Why Riding My Daughter's Bicycle Will Be the Greenest Change I Make This Year

There's a reason I didn't say 'cycling'

Your Radical Next Door

Feb 04, 2025

Dear Human of Planet Earth,

My sustainable living goal this year is merely to improve my confidence on a bicycle.

Woman in a blue coat, with a leather bag on her back, riding a bicycle towards a collection of parked bicycles that have carrier baskets and a large building painted white. — Photo by Samra Naseer: Source

It’s a small goal with a big potential impact.

I see myself cycling till the day I die - or till I lose my capacity to cycle.

Trouble is, I’ve got the bicycling competence of a five-year-old

I learned to balance on a bike aged seventeen, while visiting my mum in the UK. On my first circuit riding around the neighbourhood, I crashed into the side-mirror of a stranger’s parked car. Every piece of glass from the side mirror lay shattered on the road. I returned with a note of apology and our address, but we never heard from them. I guess their insurance covered it.

About fifteen years later, in Trinidad, I bought a heavy yellow mountain bike in a flat box from the guy who ran the gym opposite the Aranguez savannah. I paid somewhere between the equivalent of £70-£100.

It was a bike for a heavier, taller person than me. I rode it once or twice around our small gated community compound. Then I sold it for £20 when we moved to the UK, and promised myself I’d replace it one day with a lighter, more suitable bike.

Twelve years later, I wasn’t sure if my brain would remember how not to fall off a bicycle.

But when I dared to hop on, despite fears of hitting the ground hard and breaking my ankle, I found I balanced just fine. Not bad for someone who’s probably mounted a bicycle at most five times since learning to balance at seventeen.

And so, in 2025, I’m starting again with my daughter’s bicycle. It’s a little too small but only needs to serve my initial task of gaining confidence. I’ll start off cycling on the paved area of the local park, five minutes walk from home.

This is what progress will look like:

Get on the bicycle weekly once it’s sunny. Benefits: Build muscle strength and improve my metabolism.
Progress to a suitable bicycle of my own, new or secondhand. Take a course to build my confidence cycling on the road. Benefits: maybe my daughter and I can go riding together and …
I’ll learn how to maintain my bicycle. Benefits: with my bookish brain, that’s exactly the kind of hands-on brain exercise I need as I work on getting the cobwebs out of long-shuttered, dusty areas of grey matter.
Add an electric bicycle. Benefits: I can replace certain short trips in my petrol car with cycling on my electric bike. eg 5 miles to Westcroft Leisure Centre (added journey time +10 minutes; 2.7 miles to Tesco Extra, extra journey time 0 minutes).

Build my stamina and strength. Benefits: I can use my 100% pedal power on my 100% pedal bike for more trips. Since it’s hard to avoid having hilly routes where I live, the electric bike will continue to serve for the longer trips - unless my improvements in muscle strength really exceed my expectations.
Net Value: I burn less petrol, add more exercise and improve my fitness.

Maybe too, I live longer in better health?

For those of us with the mental fortitude and financial means to take care of our physical health, it’s a responsibility to the collective to do exactly that. Bad luck can intervene but we’re not responsible for that.

Ill-health has carbon emissions too. Hospital care for complicated illness relies heavily on single-use plastic-based materials and complex machinery powered by electricity.

Maybe, you say, within twenty or thirty years we’ll be so close to Net Zero it won’t matter how much electricity we’re using for advanced healthcare?

I love your optimism. I won’t argue.

Optimistically, let’s say we turn a corner on carbon emissions before being forced to by mass extinction, hitting that net zero while dealing with the fallout from the changed climate we already have baked-in, I have personal reasons for wanting to be well later in life, should I be lucky enough to get to later life.

And so do you. Think about it:

Who wouldn’t prefer a walk in the woods on their ninetieth birthday over being locked up in a home, plied with tablets - and only let out for hospital admissions and clinic appointments?

Quick Math. Miles by car vs bicycle

CO2(e) = the climate change impact of all the greenhouse gases caused by an item or activity, expressed in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide that would have the same impact over a 100 year period.

The definition above and estimates below are sourced from How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 Revised Edition

A mile driving a petrol car: estimating 530g - 1,26kg CO2(e); varies from a typical car to a Range Rover.

A mile on a fully human powered bicycle: 40g-300g CO2(e); varies with the carbon emissions associated with the cyclist’s diet.

A mile by an electric bicycle: 3g to 5g CO2(e), (flat vs. hilly routes). This figure gets even lower the more we power our grid from renewables.

How have you been? How have you been coping?

It’s a good question, considering:

Fires in Los Angeles, the biggest, best, baddest, wildest fires the world has ever seen and all because of DEI. Sorry to riff but I can’t get The Orange 45/57 Combo1 dutifully performing propaganda in the US White House like his life depended on it, out of my head.

Musk doing Nazi salutes, while urging on the success of far right parties across Europe that are cultivating climate conspiracy narratives around climate emergency realities.

Anti-genocide protestors in the UK intimidated by the police in a manner not seen over the preceding fifteen months of their protest efforts. And under a supposedly left-of-centre Labour government too! Is this a nod to Trump and Netanyahu, a way of saying, ‘We are truly with you, moreso than ‘moderate’ Rishi Sunak ever was?’

Have you added fascism and unregulated artificial intelligence to your list of climate-related existential threats yet?

I’m still figuring out how to navigate all of this in a healthy way. If I figure it out I promise I’ll share.

How not to despair

Even so, I found a few moments of inspiration from the podcast interviews that I’ve allowed to invade my kitchen space over the last few weeks:

Greta Thunberg, in an interview with Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo, pointing out that to lose all hope is not an option.

Yanis Varoufakis and Gary Stevenson reminding us that the oligarchy has nothing to offer but distraction and division. Our job is to make sure we build an alternative and credible vision.

Have you read that classic Man’s Search for Meaning by holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl? My biggest takeaway when I read it was this: making our lives meaningful is the key to navigating difficult times.

What can you do that makes living meaningful for you? Your partner, kids and best friend may not get it. They might ‘make meaning’ differently.

Remember, even in the worse case apocalyptic scenario, as long as we have life, we can choose to live it according to our values.

What I do Know

I may not have figured it out but I do know we have to take care of ourselves; spend time with what is good, beautiful, joyful and meaningful; do good, connect with others.

And beyond taking care of ourselves, the task ahead is to build community - less online and more where we are, everywhere we are - and not only with people who are ‘just like us.’

Social media and online life socialises us to believe we build community around common interests and common ways of being. But if we only build those types of communities, then we’re building silos that isolate our knowledge and understanding. We’re losing opportunities to teach ourselves conflict resolution, tolerance and compromise in pursuit of goals bigger than our individual egos and preferences.

We need to build communities that are relationship-based, rather than interest and concept-based. When we know and trust the people in our physical communities, we can explore different perspectives and approaches to navigating the world in good faith. We can make hardier contributions to policy-making ideas, because our perspective has more depth and understanding.

And we can see through the Divide and Rule politics of the most-powerful, rather than fall for the tricks they employ to tear our communities apart.

Tell me, how are you coping? What are you doing? What are you not doing? What can you do in your circle of influence?

With Love, Your Friendly Neighbourhood Radical

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