CARFREE BLOGOSPHERE

We’ve moved!

World Carfree Network — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:18:17 +0000

For those of you who missed the last notification, we moved the Carfree Blog to the new Carbusters Online in November 2009. So check out http://carbusters.org for all the content from Carbusters Magazine plus the Carfree blog, and if you’d like to contribute, please contact us at editors@carbusters.org!

Best,
Carbusters Team

New Carbusters Online!

World Carfree Network — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:15:42 +0000

"New Carbusters Online!"

Carbusters website has had a makeover!

We’re proud to announce the new and improved website offering you all the action from the magazine of the carfree world! Now you can easily browse through all back issues and test out its new features, including a donate feature offering you the chance to further support us http://carbusters.org/

The blog also moved to the new webpage. We hope you will like it!

The Enclosed Habitat of Modern Man

World Carfree Network — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:59:42 +0000

Chris Coleman takes a biological point of view at the favourite habitat of the Homo Sapiens in the Post-Industrial Age.

Each species has its preferred habitat: tigers favouring plains full of grazing prey, or sloth a rich, broad-leaf forest canopy. We humans are no exception. However, we are – along with the rat – the most versatile animal going on earth, meaning that we can settle in all but the most extreme conditions. Though we may be capable of thriving in the Arctic tundra or thickest jungle, we have chosen (or the mechanisms of industrial capitalism) to settle in the cozy confines of the city.

Not unlike the bear lured in by easy food from waste bins in mountain towns, we couldn’t resist the temptations of gas heating coming to our home at the turn of a knob, or food provided in exchange for minted coins and paper notes. We have chosen the path of convenience first, creating a living environment of sterile, lifeless, climate-controlled what I’ll call “insulated boxes” (rooms) and transforming more and more wild nature into monocultural land and industrial parks.

Our Post-Industrial/Information Age has decidedly embraced these insulated boxes as home: work is done inside in front of computers and desks; purchasing our daily wares is done under ultra-bright lighting in shopping centres; and transport moves from point A to B in cars and buses. Every activity possible – even sports – seeks a controlled, air-conditioned cubed box bereft of all but human life. This is the very opposite of the spontaneity, and cooperation between a diverse range of species found in nature. The closest most city-dwellers come to nature is the park where grass, a few trees and bushes provide habitat for only squirrels, stray dogs and the occasional homeless man.

The city is clearly coiling in on its grey, concrete self, leaving the modern man sadly unaware of the miracles of the unfolding seasons. In the US, for example, the Spring’s dandelion is perceived as an obnoxious weed, not a wonderful herb used in salads, syrups and teas. Also, the city dweller is only dimly aware of the phases of the moon as the brightness of ubiquitous street lights even overpowers the magical glow of the full moon. Is it any wonder that the average citizen does little to stop the destruction of our natural forests, meadows and traditional farms when nature is so distant from their daily lives?

Sensing guilt and emptiness due to our separation from nature’s bountiful joys in the rigid grey-black cityscape, modern man over the 20^th Century sought a compromise in the suburb. But poor planning led to unforeseen consequences: as the urban nucleus spread out, so did the city’s cultural and municipal services, to the point that the foundations of civic engagement such as the theatre, town hall and local pub became further apart and less accessible. Furthermore, public transport became less and less viable as urban density decreased dramatically during this exodus to the outskirts. Coinciding with the fall of the tram and train was the rise of the car, which soon clogged our streets. Where children once played ball games and neighbours shared stories is now under the reign of the car. Even children are stuck in these insulated boxes.

The habitat we’re creating for ourselves now seems to be in profound denial of what has been usual through the history of the Homo Sapiens: a sustainable interaction with nature. A mere 200 years ago, 97% of world population worked in a rural setting. Compare that with current figures where an average of 3% of citizens in developed nations work on farms (most of which are highly industrialised). Our habitat is simply not “natural” in both meanings of the word. Could this explain the alarming rate of depression as seen in the U.S. where 30% are or have been diagnosed as depressed, not to mention the decline of ethics that define our era? There is not room in this article to analyse the solutions available, but the fact is clear that we aren’t satisfied, fulfilled humans in this artificial environment. Its time we evolved our city into a more natural form where are parks are more wild, and transportation more self-propelled, and make the biologically rich small farmsteads of our villages economically viable again.

An Einsteinian thought experiment about transport

World Carfree Network — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:24:50 +0000

Let’s remember how useful it can be to ask new questions, remembering how Albert Einstein asked himself questions that led to his discovery of the special and general theories of relativity.[1]
Are there not many questions we need to be asking about how to organise our transport — our systems and modes of transport? Our current system — globally — is massively destructive, killing millions every year, [2, 3] maiming tens of millions, [2, 3] and is a leading cause of catastrophic global warming. [4] That is just the start of the list: it also destroys space and natural life, kills tens of millions of animals every year, [5] pollutes air, water and land, requires gigantic money costs, etc. We ought to change our transport system. How?
Well, how can we think about transport? For example, what goals do we want to solve with transport? Simply put: where do we want transport to take us? Maybe there is an interesting physical relation to consider, and this brings us to a kind of Einsteinian thought experiment.
An Einsteinian thought experiment. Imagine, for example, a transport, like a jet-pack, that enables people to move in all directions at infinite speed. Then no one can move or even stand safely anywhere! One person on a jet pack — moving at infinite speed in any direction, prevents any other person from being safe wherever they may be.
That is to say, some people travelling fast and freely (e.g. by car) means that others are limited, in their ability to move or even stand anywhere! The Einsteinian thought-experiment leads to the idea that: One body moving more means other bodies must move less. I.e. when one body moves extremely fast in a range of directions, other bodies must limit their freedom of movement (speed / direction). There is a safety limit in terms of vector/speed.
This form or equation of the physical relation can describe the problems of cars, that combine (with roads) many vectors and high speed, and therefore, limit the speed/vector for other persons or bodies.
Let me try to apply this general relation to ordinary examples: A child playing in the street, is at danger when other objects/persons travel in that space at injurious speeds. The child’s range of movement (speed and vector), e.g. just bouncing a ball around, or painting on the pavement, is limited by these other moving bodies, to the extent that the child simply cannot play in the street safely. This is amazing: even extremely modest/limited movement by a child in the street is obviated (made impossible) by much more expansive (high speed/large vector range) movement by other objects. We see this historically in our societies, as children’s freedoms of movement have become extremely limited, by the spread of the car, for example, but really it is any high-speed/high-vector moving object (even a bicycle, I’m sad to have to say).
Gravity is an invisible force; and maybe what we’re working with in understanding the physical relationships of transport is also invisible, to some extent.
- The effective sphere for the imaginary jet pack I described is gigantic; as a result, the effective sphere for all other bodies (that are vulnerable to that jet-pack) shrinks to near-zero, or even zero (there is no safe place at all!).
- The effective sphere for a car-user is large — the car-user can move at high speeds along many vectors. As a result, the effective sphere for bodies that are vulnerable to the car, shrinks.
How can we use this physical relation understanding?
Movement is relative! One fast moving body means that other bodies must move slower or not at all — if they share space!
Vectors are important! If bodies don’t move in the same space (i.e. along the same vectors), then the relation is not so large. A mundane example: segregating bicycle traffic from pedestrians enables higher speed for bicyclists, and more speed/vector range for pedestrians.
We need to consider all movement in our world: it’s not just human beings who need to move around! Animals, birds, i.e. non-human life also needs to move around. And non-animate nature needs to move around too: water, for example, as considering the hydrological cycle confirms. Consider a situation where a human transport system destroyed the hydrological cycle (the movement/cycling of water through various stages and phases): it wouldn’t last long!
Walking is amazing! Perhaps the relational idea about movement helps us understand yet again (from a new standpoint) why walking is so amazingly good, and beneficial! Well, at the slower speeds of walking, one can preserve more vectors of movement. Walking down a city street, one can do a million things (and one preserves others’ freedoms also). Driving fast down that street, one cannot do much; and one limits others too. A city street only for walking (as transport) enables millions of activities — is “convivial”, lively, etc. A city street designed for moving at high speed, disables.
At a global level, we can see that new questions arise: what forms of movement (human, non-human, non-animate), are important, necessary, sacred?
Car-free is better:
(1) Given a certain amount of space, like a town of 10 km diameter, the freedom of movement is far greater without the car than with the car. The space is usable in more ways.
(2) When distances expand, and people wish to accomplish those distances rapidly, then the range of transport vectors should be limited. High-speed rail is an example of an extremely limited vector range (only the track), and so it can travel at high speeds, over large distances, without much impact on other people’s freedoms of movement. (Japan’s elevated high-speed rail tracks take it to another level!)
(3) In a sense, the car is our world’s real version of the imaginary jet-pack that I described above. It’s a technology for a person to “enjoy” transport at high speeds on a wide range of vectors. The results are there for everybody to see: the range (or freedom) of movement for others shrinks.
Cars have other wasteful/destructive qualities: among them, they have a very low density of passengers, relative to other forms of transport, like walking, cycling, buses and trains. One could have a car-free city of 50 km diameter, with high-speed motorised transport (bus, train), and be fairly safe, if the motorised transport forms were extremely segregated from other bodies.
References
[1] A nice summary of these processes of asking interesting questions by Albert Einstein is provided by the book from White and Gribbin, Albert Einstein, A life in science. (preview available here)

[2] WHO (World Health Organization), Global status report on road safety, 2009, http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2009/9789241563840_eng.pdf
[3] WHO (World Health Organization), The global burden of disease: 2004 update, http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GBD_report_2004update_full.pdf
[4] “In 2004, transport was responsible for 23% of world energy-related GHG emissions with about three quarters coming from road vehicles. Over the past decade, transport’s GHG emissions have increased at a faster rate than any other energy using sector (high agreement, much evidence).” a quote from p. 325, of IPCC, 2007, “Transport and its infrastructure”, chapter 5 of the Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter5.pdf
[5] One million animals killed every week globally was the figure cited in Natural Capitalism, the 1994 book by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins. The book is available free here: http://www.natcap.org/

This article was originally published on the blog of Aaron Thomas: http://aaronkmthomas.blogspot.com/

thank you for allowing us to publish this interesting post.

Germany: Conference “Science and Ethics”

World Carfree Network — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:29:46 +0000

Last week-end, I spent in Berlin at the Conference “Science and Ethics” which was a joint event of the German Physics Society (http://www.dpg-physik.de) and the German Scientists Association (http://www.vdw-ev.de/). http://vdw.dpg-tagungen.de/
Its topics were nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, energy and teaching of natural sciences.

My impression was that all other problems are solvable, except for the energy problem. The experts had to admit that they know no single solution which solves the problem. Therefore, they recommend a mixture. It seemed to be consensus that nuclear power plants must continue to be used because they are secure and cheap. (Uarg!) Saving energy was also recommended, but it sounded like “build cars from lighter materials and sometimes use the public transports instead of the car”.
There were arguments against each renewable energy source: wind energy is only efficient when the wind is fast enough, solar energy is used in larger scale only in Germany thanks to governemental subventions, geothermal drills
lead to earthquakes, insulation of buildings is good but advances too slowly. Agro fuel was considered catastrophic because it aggravates some other problems like water and food shortness. Argo fuel and other energies are recommended for local use only, e.g. when Brazil produces its own fuel based on sugar cane and the Sahara region produce solar energy for water desalination.
Consequently, Germany can not expect other countries to solve our energy and CO2 problems. Which leads us back to the topic of saving energy. Even a Mc Kinsey study says that the CO2 goals can only be achieved in an economically
reasonable way by cutting energy consumption. All alternatives are too expensive. Unfortunately, we need enormous cuts, not only “building lighter cars”. And this is nothing what politicians can communicate to the voters. Therefore,
scientists must do this. (Or activists!) Only one speaker emphasized that we can save a lot without suffering, because some dozens of years ago people in Germany had a comfortable life also and used much less energy.

Andrea Herrmann

The End of the Road: Part2

amyigibson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:04:20 +0000

IT’S A NEW STAGE NOW, BABY

INTRODUCTION. (Joseph ; Amy)

I’m Joseph and I’m a car dealer. I feel like I’m introducing myself at an addiction support group. President G. W. Bush’s recent admission that we’re a nation addicted to oil was not the first time I noticed. I’ve been in the business for 25 years. I’ve been on the planet 52 years. Nothing in my business is new.

I was born in 1956. That’s right about the time that the Interstate Highway system and suburban migration changed the American landscape. Each family was capable of owning its own personal transportation device, a car.

People were moving around fine without cars. I was born in New York. Mobility takes many forms there. People take busses to trains to subways and perhaps a taxi. Ferries still carry cars and people but just imagine how many people used to use ferries to and from Manhattan Island. There weren’t very many bridges to Manhattan until planners were convinced that they’d be full of cars.

I live in the Pacific Northwest now and enjoy my visits to Seattle, perhaps because it reminds me a bit of home. I love the Puget Sound. I had considered moving to Seattle when I moved west but the traffic congestion also reminded me of home and one of the primary reasons I was leaving in the first place. I was spending too much time in the car and I think that’s low quality time.

Americans have romantic notions of cars. Even though they drive on ugly roads, past ugly mills and factories, billboards and strip malls, they try to imagine the glory of the Open Road. We are great at pretending. Any moment now I’ll see a beautiful landscape, roll down the window and let the wind blow back my hair. Snow covered peaks and Sonoma desert sunsets are captured on TV and I’m sure I’ll see one around the next bend. Our expectations are not created by life. They are created mostly by television.

It’s sad but true that most of the wonders Americans feast their eyes on are seen from the car. We don’t hike those peaks and we don’t camp in the desert and we don’t fish those rivers. We satisfy ourselves with a drive through Vermont in the fall.

Is this because we don’t care? Or are we afraid? Isn’t this because we have developed a full-blown, relatively unfettered capitalist culture that says we must always be pursuing growth, becoming bigger and better, have more than our parents, that the silver medal is simply not good enough? In other words, do we have a culture that allows us to get out of the car and enjoy nature anymore? We are barely retaining art, music and physical education in our schools, life is increasingly competitive; what is this teaching us about the most nourishing aspects of life?

Is it materially better to view those leaves from behind a windshield than sitting before a TV screen? Are people meant to view beauty or experience it? Do we spend so much time working to afford mobility and modern convenience that we’ve no time left to savor an experience. Must we substitute a snapshot of it?

Is a vehicle a means to an end, in this case literally meaning to get us from here to there? Other things can move us and that’s both literal and figurative. A vehicle is a tremendous metaphor.

This is America. Here we proudly claim we’ll fight and die for freedom. We find mobility and freedom synonymous. This attachment extends wholeheartedly to our cars, our right to buy what we want and drive what we want. It’s changing; people are seeing the wisdom of more fuel efficient cars, but that psychology is absolutely tied to the price of gas, artificially low right now and within a few years absolutely going to turn around and sock us. Peak oil is here, and few understand that gas prices are artificially low currently, and for only a brief moment. Still, the car culture is cult-like. Speak out against cars and you’ve got enemies from big oil to the Big 3, not to mention the truckers, classic car buffs, motor-heads and bikers. They’re everywhere. Now I think we could include Tahoe driving soccer moms too. We just can’t seem to imagine any other way of doing our daily business.

Ok Joseph, lets start right here, and I will do my best not to be coy and simply feed you lines. I am a parent and I work, right now from home. I drive A LOT. But I don’t love my car, and I expect many women in my situation would say that. Driving exhausts me. I can remember the thrill of learning to drive, but doing so every day, especially the multiple, repetitive trips to get my children, take them to events, drop one off and pick up the next, all the while driving right back up the hill I live on about 15 minutes from the heart of the city, well I hate it. Not only is it boring and mindless at middle age, it is uncomfortable as well as guilt producing, because I know that with multiple trips I am wasting gas.

But I put up with it like everyone else, because until recently I have not seen what my alternatives are. You make it sound as though we all have luxury vehicles that we adore driving as much as possible. My car is a work horse, and any luxuries it has, such as heated seats, I feel entitled to due to my various aches and pains – which most of us have by now (I am 51.) I live in a city that has a flat downtown but a hilly suburban residential area on almost all sides. My knees prevent me from biking (we tried a bike rack, I can’t lift bikes, ok so I need to work out more and get stronger, yet another ride into town to the health club for that.) The bus service comes remotely near where I live two times during the day: 7:45 a.m., and 3:45 pm. There is simply no way I could get by on those times. This is an argument for investing in new mass transit, not “shovel-ready” projects that do not shovel us forward!

We live in a frenzied, competitive time, and the current recession has only made us all desperate. We make trade-offs. Driving is the cost of having work that allows me to put my children first, and being at home means I am not close to where I need to shop during the week. Of course I try to conserve trips; I bet most of us do. We are not just tired; we really do not want the expense or the moral guilt from using gas.

I tried a hybrid; I really wanted to do the right thing. It was an uncomfortable car, and it did not get the fuel economy the company claimed it would. I feel terrible driving a regular, internal combustion car, and terrified about the major event that comes in a few short months, when my son turns 16 and we hand him the keys to the car. (Note: by the time this book went to print, those keys were a given.)

I don’t want your ideas to be unpopular. I have learned a great deal from you, and am convinced by your concerns. But you do seem to make it sound like the way out is easy, even quick. I dare to hope again, even after the painful lessons brought home by such urgently imploring illustrations in, for example, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I believe the future depends on each one of us making the right choices, and that we are out of time to simply leave the solutions to our children. We already lost that battle; I was learning about pollution in grade school and was taught it had to be handled by us when we grew up. Right. I do have faith in our project and I think so many people want to do the right thing. It’s a matter of educating – our task here – so that people can come to see alternatives as I have now.

I imagine I could be the most unpopular man in America to suggest that it’s the end of the road! But that is what I am here to say.

That’s right. It’s all downhill from here. We are past due when it comes to changing our models of mobility. We’ve fouled the air and water with our inappropriate, destructive methods of movement. We must change now because the rest of the world is about to follow that model and that would be suicide.

I put my 177 pounds into a 4000-pound vehicle to move me efficiently from here to there. Inappropriate and unnecessary. It’s got the power of 300 horses, but most of the time I could make the trip on one horse. Inappropriate and unnecessary? Overkill. Folly.

It’s got the technology to protect me from a hundred different threats from numerous directions. Of course, I could kill and maim so many others with it by hitting pedestrians or a school bus. But I’m not alone. Not only is my personal safety covered, much of the transportation infrastructure and regulatory policy is designed to carry my weapon (car) safely and efficiently.

I have an incredible amount of comfort within my weapon. I’ve Beethoven or The Beatles filling the air in crystal clarity. I’ve heated leather seats, automatic climate control, automatic cruise control, automatic lighting and even my windshield wipers do my bidding without my asking.

I’m not sure which came first but it’s clear that our vehicles are our living rooms today. People are working, moms and dads, all the time to pay for their vehicles that average 10% of income. If one works all the time, there’s no time to be in the living room. So now our phone is in the car, our kids watch movies in the car, our many beverages have a place of their own there and our meals are consumed while we race from here to there.

I absolutely telephone, write checks, drink hot chocolate and even eat my lunch on the run. I know these things are wrong, but I do not do them out of carelessness or callousness. I do them because as a working mother who wants to be there at 3:15 for her children, everything I do, from work to volunteering to exercise to doctor appointments and shopping is fit into so few hours. Why not wait for the weekends? Sports and more sports, with my children.

How did this insane lifestyle evolve? Though I love it, I hardly work just for fun. I work because we have three children to put through college, despite my husband’s fortunate salary and because of course our 401K is in smithereens. I work because I am driven to make a contribution and give back what my education and privileges have allowed me to become. But all this and parenthood too has meant driving is not a mere matter of convenience. To me it often feels like survival!

I am not saying you have put up a “straw man” argument, because I cannot argue in general with the materially self-indulgent nature of our American culture. In fact I think in many ways we have been lulled to sleep by it. But I do think that we also want to do better, that we have been deprived of zero emission cars for decades, and have not seen our alternatives. You are helping us wake up to possibilities; especially to the urgency and the possibilities of the moment.

Our love of cars and convenience has created the convenience store phenomenon. That’s what we call those stores that have terrible selections of the unhealthiest products at incredibly high prices. Doesn’t this sound like addictive behavior to you yet?

Oh yes, I was talking about folly. I was talking about the end of the road.
I imagine that we’re all conservative on some levels. We conserve our air and water, put nuts away like squirrels and know that inappropriate, destructive behavior is unsustainable. The way we’ve evolved our transportation systems and networks has been anarchic. We could not see today’s vehicles when we designed roads years ago. We didn’t have the best transportation planners, engineers and designers working on the project. It’s been a haphazard development, and some might claim that to be the reason things are so good.
But the result is a system of roads and expenses that support them that I believe to be at the end of its useful life. Roads can be decommissioned, utilized during a period of transition and saved as a neighborhood museum. Industries can re-tool. Priorities can be re-set.
Some people will be sad and some angry at the end of the road. Sadness comes, perhaps, from nostalgia, from the hearts of the romantics still wedded to their cars and roads. Anger comes from those who perceive that someone is taking away their weapon, or freedom, or comfort or power.
Some people are always looking down. They are proponents of the myth of scarcity. There’s not enough. It’s ending too soon. How will we deal with our shrinking pot of finite resources?

I suppose the points I am making do come from a sense of scarcity.

But not just of peak oil, which I am well aware of and care about tremendously. Nor do I want to be yet another American who lives a life, however hectic, at the expense of others all over the world. Yet life, even our freedoms, come in context. I am bringing up my family in a country that does, in its competitive culture, take my time, my peace, even my ability to act upon my deeper values, away from me. I sound like a relatively wealthy victim, I know, with a lovely middle-class house and lifestyle. I do experience our American culture as so wildly competitive now that children lose their childhoods to incredible pressure way too early. But I am not ready to trust some radically new lifestyle. So keep talking, but don’t be too cynical. Show me the way out.

Other people are looking up. They see an infinite number of options, solutions, ideas and alternatives. That’s the optimism I remember from school as the essence of being American. We don’t look down and say, “Too bad, there’s not enough oil. When oil burns it’s killing us. Let’s just burn it and fight over it anyway.” I was taught that we’re smarter than that. I was taught we are adaptive and rewarded by our bullishness.
That’s right, just like on Wall Street, there are bulls and bears. On these streets, Main Streets, the mean streets, real streets, we’ve got some serious change coming. Embrace the end of the road, embrace the change and ride it. Know that it’s coming and be a part of the solution. I don’t know about you but after 52 years, I’m ready to do the right thing and stop going along, just another part of the problem.

I want to embrace this idea; I will embrace it. But it is overwhelming. I still hold back on the hope that we can save this planet for my children and my future grandchildren, and yours. I would be lying to say I am without fear and doubt. I would not have signed on to this project with you, if I had no optimism in me. I have indeed seen the difference one person can make, and what a whole group of organized people who are prepared to work and sacrifice for the greater good can accomplish. Perhaps we are just planting seeds here, but I want more than that. Because our planetary and cultural challenges are absolutely dire, I want to see a difference now, before it’s too late.

I may have to rely upon your optimism while mine builds, and while I write to try, with you, to convince others that we can do this thing. Because I do agree with you, it is the end of the road as we know it. And I will start by saying I am up for experiments, but I am afraid. Of what? Change.

Motor Mania

World Carfree Network — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:24:19 +0000

For the pleasure, an old cartoon from Disney studios. Goofy stars as a Jekyll and Hyde character, Mr. Walker/Mr. Wheeler. When he’s a pedestrian he’s mild-mannered and rational; when he’s a driver he’s mad and bad. Enjoy and don’t forget to have a look at our You Tube channel.

Peak Oil and the ARRP

World Carfree Network — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:49:49 +0000

Mini Peak Oil Library

On Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009, the New York Times published a story about new global oil finds, with the title: Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries. That would make September 24 seem an inauspicious day for members of San Francisco’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to present their final report to members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee.

In fact, the total number of barrels estimated to have been found equals only about 10 billion (globally people consume about 84 million per day, around 22 million in the U.S. alone). And that 10 billion, said task force chair Jeanne Rosenmeier, pales in comparison to past discoveries; discoveries of new oil fields peaked in 1962, and oil analysts acknowledge that in order to extract the oil found recently in the Gulf of Mexico, the price of a barrel of oil would have to be $60 or more — on September 25, 2009, according to MSNBC, the price of a barrel of oil was $66 on the New York Mercantile Exchange — as new discoveries are no longer the “light sweet crude” that has been so easy or inexpensive to extract for decades.

Peak Oil is defined as the point at which demand and supply meet, the amount of oil extracted from the surface of the Earth begins an inexorable path downward, and the price of a barrel of oil (and therefore a gallon of gasoline) begins an inexorable path upward. It is anyone’s guess when that moment will arrive globally (it arrived in the United States in 1970). Predictions range from 2010 to 2013 to a plateau starting around 2020. But no serious analysts are doubting that it is on the near horizon or that humanity needs to make preparations to transition from ways of life now dependent on oil — which has been inexpensive to extract from the surface of the Earth since 1859, when oil was first tapped on industrial levels, up until now – to ways of life independent of cheap energy.

A few years ago, an energy analyst with the United States Department of Energy, Robert Hirsch, produced a report famous in peak oil circles, The Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigations, and Risk Managment. Still, few elected officials or bureaucrats are talking about the inevitable arrival of expensive oil (and natural gas), and what it means for the survival of our species let alone the western lifestyle. Thanks, then, to San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi who sponsored the creation of San Francisco’s task force.

As the task force report explains, the arrival of peak oil (and natural gas) means much more than just more expensive gasoline, as so much of the 20th century’s “green revolution” and the vast increases in food production have been based on fertilizers made from natural gas, and soils tilled with gasoline-run tractors and gasoline-run harvesters. This realization — and the fact that this fossil fuel-based “green revolution” is in large part responsible for the exponential increase in the human population — should stir fear in the hearts of all able-minded adults. What’s to happen when one of the most basic necessities of humankind — food — becomes prohibitively expensive for the 6.4 to 7 billion people currently on the planet because of the increasing cost of oil?

New England’s Lowell Mills, Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution

There’s no doubt in my own mind that the arrival of peak oil will mean, at the very least, the end of the Industrial Revolution based on fossil fuels (let’s hope we do not step up our coal mining) and very likely the end of the Industrial Revolution period (“renewable” sources of energy such as wind, solar, and geothermal now provide Americans with less than one percent of all our energy needs), and that we’re going to have to figure out how to go back to more local and regional production models for everything from food to clothing.

TIGER: Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery

In the meantime, I’d like to see local officials beginning a conversation with state and national officials — and getting some of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money (H.R. 1, the stimulus package passed by Congress, and signed by President Obama, in early 2009) dedicated to preparations for peak oil and not just thrown willy nilly at “shovel ready projects” — as appears to have happened along Geary Boulevard in San Francisco where, a few years from now, this artery is scheduled to be transformed by Bus Rapid Transit anyway.

And on an individual level, I’m rededicating myself to gardening, as the report recommends that San Francisco step up its local food production.

Thank you to Susan Vaughan for allowing us to publish this interesting post. It was published at first on Carfree-Talk: http://carfreetalk.blogspot.com/

Book Review: Bicycle Diaries

World Carfree Network — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:27:54 +0000

“All this talk about bike lanes, ugly buildings, and density of population isn’t just about those things, it’s about what kinds of people those places turn us into.” - © Kelly Nelson

David Byrne, a founder of the band Talking Heads, has been biking for transportation for decades, in New York City where he lives and while visiting foreign cities. (He brings a folding bike when he travels.) His new book Bicycle Diaries recounts his experiences bicycling in various cities: Berlin, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London, Manila, San Francisco and Sydney. Don’t expect a bike travelogue though. The book would more accurately be titled “Diaries of an Artist Who Bikes.” It contains a wide range of musings (can dogs deceive themselves?) and wonderings (does every culture have its own palette?) as well as encounters with artists, musicians and strangers on the street. It is a thought-filled, swirling read. And if you flip the pages front to back you’ll see a tiny bicycle scoot across the bottom of the page.

The most bikey parts come in the introduction, the New York chapter and the epilogue. Byrne started biking in the early 80s when it was a geeky, uncool thing to do but he found it exhilarating. Still does. Byrne, in his fifties, clearly enjoys having a bike-seat view of street life and urban landscapes. “It’s the liberating feeling—the physical and psychological sensation—that is more persuasive than any practical argument,” he writes to explain why he rides. He does use cars on occasion but says of driving, “The romance of being ‘on the road’ is pretty heady, but a cross-country ramble is a sometime thing. It isn’t a daily commute, a way of living, or even the best way to get from point A to point B.”

Byrne has applied his artsiness to the world of biking by organizing a public forum in 2007 that featured helmet designers, lock breakers, writers and singers (detailed in the New York chapter) and by designing one-of-a-kind bike racks (shown at the end of the book).

After reading Byrne’s description of Berlin—“No cars park or drive in the bike lanes, and the cyclists don’t ride on the streets or on the sidewalks either. There are little stoplights just for the bikers, even turn signals!”—I’m itching to go there and see it for myself. And that is the gift of this book: it makes you want to go some place new, bring a bike or rent one there, ride around and take your own photos, write your own journal.

Kelly Nelson

Tempe, Arizona USA

Bicycle Diaries / David Byrne / Viking, 2009

The EVolution of the EV Revolution

amyigibson — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:13:06 +0000

My wife Zan Dubin Scott and I are activists for electric cars. We didn’t mean to be, but we were kind of forced into it.

Back in 2002, I chanced upon a website where people were talking about electric cars. The things they were saying sounded almost too good to be true. These were not the low speed EVs sometimes derided as golf carts, these were full function, highway capable cars, trucks and SUVs. I had recently installed a 3 kW solar photovoltaic system on my house, so all of my electricity was now generated by sunlight falling on my roof. Since I had always tried to reduce my gasoline usage, it seemed a perfect solution to buy a car that could run on those very same kilowatt-hours. As it happened, only Toyota was willing to actually sell their EV, the versatile RAV4, a small SUV. After our first test drive, we jumped at the chance, bought one and took possession of it on winter solstice 2002.

We were now running our house and our car on sunlight, no pollution well-to-wheels, no more of our money going to foreign countries for oil, and just as important, none of our money paying for the bombs and bullets that were killing our soldiers. We thought everyone would follow our lead. The future felt bright in spite of the turmoil in the world at the time.

One week later, we were informed that Toyota was stopping production on their EV. The electric vehicle program was unceremoniously shut down, leaving thousands of eager customers in line for a car that was no longer available.

Here we were with first hand knowledge of a technology that could literally change the world for better in massively significant ways; elimination of all pollution connected to driving a car and most of the pollution connected to running a household; keeping hundreds of billions of dollars from leaving the country to purchase foreign oil, money that could instead be used to hire workers to install solar panels and windmills; and finally, eliminating the need to fight wars over oil. We’ve never fought a war for electricity, and we never will.

Yet the one piece of the puzzle that could make all of this happen, the vehicle that ran on electricity, was taken away. Given that we, along with a few dozen other Californians, knew this truth first hand, we decided to become activists and fight the car companies over the crushing of their cars. It was very clear to us that the whole world needed to understand this truth, and as soon as possible. Being naive, we had no idea how hard it would ultimately be.

There followed three years of protests in the hot sun and the pouring rain, around the clock in some cases. Whatever it took. We protested in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego in front of car dealers, state regulators and, as depicted in the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, we protested for 28 straight days around the clock in front of GM’s training facility in Burbank, CA.

Our efforts got picked up here and there, including in the LA Times, Washington Post and the New York Times. And when the film premiered in June of 2006 the whole story was finally revealed in great detail. It was then that everything changed.

The film resonated with Americans who had been brought up on rumors of magical additives and super-carburetors that had been quietly bought up and hidden from the public, all to keep everyone from reducing their need for oil. Well, rumor or true, those paled in comparison to a car that not only ran without any gas at all, but also ran quicker, ran quieter and didn’t pollute one bit. “Zero Emission Vehicle” they called it, ZEV for short. These cars represented everything the carmakers despised. They required virtually no maintenance and lasted a long time, and considering that the auto industry gets about 40% of its profit from parts and maintenance, the car industry wanted nothing to do with them.

As thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of Americans saw the film, word spread that this technology did indeed work. It worked so well in fact that years later, the original cars from the California experiment were still running exactly the same as when they were new. With no maintenance and no deterioration, and the ability to run on domestic fuel with no pollution, people were starting to pay attention.

Then the hammer came down – $4/gallon.

I had thought maybe $3/gallon would do it, but I was wrong, we blew right through that price and SUVs kept rolling out of the car lots. But, when the magic $4 was announced as the nationwide average, you could feel the shift. The price continued to go up and people began to hurt a lot. The pundits speculated on the ultimate price, while the most pivotal Presidential election in our lifetime was heating up. The high price of fuel, coupled with a growing recession, mortally wounded a domestic auto industry saddled with bloated, inefficient vehicles.

We now find ourselves in a different world from just a few years ago. The Obama administration is intent on reducing pollution from dirty fuels and also reducing our dependence on foreign oil. As external costs are internalized in the price of oil, and the scarcity of peak oil is fully understood, the cost of gas and diesel will rise dramatically.

Coincident with this, we now find that every carmaker on the planet is in development on plug-in vehicles of all shapes and sizes. From powerful motorcycles to small city cars, from blindingly fast sports cars to trucks capable of hauling 60,000 lbs, all manner of plug-in vehicles are racing to get to market first. We find start up companies in Silicon Valley competing with the “Crumbling Three” of Detroit. There are even start-ups rising Phoenix-like out of the ashes of GM facilities in Indiana. And all of them are competing with well-funded companies out of China and India. China is even publicly announcing that it will lead the world in EV production, a shot across the bow of Carlos Ghosn’s Nissan who lays claim to the same goal.

On the ground, our little protest group had morphed into a grown up advocacy organization with 15,000 active members and a sophisticated working board that helps federal and state regulators and legislators devise incentives to get plug-ins to market. We are the go-to organization for media the world over when they want to report on this movement from the perspective of the consumer, because we are those people. We have been using this technology for six to ten years and know what it means to drive a car that doesn’t pollute, doesn’t make noise and doesn’t put our country at risk. Soon, all our friends and neighbors will get to experience what we’ve been experiencing, and this time, there’ll be no attempted murder of a technology, just sweet revenge.

By Paul Scott
5.11.2009

Paul Scott, a lifelong environmental activist, co-founded Plug In America (PIA) in 2005 to galvanize support and advocate for the manufacture of Electric Vehicles and plug-in hybrids that reduce America’s dependence on petroleum and improve the global environment. As one of the nonprofit organization’s most visible leaders, he is regularly interviewed by media coast to coast and works with auto industry officials, consumers and local, state and federal policymakers to advance clean car technology.

Paul helped create Don’tCrush.com, PIA’s predecessor, a grassroots group that single-handedly prevented some 1,000 production EVs from being destroyed by the auto companies that manufactured them. His work with both groups has included strategic campaign research, planning and execution. He is among the key figures featured in “Who Killed the Electric Car?” the 2006 documentary distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Paul works professionally as a consultant for SolarCity, a solar installation firm. He owns a Toyota RAV4 EV, which he drives on sunshine generated by the photovoltaic panels on his own roof in Santa Monica. He is President of the Electric Vehicle Assn. of Southern California and Vice President of Plug In America.