Save the Earth: Kill yourself.

(for Mark)

Stop hugging that tree and start hanging yourself from it: UPenn professor Karl Ulrich has a new study out called "The Environmental Paradox of Biking", wherein he concludes that switching people over from cars to bicycles has no current net environmental benefit. The tortured logic at work here is that just by being alive you are consuming resources which produce carbon emissions. And if you stop driving and start biking, the cardiovascular benefits increase your life expectancy, so you live longer consuming more resources.

This is such grist for the unironic forces of darkness to attack both environmentalism as well as bicycling. What is the use of such circular neo-Malthusian reasoning? If you think people living longer is in itself a bad idea Dr. Ulrich, I suggest you lead by example. Some moron will just end up taking this conclusion to soe bike path-bombing, multiple-gear banning extreme. Yes, Ulrich came up with TerraPass and is a dedicated cyclist himself, but this navel-gazing seems even more irresponsible comng from him. And yes, he notes that this situation will ease in coming years as the energy intensity of current lifestyles undergoes a projected economic decrease.

On the other hand, we have morons like Peggy Noonan who argue that is it those dreaded scientists who are to blame if manmade climate change exists:

for refusing to be honest, for operating in cliques and holding to ideologies. For failing to be trustworthy.

Talk about projection. Apparently they just did not scream loud enough to overcome the fingers she and her friends had stuck into their ears for the past two decades.

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