Jack May wrote:

But these are figure that don't count the oil used to grow, transport, and
cook the food that is used to power the person that is doing the riding. A
totally stupid analysis.


No, what you wrote qualifies as silly. Those figures are a constant for
both the cyclist and the non-cyclist, since both eat and the food comes
from these same sources. The non-cyclist typically consumes more
calories than the cyclist because cycling improves the effiency of the
human engine and reudces the number of heartbeats per minute, further
reducing the number of calories. While amount of additional food
required to feed a fit cyclist who trains for racing may well be
significant, the commute cyclist does not need any additional food than
his sedentary counterpart and may well consume less.

Its like those idiot that call electric cars zero pollution because they
don't know where the energry came from. Just for food processing we get
"All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about
ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it
produces."


In those cases, you are correct. There is no non-polluting form of
transport, though some are clearly less polluting and more efficient
than others. If you use, say, hydroelectric or geothermal plants,
pollution is still a huge concern (as is the localized environmantal
damage), but the overall air quality would clearly improve.

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