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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

EV, epedelecs (+bike infra), heat pumps, anti plastic regulation, and Europe becomes fossil fuel resilient.

e-bikes in particular have reduced fossil fuel use by huge amounts compared to EVs. When you consider that most of a car’s energy is used simply to move the car itself, the aggregate inefficiencies are staggering.

A motorcycle uses about half the amount of fuel as a gas car, and costs a fraction of what a gas or EV car costs.

But motorbikes are always ignored, even though they would be the fastest and cheapest way for Europeans to reduce their gas usage.

What mid-sized motorcycles and EV cars have in common is superior performance.

Most people, and especially women, don't want to ride motrocyrcles as they are dangerous. Yes, that's also because cars and dangerous, but motorcycles, by design, mingle with cars.

The dangers of motorcycles are a bit exaggerated, although they are still more dangerous than cars. Modern bikes have a bunch of safety features that motorcycles didn't have when they got their bad reputation; including super powerful ABS disk brakes and anti slip systems. There is also modern safety gear such as airbag jackets and even airbag pants.

But you have to learn to ride, and it demands more from the motorist than driving a car. And yes, there are dangers in form of car drivers, which you can do very little about to mitigate. But when motorcycles become more common, car drivers also learn to accommodate better to them. And I suspect a lot of the accident statistics come from young riders who haven't learnt to risk manage. There's a big difference riding at 35 compared to at 19.

Let’s be real, most cagers wouldn’t last a day on any sort of motorcycle.

There will always be conflicting interest between reducing plastic packaging and guaranteeing hygiene for food products.

In my opinion hygiene takes priority.

That's a huge leap of logic - and a bad one.

There is so much plastic we could eliminate from our lives before we even worry about that.

First of all, ban synthetics in clothes and footwear except for specific uses: windproof, waterproof, athletic gear meant for actual competitions (not athleisure). Or force full disclosure for clothes, not just main fabric, but lining, filling, decoration, trim, sewing threads, pockets, etc. Ban all false advertising (100% cotton needs to be 100% cotton, not just exterior and then 100% polyester filling, lining, trim, sewing threads, pockets...).

Ban all single use plastics such as bags or mineral water and soda plastic bottles. We are perfectly fine with natural textile bags, aluminum cans (yeah, I know), glass bottles, etc.

Ah, ban plastic plush toys and all massive microplastic generators like fleece. Keep only very limited plastic toy categories (Legos, balloons, etc).

> ban synthetics in clothes and footwear

Not sure about that one. The major alternative for footwear, leather, is such a dirty industry that starting new production in developed countries is now essentially impossible, and the existing production sites will become expensive chemical hazard cleanup sites in the future.

We can make footwear from textiles, so that covers a part.

And for leather, it would probably be worth it investing in clean tanning and leather processing. It will be a long time before everyone gives up beef & co, so we will have raw hides for a long time. We might as well accept this and use a wonderful natural material that could save us a lot of CO2 emissions, micro and nano plastics, VOCs, PFAS and all the myriad other issues with second generation sytntgetics (polyester, acrylic, nylon, etc).

> clean tanning and leather processing

This, I suspect, is a bit like 'clean coal'; I'm not aware that anyone has managed to make this, like, actually clean?

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