Transportation

The Peak Oil Crisis: A Breakthrough?

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For many months, U.S. Energy Secretary Chu, the guy with the Nobel Prize in physics, has been running around the country telling audiences that big breakthroughs were coming for electric vehicles. Well, this week the other shoe dropped when an announcement was made of an advance in battery technology that has the potential to change the motor vehicle industry as we know it.

Zurich: Adventures in urban relocalization

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As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with its natural ecosystems and grassroots social innovators.”

The idea was to demonstrate, in practice, and at a city-wide scale, how to combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture, with the metabolic energy of social innovation.

Biketopia exists!

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I like to think of utopia as the space where idealism meets reality. Over the years, I have found few radical social change projects that met reality without failure or conflict, especially within a capitalist economy. Transformative projects often fail to take off and end up disillusioning their founders and volunteers. The Bike Kitchen model is one of those unique exceptions that we can try to learn from.

Transition and solutions – Feb 13

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– Portland, the US capital of alternative cool
– Are electric or hybrid cars a green marketing myth, or a real solution?
– Is This the Most Beautiful Street in the World?
– Voices from the previews of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (video)
– When the Transition Movement & the Community Rights Movement Start Collaborating, Watch Out!

The new geography of trade: globalization’s decline may stimulate local recovery

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It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.

… In addition to the corporate response, there is a second, more local, noncorporate response. This response is found in the Relocalization and Transition Towns movements now springing up in many developed countries. It is a bottom-up response that includes individuals and municipalities planning for a post-peak-oil future and altering their way of life.

The history of carpooling, from jitneys to ridesharing

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The word “carpooling” usually conjures images from the 1970s: service stations warning “No Gas”, lines at the pump, and bell-bottom pants. For many people, carpooling brings to mind quaint notions of penny-pinching habits that went out of style along with turning the thermostat down.

But the history of carpooling goes back almost as far as the invention of the automobile itself, and has endured well-beyond its heyday in the late 70s, according to a publication by MIT’s Rideshare Research.

Perfectly comfortable

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I don’t particularly like cars. I don’t like the way they smell, on the inside or the outside. I don’t like the feeling of being trapped in a sheet metal-and-vinyl box, my body slowly warping to the shape of a bucket seat.

If any of this seems strange to you, then there may be something funny going on inside your head and you should get it checked out. Around the world, for over a century, people everywhere have used the bicycle to get around in every kind of climate and weather.

What is energy for?

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So familiar has the social economy of energy become in modern societies, so routine its extraordinardinary wastefulness, so toxic its effects, that the capacity for a better way can be missed. By questioning the how, why and what of energy use, new possibilities – of living, travelling, eating, working and buying – can open.