469
Cycling like the Dutch would slash the world’s carbon footprint (www.euronews.com)
submitted 1 week ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
200 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Dutch people cycle an average of 2.6 kilometres each per day. If this pattern was replicated worldwide, the study suggests, annual global carbon emissions would drop by 686 million tonnes.

This mammoth figure exceeds the entire carbon footprint of most countries, including the UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Rothe@piefed.social 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

What complete nonsense. The suburban sprawl of the US is a relatively recent phenomenon that definitely happened after cars had become widespread.

[-] kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

So I live in one of America’s oldest streetcar suburbs, from the 1890’s. They had horse-driven streetcars since the 1860’s or so, steam from the 1870’s, and electric ones from the 1880’s. LA’s urban sprawl is entirely due to their historic streetcar system. The person you’re responding to is basically correct…

this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
469 points (98.0% liked)

Climate

8961 readers
306 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net