Thursday, June 26, 2008

Pedal Power

Living near "Liberal City, USA" where cyclists almost seem to outnumber the cars, it is only natural that my nearby city would make a big deal out of "Ride Your Bike to Work Day". So in an effort to see if I could do it, I didn't drive my car yesterday. I rode my bike to a meeting I had in the morning and cycled 16 miles round trip. Although I impressed my garden club co-members, my husband actually performed the more amazing feat. He typically drives 48 miles round trip to work and yesterday he cycled in to work and back home again. Neither one of us is a spring chicken so this was a pretty incredible feat and the more amazing thing is that neither of us died in the process. An approximation of the CO2 we saved from going into the atmosphere yesterday is somewhere between 65 and 75 pounds. This is an approximation because the calculators available on the web only give you an annual output. We both feel pretty good about our accomplishments but as my husband said, "It won't be anytime soon before I do that again!" Today we will just concentrate on trying to get up from a chair. Mom

2 comments:

  1. by one estimation, you saved 94 lbs of CO2 ... which is the equiv. of what 0.24 trees can offset over their lifetime ... imagine if you did this every working day of the year ... that would be freeing up 62 trees to clean some one else's mess! then again, after doing it you may not want to imagine doing it every working day of the year :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. So that estimation is higher. I took a more conservative estimate...but regardless it is impressive and gives one food for thought on ways to change our lifestyles.

    ReplyDelete