miles away. In the car you would burn about 11,000 calories a day, in the bike you would never burn more than 2,500 and that ignores the fact that actually most of those calories have nothing to do with the biking.

Also, one year of an average American driving (around 14,000 miles) would have the equivalent calories of giving 16,000 people a proper meal.

If this is true, then support a carbon tax without exceptions. All the extra food cyclists use will be taxed extra.

My understanding is that humans pretty use about the same amount of calories a day, whether sedentary or not. If you spend more on exercise, your body spends less on other things.

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why

The amount your body uses just to stay alive dwarfs what you'd burn from adding cycling to your day.

This has to be satirical

Guarantee that person has a BMI over 40.

If the the Dutch are so climate couscous maybe they should invent energy-free travel

That's cute. No other personal vehicle beats the caloric efficiency of a bicycle, and it's not even close. They're very literally one of the most impressive feats of engineering that human kind has ever invented.

No one tell them how many calories are in a tank of gas

Alright, I'll take the bait. Let's do some recreational math

This web page contains average passenger car fuel efficiency broken down by year. The most recent year available is 2016, so we'll use that: 9.4 km/L or 22.1 miles per gallon. A gallon of gas has about 120MJ of energy in it. So, an average car requires about 120,000,000 / (1/22.1) = 5.4MJ per mile

This web page has calories burned for different types of exercise. I separately searched and found that the average adult in the US weighs around 200LBS, so we'll use the 205LBS data, and I'm going to assume that "cycling - 10-11.9 MPH" is representative of the average commuter who isn't in too much of a hurry. That gives us 558 calories per hour, or 55.8 calories per mile (using the low end of the 10 to 11.9mph range). That's equal to about 0.23MJ per mile (as an aside, it's important to note that the calories commonly used when talking about diet and exercise, are actual kilocalories equal to 1000 of the SI calories you learned about in school.)

Moral of the story: an average bike ride consumes around 20x less energy than an average drive of the same distance.

Wait until he finds out how many calories gasoline has

You know you're on the right side when you're arguing against humans exercising more!

And yet cyclists still consume less per day than that 400 lb dude in an F150.