I think the takeaway here should be that meat heavy diets are worse for the environment than you might realize.

The takeaway should not be that cars are only barely worse than bikes.

When you power your bike with your legs, you burn energy. That energy comes from food. Producing and transporting the food to you has a climate impact. Cycling has a climate impact.

Riding a short distance vs riding a long distance is irrelevant. Both systems require an amount of energy per unit of distance. Because the energy is supplied in different ways, there is a different total amount of carbon emitted of per unit of energy. For ebikes, that amount is lower than it is for traditional, human powered bikes.

Here are a couple sources, dickface:

https://www.ebikes.ca/documents/Ebike_Energy.pdf

https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact

A watt hour is equal to 0.86 nutritional calories. My estimate of 40 watt hours per mile converts to about 35 kcal. Estimates of the energy taken to pedal a bike are about 30-40 kcal/mile. That checks out!

1 kilowatt hour is equivalent to 860 kcal.

1 kilowatt hour from a coal power plant generates about 1.0-1.1 kg of CO2.

For a typical Western diet, studies suggest that the average emissions associated with food production and transportation can range from about 0.5 to 2.5 kg of CO2 per 1,000 kcal of food consumed. (0.4-2.1 kg of CO2 per 860 kcal)

The ebike generally has a smaller environmental footprint than the analog bike, as most sources of power produce less CO2 than coal power plants and most people eat more meat than necessary, putting them in the higher range of the food CO2 production range.

Unless you’re vegetarian, a traditional bicycle will have a higher carbon footprint than an ebike, due to how inefficient it is to grow and transport food when compared to production of electrical power.

Ebikes are way more efficient than electric cars, too. I calculated that my bike uses about 40 watt hours per mile, compared to about 250-350 for an electric car.

My brother in law was still using windows 7 and it had never occurred to him that this might be a security risk. Normal people don’t care.