Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
America is a car country. We drive everywhere, and we all pay the price: transportation alone accounts for 20% of an American family’s budget, the 2nd biggest cost after housing. A sedentary lifestyle doesn’t just kill our pockets, either — it kills us. After tobacco, inactivity-related diseases are the number one killer in the US. But research has proven that swapping out driving in favor of biking can have wondrous results.
– Bill Clinton joins Obama to champion Washington energy saving strategy
– Obama’s Push for Better Mileage: This Is a Big Deal (Thomas Friedman)
– Report highlights Obama’s broken environmental promises
– Hans Noeldner: Spending the Middle Class out of existence
– Rotating blackouts possible in Texas this winter
On Do the Math, three previous posts have focused on transportation efficiency of gasoline cars, electric cars, and on the practicalities of solar-powered cars. What about personal-powered transport—namely, walking and biking? After stuffing myself over Thanksgiving, I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation?
Be the first in your group to get your Undriver License™ — it’s great fun! You pledge to reduce automobile use — yours or others’. Seattle founder Julia Field’s creative project is sparking imaginations and creativity by changing how people think about getting around — be it skateboards, sailboats, or just plain skipping the trip! Undrivers of all ages are jumping on the bandwagon, changing assumptions, and telling their empowered stories.
If you like the sun, and you like cars, then I’m guessing you’d love to have a solar-powered car, right? This trick works well for chocolate and peanut butter, but not so well for garlic bread and strawberries. So how compatible are cars with solar energy? Do we relish the combination or spit it out? Let’s throw the two together, mix with math, and see what happens.
The following is the text of an address by Richard Heinberg to the Moana Nui Conference in Honolulu, November 12, 2011. Honolulu was concurrently hosting the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Conference; as a response to that secretive international trade meeting, the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala Ka Po collaborated to organize Moana Nui.
US oil prices rose this week on news that the glut of crude stocks at Cushing Oklahoma, which has depressed the benchmark WTI contract for months, may soon be drained. Enbridge is to buy the Seaway pipeline which runs from the Houston area to Cushing, and plans to reverse its flow.
The ambition of this volume is the aspiration that motivates the whole Transition movement: nothing less than to remake industrial civilization from the bottom up and from the local level.
-A farewell to pavements
-WikiLane – How citizens built their own bicycle network
-Local Economic Implications of Urban Bicycle Networks
Today’s show features two guests who were at last week’s Truth in Energy conference of the US chapter of ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, in Washington, DC. Jeff Rubin, is former Chief Economist at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the author of Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. He explains why the price of oil the US media report is $25 too low, why today’s triple-digit oil prices show that the days of low unemployment and 3% economic growth are over, and warns that 30-year US Treasury bonds are not as safe an investment as many people think. Jan Lundberg went from being an oil-industry analyst at Lundberg Survey to a self-described “eco-warrior” fighting petroleum pollution, car culture and sprawl development. He writes at Culture Change and promotes sail transport of freight.
At first glance, Jan Lundberg and Amanda Kovattana seem like unlikely kindred spirits. He’s a former oil analyst turned whistleblower and rock musician, while she’s a British-educated Thai émigré who makes her living helping people become organized. Yet their similarities run deep, beginning with a profound concern for the planet and a flair for writing. Indeed, both are indispensable contributors to one of the top news sites on energy and the environment, Energy Bulletin. Both also happen to be accomplished memoirists, and their memoirs offer rare insights into family relationships, the vicissitudes of wealth and the quandary of being an environmentalist in an environmentally apathetic age.
The idea of the “energy trap” is that an increasing number of Americans are caught between the cost of gasoline and a systemic inability to stop driving their cars. In the last 60 years America has become a “motorized society” in which most of our citizens have become totally dependent on daily travel by car for their existence. Take away our cars and most of us would be hard pressed to reorganize our lives to provide for the essentials of life – earn an income, and provide food, shelter, and education for ourselves and our families.
