Opinion
Misguided lefties bike, ruin world
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As the most important movie of our young millennium, "An Inconvenient Truth" seductively thrust the issue of global warming into the face of America and spread its seed of urgency. In the powerful wave of activism that has followed, the bike has experienced a renaissance of sorts. With oil suddenly redefined as a "non-renewable energy source," the two-wheeler became the optimal mode of transportation for a generation that can no longer count on gobs of the gooey good stuff. Madison in particular has witnessed a cycling boom — it seems like every other person you see is sulking around the isthmus on a fixed-gear bike, hoping to score a couple scene points and gain social acceptance. But as hundreds of millions of Americans saddle up and clog the streets with Schwinns and Huffys, we must take a step back and shed light on the immeasurable damage these "bicyclistas" inflict upon our increasingly fragile environment. The conservative media, forever feasting on the latest scraps of pseudoscience thrown their way, are hoping that global warming is just another liberal myth like astrology, Africa or "DNA." You don't even have to visit www.globalwarmingisreal.com to get the truth. Just look at the URL, which clearly states without any spin or bias that global warming is, in fact, real. But what do we do about it? The primary cause of global warming is what we've mistakenly deemed the solution: bikes. Biking is the most wasteful and energy-inefficient mode of transportation possible and imposes great stress upon the Earth. Calories are the universal measure of energy and it seems that bikes are specifically designed to burn calories indiscriminately. For the average 250-pound adult, biking burns 1068 calories in an hour. That's 1068 units of energy that are forever lost. Driving a car, on the other hand, results in virtually no waste of energy. The average adult (250 pounds) can drive for hours without burning a calorie. Plus, he can listen to classic rock like the Stones and Green Day and enjoy the refreshing blast of cool air-conditioning. As they burn calories without considering their impact, bikers must consider their environmental footprint. All the energy they waste pedaling must be replaced by food, the growth of which takes a significant toll on the environment. According to PETA, the pound of meat a biker would eat following a ride requires an additional 16 pounds of grain just to harvest. Every minute, seven football fields are created in the Amazon rainforest to grow the food that bikers need to eat after burning calories while biking. The conservative media claim Brazil has simply discovered the brilliance of (real) football. The truth, unfortunately, is tougher to swallow. Brazilian farmers are forced to go to great lengths to feed the Americas' greedy two-wheeled transportation, and Africa is probably affected somehow, too. The most common reaction is to vilify vehicles because they require oil and emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The radical right fuels the confusion as they push their "Peak Oil" movement, claiming our fossil fuel reserves are limited and that we must switch to untested alternatives like nuclear power or burning wood. What everyone fails to point out is oil is dependably renewable! Every day, organic matter like you and me is deposited in the Earth and subjected to crushing pressure and unimaginable heat. The end result (a few million years later) is the fossil fuel deposits we claim to lack! A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that 14 percent of greenhouse gases come from cars and trucks. Whether or not cycling gangs fabricated the statistic, the article points that 16 percent of greenhouse gases come from agriculture and waste treatment, two sectors completely reliant on the rapidly growing population of bikes. The mainstream media, largely funded by the bicycle corporations, will continue to point to the bike as the solution to our current environmental woes. However, as Shakespeare once said, "there's more than meets the eye," and the bike, with its subsequent vacuum of hunger, is the ultimate deceiver. The end to global warming and any problems having to do with Africa will only come with a clear-eyed rethinking of our mistaken embrace of these trendy two-wheeled people movers. Danny Tenenbaum (drtenenbaum@wisc.edu) is a senior majoring in political science, international studies and history.
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So what’s causing the “global warming” on Mars? Martian rovers running on diesel?
Bicyclists need food for energy, which comes from livestock and crops? Why is it that the president wants to grow crops (corn and switch grass) to supplement our fuel supply? Food or fuel, either was they’re still crops. Besides, crops are “carbon neutral.”
I know this article is supposed to be satirical, but it’s awfully stupid. Getting off oil would solve many of our geopolitical problems, so finding a solution should be taken seriously.
One day I hope we can say, “suck it, Saudi Arabia.”
I hope this is satire.
The universe generally runs on nuclear power. Only on earth are we so stupid as to burn carbon for energy.
Since when is “average adult” 250 pounds?! I know this article is not serious, but you make an interesting point, and I can’t help but wonder: How many calories are being wasted only to pad the love handles of the 69% of us who are overweight or obese? That’s a lot of energy that could be put to better use.
even if this is satire, i think the calorie counts are off anyway. compared to most other forms of excercise cycling has a relatively low calorie usage especially within the first hour. not to mention if it takes you an hour to get from one side of campus to the other- you need the excercise. if you could walk as fast as you could bike then you would burn far more calories because running is proven to require more caloric exertion than the comparatively low needs of cycling. why not focus on the morbid amounts of calories consumed by the football team. that would be interesting.
i know more reds who bike anyway because they are the only ones who can afford to put down the money for a nice ride-because they embezzled it.
Imagine how many acres of Amazon rain forest we could save by outlawing tassles on handlebars and baseball cards in spokes, since they are decreasing the fuel efficiency of said two-wheeled people movers!
ires in underground coal mines in China consume an estimated 200 million tons of coal per year, putting some 2-3% of all man-made carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—or as much as that produced by all the cars and light trucks in the U.S. And whereas auto transportation has considerable economic value, all the pollutants from coal fires are completely and utterly useless.
Of course, to 'global warming' zealots the purpose of fighting 'global warming' isn't to save the environment; it's to bugger industrially-advanced nations, especially (indeed, almost exclusively) the United States.
What’s up with the opinions page here lately? Every day, there’s a new “stupidest article ever” published here.
If this is satire: What, exactly, is your point? You’re so hyperbole-happy that this feels like little more than a cynical ode to the creator of the Internet’s latest piece of work.
If this isn’t satire: Why are you using the existence of a domain name and an article from Wikipedia as sources? I can purchase www.dannyisanidiot.com tomorrow and write about it in Wikipedia; that doesn’t make it journalistically-justifiable.
I’m assuming this is the former, not the latter, however (based in large part upon the faux quote at the end, because you didn’t leave many other clues that you’re anything other than simply deranged). But a problem still exists: Satire devoid of original or cunning argument is merely farce. There’s no point in a “laugh at, not with” approach if the self-deprecation doesn’t serve to reflect on a greater controversy through witty misalignment. Here your misalignment seems to be with a thoroughly-undefined and overly-broad target of “the right.” In short, it’s a potshot at roughly half of America without any explicable rationale.
To paraphrase an actual Shakespeare quote, “The [columnist] doth protest too much, me thinks.”
-Victor Blake Marx
Victor, you misquoted ye olde Willy, he said “you doth think people give a shit about what you say.”
Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, says China will surpass the United States in carbon dioxide emissions and China is embarked on an internal propaganda campaign to blame the rest of the world.
Read more at:
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003957.html