The lowest emission vehicle you can own is an electric bike.*
Will cost 1–4k and way less than $750 annually in maintenance. Can get a road-only one or one capable of going off-road. Does not require insurance or licensing. Can’t legally drink and ride, but you’re very unlikely to get caught if you do, and unlike drink driving the risk is overwhelmingly only to yourself.
Keeps you fit and healthy by being active in your daily life.
* yes, lower even than an analogue bike, because the electric motor is more carbon efficient than human muscle power which requires eating more.
yes, lower even than an analogue bike, because the electric motor is more carbon efficient than human muscle power which requires eating more.
Everytime I saw this claim, it ended up being bullshit. What’s your source?
It’s been a while, but I believe this video was where I heard it. From memory (I’m out right now and can’t rewatch to verify) it was specifically the per-kilometre carbon emissions, not taking into account manufacturing costs.
Obviously there’s some fuziness depending on your diet and the power source used for charging. A vegan who would be charging in a coal-powered grid is going to look better, relatively speaking, for an analogue bike than someone who eats multiple kilos of red meat every week who has solar panels.
I’m not vegan, but I largely replaced by cycling calories w/ oats when I biked to work for a few years, and my area is largely powered by coal and natural gas (not sure on the exact ratio). I haven’t done the math, but I’m guessing I would come out ahead of an electric bike, especially if we included manufacturing and shipping costs for the motor and battery.
750 a year? Wtf is this retard smoking. Cost for land, hay storage, water, vet, and farrier. Human time cost to feed them twice a day, get rid of or spread the shit. Blanket, saddle, bridle. You’re looking at a few thousand a year minus the time sink.
Almost all of those problems are solved by your local park.
Vet costs can be reduced by the skillfull application of healing stones.
Yep. Once upon a time, you had to be very wealthy to own a car.
Now it’s horses.
Eh, it probably wasn’t bad back when everyone had them. If you were a farmer, you already had pasture for your horses to graze on, and you could trade some food w/ the local vet for medical bills. Also, since you probably needed multiple, you probably bred them with your neighbors, making replacement cost really low.
Cars are still the most significant expense in most people’s lives after shelter and certainly the most significant in terms of cost per actual time used.
I’d say food is a bigger expense for many, depending on how much they drive and whether they’re paying the car off.
If you include all groceries, so pet food, toiletries etc, I’d spend more on groceries than my car most years.
This article says 8 to 11k yearly. https://horserookie.com/average-horse-cost-by-state/
While cost of owning a car is between 3k and 9k yearly according to https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/.
I would have thought that a horse would be much more expensive, like 10 times a car cost.
Interesting, I recall a colleague in UK mention that it was costing her up to 20k a year. That was her max but not always/everywhere - would have been almost 30k USD at the time, so it sounds considerably cheaper in US but obviously a lot more land available and affordable
cost of owning a car is between 3k and 9k yearly
Maybe if you drive a fancy new car, but an older, reliable car can be much cheaper. For example, I drive a Toyota Prius that I’ve had for 10 years, and I paid $10k for it (approximately, and cash, so no financing). I’ve driven about 100k miles, spent about $3k on repairs, and have spent about $500/year on insurance. So an estimate for total costs is:
- gas - $7.8k (~45mpg @ $3.5/gallon)
- insurance - $5k
- repairs - $3k
- depreciation - $7k (assuming $3k value if I sold)
- taxes and fees - $2k (~$100/year registration + emissions cost)
- regular maintenance - $500? (I change my own oil, so $20/oil change every 5k miles, plus spark plugs, headlights, etc)
- tires - $1200 (changed them twice for ~$500-600 each time)
Total cost over 10 years is $27000, or about $2.7k/year.
So that $3k/year low end figure is actually a little high for me, and I ended up rounding most of these things up. I’m guessing a cheap EV could come out even cheaper.
So if you’re cheap like me when it comes to cars, owning a horse could be about 10x the cost of a car.
He said to keep it alive, nit to actually care for it in any meaningful way.
0 emissions? Methane from cattle is a large contributer to climate change. If we had as much horses as we have cars, the amount of methane would be too much to handle.
Cars run on gas, horses run on grass.
Livestock contribute by land use (deforestation, crops for feed, pasture), water consumption, and the fossil fuel used in logistics processes (farm equipment, transport, electricity, etc…)
But anyways, animal farts come from preexisting carbon in the biosphere. Car farts come from extracting previously sequestered carbon. So without extractive processes, and with ethical land use/management, the atmospheric methane wouldn’t have a significant impact.
Also you fart too. So there’s that…
Also you fart too. So there’s that…
So you’re saying to solve climate change we need to remove the humans? You might be on to something there.
But anyways, animal farts come from preexisting carbon in the biosphere. Car farts come from extracting previously sequestered carbon. So without extractive processes, and with ethical land use/management, the atmospheric methane wouldn’t have a significant impact.
Methane is 81x worse that CO2 over 20 Years, so if it came from atmospheric carbon it’s only 80x as bad.
Sure but the generation of new hydrocarbons from sequestered resources means net available carbon increases. You’re totally right that converting existing atmospheric CO2 to methane would have a larger impact. I’m not saying agriculture is off the hook here, nor that we should consider the horse as a solution to climate change, just that we probably wouldn’t need this conversation without fossil fuel extraction.
Zero emissions? I know people find it ha ha funny, but farts legitimately contain methane and other green house gassses.
Cows for example are a large contributor of GHG
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If you think a horse has the environmental impact of an automobile, I have a bridge to sell you
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Horses aren’t cows
I, uh, errr, uhhhhh…
Motions vaguely at the four-legged animals
They’re just different, trust me, okay???
I mean you’re not wrong but no matter how small an impact it’s still not ZERO emissions, so the guy you’re replying to is technically correct.
Ah yes, good ole technically correct, the weakest and most schlubby shade of correct, whatever would we do without it?
This is complete bs.
Tldr: cows in sheds eating corn is the problem, cows eating natural grass actually sequester more carbon than an empty field.
Long answer: Photosynthesis can only get carbon from the atmosphere. This carbon is then turned into plant material in grass. This grass is then eaten by the cow. A small portion of this grass will be converted into methane and other byproducts in the cow’s digestive tracks. Some will be turned to energy for the cow and a vast majority will be shit out as raw unprocessed material. This raw unprocessed material, i.e. cow shit, this will last in the environment sequestering more carbon for longer time than just grass sitting there by itself. A grazed paddock will grow more grass than a non-grazed paddock because the cows are eating the fucking grass. i.e. more carbon from the environment is getting sequestered in the grass and the cow shit.
The only reason that cows get such a bad wrap is that variouse other factors are being counted that really shouldnt be under cows. Deforestation to grow plants to feed livestock, the transportation of meat, livestock feed etc etc.
A properly managed grass fed beef (like what we have here in australia) actually has a net negative effect on ghg. The factory farmed beef eating corn in a shed thats never seen a blade of grass is whats actually causing the ghg seen in the reports.
We have already seen this narrarive been used to strongarm small farmers grazing cattle while the multinational farms get away with fucking the environment cos they can afford the cost of beurocracy.
We are all just 3 warm meals away from anarchy thats something we should do well to remember.
Ps. Its not “cow flatulence” its “enteric fermentation” (burps) cow farts just makes a better headline.
Edit: formatting
I think you should’ve put TL;DR in the beginning, otherwise it looked like you’re arguing cows don’t fart, when you were actually about net effect.
I never thought about it from this side, but it makes sense, and seems like another way big corporations fuck the world up.
plus if we had as many horses as we did cars we would be living in a horse shit apocalypse.
I generously donate my castle composed entirely out of horse shit to you kind sir.
Faster travel > everything else
Searching trebuchet launch velocities, I’m getting 30-70m/s (67-157mph, 110-250km/hr), so a decently fast car might actually have trebuchets beat here