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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Saying Goodbye to Air Travel
Richard Heinberg, Global Public Media
… There are good reasons to cut down on air travel voluntarily: flying not only swells our personal carbon emissions but spews CO2 and other pollutants into the stratosphere, where they do the most damage. However, the worsening scarcity of the stuff we use for making jet fuel takes the discussion out of the realm of optional moral action and into that of economic necessity and personal adaptation.
I fly to educate both general audiences and policy makers about fossil fuel depletion; in fact, I’m writing this article aboard a plane en route from Boston to San Francisco. I wince at my carbon footprint, but console myself with the hope that my message helps thousands of others to change their consumption patterns. This inner conflict is about to be resolved: the decline of affordable air travel is forcing me to rethink my work. I’m already starting to do much more by video teleconference, much less by jet.
Those who live far from family will be more than inconvenienced, as will the hundreds of thousands who work for the airline industry directly or indirectly, or the millions who depend on tourism or airfreight for an income. These folks will have few options: teleconferencing can accomplish only so much.
Our species’ historically brief fling with flight has been fun, educational, and enriching on many levels to those fortunate enough to benefit from it. Saying goodbye will be difficult. But maybe as we do we can say hello to greater involvement in our local communities.
(14 May 2008)
Peak-oil spike reshapes the suburbs
Carlito Pablo, Georgia Straight (Vancouver)
The reality of peak oil will see properties classified into two types in the near future, according to Simon Fraser University professor Anthony Perl.
One will be properties from which owners can get to work, leisure activities, and services predominantly by car. The other offers alternatives to the automobile such as public transit, biking, and walking.
“The one that is accessible without a car will have a higher value,” Perl told the Georgia Straight in a telephone interview during which the director of SFU’s urban studies program tracked changes in oil prices with a ticker he keeps on his desk.
(15 May 2008)
Bicycles Pedaling Into the Spotlight
J. Matthew Roney, Earth Policy Institute
The world produced an estimated 130 million bicycles in 2007-more than twice the 52 million cars produced. Bicycle and car production tracked each other closely in the mid-to-late 1960s, but bike output separated sharply from that of cars in 1970, beginning its steep climb to 105 million in 1988. Following a slowdown between 1989 and 2001, bike production has regained steam, increasing in each of the last six years. Much of the recent growth has been driven by the rise in electric, or “e-bike” production, which has doubled since 2004 to 21 million units in 2007. Overall, since 1970, bicycle output has nearly quadrupled, while car production has roughly doubled.
Promoting the bike as a clean and efficient alternative to the personal automobile is a practical way for cities to reduce traffic congestion and smog. To simultaneously confront those problems as well as climate change and an emerging obesity epidemic, government leaders and advocacy groups are working to bring cycling back to prominence in the urban transport mix.
A number of European cities have set the standard for bicycle use and promotion, via pro-bike transportation and land use policies, as well as heavy funding for bicycle infrastructure and public education.
… While the bicycle is still an essential form of transportation in China, the country has recently seen a rapid decrease in bike ownership as its population becomes wealthier and turns to cars. From 1995 to 2005, China’s bike fleet declined by 35 percent, from 670 million to 435 million, while private car ownership more than doubled, from 4.2 million to 8.9 million. Blaming cyclists for increasing accidents and congestion, some city governments have closed bike lanes. Shanghai even banned bicycles from certain downtown roads in 2004. This deterioration in Chinese bike culture emerges even as the country’s share of world bicycle production continues to rise: China now turns out more than four fifths of the 130 million bikes produced each year.
China’s central government, increasingly concerned about traffic congestion, energy consumption, and people’s health, has now begun calling on cities to reverse this discouragement of bikes.
(12 May 2008)
Pedaling Toward Cleaner Cities
Alison Raphael, OneWorld US
What single silver bullet can simultaneously reduce air pollution and oil dependency, roll back urban congestion, and fight obesity?
It’s not a pill, nor a complicated formula concocted by the World Bank. People around the world are turning to bicycles by the millions, as governments rush to create incentives for the low-tech transport alternative to gas-glugging, smog-making, traffic jam-producing automobiles.
Some 130 million bikes were produced worldwide in 2007 — more than double the number of cars rolling off assembly lines (52 million). Bike production took off in the 1970s, and after a brief dip, has been soaring since 2001, according to an ”Eco-Economy Indicators” report issued Monday by the Earth Policy Institute.
Although more than 80 percent of all bicycles produced today are made in China, rising wealth led many Chinese to set aside their bicycles in favor of cars. But in the face of rising urban pollution and congestion, Chinese authorities are insisting that bike lanes be re-established in major cities. In Beijing, bike rentals are being strongly promoted.
(13 May 2008)
Calculating Commuting Costs on Vancouver Island
chrisale, Murky View… (blog)
This will be the first post in a series as I work through this data.
First, full disclosure, I work at Malaspina (Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo and live 80KM away in Port Alberni. It’s a 1 hour drive morning and night, so yes, I have a vested interest in this topic. I am also a volunteer with the Corridor Coalition, which is trying to convince government to restore the E&N to a state where it could take a large chunk of the economic and environmental load of off residents, business, and industry on Vancouver Island.
The reason i started this, what I saw this post here at the theoildrum.com doing a similar study of commuting costs from the suburbs of Sydney, Australia.
The general premise being, that those in Australia, and in North America, have very much become used to very cheap gasoline (petrol). And this has created the ever expanding suburbia and exurbia with very little investment into Public Transport (rail, bus, or otherwise) by any of the governments in question.
As fuel prices rise rapidly, this is having a serious affect on the ability of households to cope… especially since wages are not keeping up with inflation over the past 30 years, let alone rising costs of the past 5.
So, I’ve created my own version of the Sydney example.
(13 May 2008)
More at original.
Ready For Anything
Hans Noeldner, Oregon (WI) Observer
2×2 seating in an ultra-roomy cab. 4×4 traction to climb remote mountain passes. 4×6 standard/4×8 optional box to haul dog food and twelve-packs and ATVs. And 9,000 pounds of towing capacity for…well, who knows? King of the road, sitting up there like you’re in a deer stand, far above the Saturns and Subarus and crossover SUVs.
And the price! What else offers so many tons of iron for your hard-earned dollar? Stretches so far along the street? Or exudes so much raw manliness? Who can ignore the throaty rumble of V8 standard/V10 optional power? Or that unmistakable turbo whine? My God, how could you hold up your head at the bowling alley if you didn’t arrive in one?
No wonder the full-size crew-cab 4WD pickup truck has become one of the most popular single-occupancy commuter vehicles among Dane County’s “country estate” dwellers and suburbanites. Heck, we’ve been programmed since the sandbox to want our very own life-sized Tonka truck. It’s oh-so-cool. Oh-so-irresistible. We tell ourselves we’ll be ready for anything.
Anything but reality, that is. Anything but inconvenient truths about climate change and wars for oil and a bank-busting addiction to petroleum that can only be described as suicidal.
Sorry, Wisconsin, we aren’t going to drive our way to world peace in three-ton Tonka toys. Nor will driving to work and the grocery store and soccer fields in these gas-guzzling behemoths drive down global warming. F150s and Silverados and Sierras in suburbia won’t shift highway expansions into reverse or halt the relentless paving-over of farms and wetlands and open space.
If we don’t ration our own fossil-fueled “will to power”, depletion and strife will do the rationing for us – and it won’t be pleasant. We must abandon our resource-gobbling, planet-suffocating, debt-fueled way of life…and learn to live within Earth’s means.
(4 May 2008)
Not online.
