Riding a bicycle can save the world

Published Apr 26 2006 by New WestArchived May 1 2006
Riding a bicycle can save the world
by Dana Green
Killer storms. Glaciers melting. A rapidly disappearing snowpack.
The signs of global warming are here, and they aren’t pretty. With the U.S. spewing 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air last year – one-quarter of the world total – a global meltdown, Day After Tomorrow-style, doesn’t seem farfetched anymore.
But getting on a bicycle saving the planet? Call me a skeptic, but I wasn’t buying it. Jim Sayer, Director of Adventure Cycling, a national bike advocacy group headquartered here in Missoula, was giving a lecture during Bike Walk Bus Week claiming bike travel could save humanity from its own excesses. So I hopped on my cruiser, with its cute little basket, and biked over.
I left convinced that, if I would only drop my car keys in the toilet and flush, a revolution would sweep the globe. One person at a time. With happy, smiling people across the planet riding bicycles everywhere.

Vive la revolution!
Okay, first we start with the problem –a virtual carbonfest in the Earth’s atmosphere. Right here in Montana, there aren’t too many people who haven’t noticed the glaciers in Glacier National Park are looking a lot smaller. Puny, actually. Outside Montana, Mt. Hood, a snowy icon with its perpetually snowcapped peak, is rapidly losing its snowy dome.
That’s where Jim Sayer has the answer. Enter enlightenment – the bicycle.
Sayer could convince Rush Limbaugh to sell his car and buy a road bike. With a fit build, wide smile, the man radiates impossibly good health. His young, blond children all cheerfully ride their own bikes around Missoula. In all, he’s the perfect person to convince the global community they need to permanently ditch their cars.
Sayer’s argument is simple: In the U.S., Sayer said, half of all trips taken are three miles and less. If just half of those trips were done by bicycle, we would save 24 billion gallons of gas each year – and reducing emissions as a result.
Those figures are why most of the world is seriously committed to promoting bike travel. So why can’t the U.S. stop spending billions on automobile travel and start spending a small portion on bikes?
It’s all about attitudes – and a political commitment, Sayer pointed out. In Japan, fuel taxes are huge. In Denmark, a 180 percent car registration fee helps encourage bicycle travel. France just hired a National Bike Czar, under the Ministry of Transportation. Copenhagen has 2,000 free bicycles out for commuters to use. And in Bogota, a city of 6.5 million, a plan is in place to ban all cars downtown during peak commute hours by 2015.
Even in Beijing, where the Chinese government is trying to encourage the purchase of automobiles (God bless capitalism), 50 percent of commuter trips are still done by bike.
“Bikes are just part of normal life – they’re respected, and no one thinks anything about it,” Sayer said. “Here, if you rode into work tomorrow on a bike, what would your (boss) say? They'd probably think you were weird.”
In the U.S., federal, state and local governments have committed almost nothing to encouraging bike use. Culturally, while business suit-clad European men get to work by bike, most American businessmen wouldn't be caught dead riding their cruiser to the office.
It’s not like everywhere in the U.S. is equally bike-unfriendly. As Waylon Lewis points out, the revolution has already begun in Boulder. Davis, California, has committed millions to make their city the bike capital of America.
The tide is turning, Sayer believes. National advocacy groups such as Adventure Cycling, Rails to Trails Conservancy, Bikes Belong Coalition, and the venerable League of American Cyclists are growing in strength, and they are pushing to get bike safety and infrastructure on the political front burner. Rails to Trails has a goal to get 90 percent of Americans within 3 miles of a bike trail network by 2020.
As for Adventure Cycling, Sayer’s group, they aren’t dreaming small. They want to see a nationwide, coast-to-coast bike “highway,” with extensive signage, allowing travelers to navigate across the country by bike.
“We think its time there was an interstate bike system,” Sayer said. “We want an official one, so people can follow signs across the country.”
But to bring on the global change, it’s all about starting local.
Missoula is mostly flat. It’s compact. It should be the perfect bike town. But its far from ideal. Although there have been improvements in recent years – extending trails, new bike/ped bridges – there’s a long way to go. Only 5 percent of all trips are by bike in the Garden City. The city hasn’t spent a lot of money on bike paths and advocacy – instead, dollars are going towards widening streets for cars, in Sayer's view.
“We have all the ingredients to be the best bike city in the nation,” Sayer said. “What if the sound you heard in Missoula wasn’t the drone of traffic, but the ring of a bike bell?”
The revolution starts with a simple act of defiance, a symbolic raised fist to the gas industry executives: Leaving the car at home.
I think I’ll leave the basket on the bike. I might need it to get to work tomorrow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another article on the same talk:Pedal to save the planet, speaker says (The Missoulian)-BA

image from http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/

Davis: The Best Bicycle Town in North America

Alex SteffenJuly 10, 2006 10:52 AM
Bicycles are tools for urban sustainability. In North America, however, bikes are largely relegated to a recreational role, and people who use them as their main means of transportation often do so at great incovenience and danger
One city, though, has pedaled against the trend. Bicycling Magazine calls Davis the best town in America for cyclists: I'm here to check it out and on the ground it's hard to argue. Davis is a biker's nirvana.
This small city of 65,000 people has over 100 miles of bike lanes and bike paths (indeed, some claim that Davis was the first city in North America to create separate bike lanes). Bicycle infrastructure is everywhere – from bike shops to bike maps to artistic bike racks on the sidewalks. Most people here own bikes, and 17% of Davis residents commute to work on them. Davis even has a local Critical Mass group, though as my traveling companion said, CM seems a bit redundant here, as at least in the residential areas it's hard to find any car traffic from which you could reclaim the streets in the first place.
How did Davis do it, though? The climate and location – hot, flat and dry, with a large population of university students – certainly help. But even more, Davis has made a series of really far-sighted policy and planning decisions which have de-emphasized the car and made biking and walking easier and more attractive.
For one thing, though not a particularly dense city, Davis is fairly compact, with a well-defined downtown that flows into the university campus. (The university bans almost all car traffic). Slow-growth policies and good planning have kept the city relatively tightly woven (though it shows definite signs of sprawl on the fringes). The result is that most destinations within Davis are bike-able, and the surrounding agricultural lands both provide for great recreational riding and act as something of a greenbelt.
Davis has also made bicycling a top transportation priority, putting real funding into bike infrastructure, even building bike overpasses so that cyclists can cross the freeway more safely and easily. The city has an amazing comprehensive bike plan (big PDF) which details the wide variety of innovative ways the city aims to support and promote bicycling. (A more reader-friendly overview of Davis' efforts is David Takemoto-Weerts' Evolution of a Bicycle Friendly Community — the Davis Model.)
And the innovations continue, such as the bike signal head:
The most recent Davis innovation that may soon see use in other cities is the bicycle signal head. Modeled after similar devices used in Europe, the bike signal head has been approved by the California Traffic Control Devices Committee for certain specific uses, generally where large volumes of bicycle traffic are encountered. In Davis most of the devices are used to control bike traffic at mid-block bike path crossings of roadways. However, at one particular intersection, a significant interface between the campus and city with over one thousand bike crossings per hour at peak times, the special lights have been employed to provide cyclists with their own separate phase during which only they may cross a busy arterial. Bicycle collision rates at the site have been dramatically reduced since the signals’ installation, and the device shows promise for similar situations where bike traffic volumes warrant their use."
Bicycles won't work everywhere, all the time, but they are a key tool in the chest of innovations we're putting together for building bright green cities, and there's probably not a city in North America that couldn't learn something from Davis.
(image: TheoPaaske)

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004676.html

Tropical Forest Aid Planned by Brazil, California (and Indonesia forest ?)

By Adam Satariano
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- California pledged financial aid for efforts to curb logging in Indonesia and Brazil, aiming to slow deforestation that scientists say adds to global warming.

(pic from http://merchistongeography.blogspot.com/2007/12/biome-case-studies.html)
State officials and governors of the two rainforest nations reached a preliminary agreement that become a part of California's 2006 climate-change law. Polluting companies in the state would get credit for meeting emissions-reductions rules by investing in forest-conservation efforts, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and officials from the two nations said at a climate-change conference yesterday in Beverly Hills, California.
Trees absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and cutting or burning them down around the world fosters more heat- trapping emissions than does transportation, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said. The agreement pioneers using forest preservation in developing nations to stem global warming, conservationists said at the conference.
``This is the first time policymakers are creating concrete rules and incentives to protect the world's remaining tropical forests,'' said Toby Janson-Smith, director of the forest carbon markets program for Conservation International, in an interview.
California's climate-change law, set to take effect Jan. 1, 2012, calls for the state to slash carbon-dioxide emissions from industry, vehicles and other sources by 2020 back to the 1990 level. Adding forest preservation to the law's regulations, which are yet to be written, may for example allow utilities such as PG&E Corp. or the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power to help meet their pollution caps by investing in anti-logging programs.
`Sending a Message'
Indonesia and Brazil respectively are the world's third- and fourth-largest emitters of greenhouse gases after China and the U.S., the World Bank has said. Deforestation contributes about 70 percent to 90 percent of the two developing nations' emissions, the environmental group Conservation International says. One- fifth of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide stem from deforestation.
A signing ceremony for the deal was held yesterday evening at the conclusion of the first day of the Governors' Global Climate Summit that Schwarzenegger is hosting at the Beverly Hilton hotel.
Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich also signed the ``declaration of understanding,'' along with leaders from the Indonesia provinces of Papua and Aceh and the Brazilian states of Amazonas, Para, Amapa and Mato Grosso. The six regions account for 60 percent of the world's remaining tropical forests, Schwarzenegger said.
The deal is ``sending a strong message that this issue should be front and center during negotiations for the next global agreement on climate change,'' Schwarzenegger said in a statement.
Challenge to Verify
To be accepted, the anti-logging investment projects will have to meet California standards that regulators will draft, according to the deal. The state's climate-change program already has guidelines for forest management projects within its borders.
The biggest challenges dealing with Brazilian and Indonesian state governments are finding dependable methods to measure, verify and accurately report the levels of greenhouse gases that are saved through the investments, said Michele de Nevers, a senior manager at the World Bank's environment department, in an interview.
``These are governments that have weak institutions to begin with, and this will put those institutions to the test,'' Nevers said in an interview.

`Add Value to Forest'
Amazonas Governor Eduardo Braga said poverty typically drives communities to sell forests to timber companies or convert it for farmland. Anti-logging investments through California's climate change program can provide a good alternative, he said.
``The only way to preserve the rainforests is adding economic value to the standing forest,'' Braga said.
The agreement signed by California, Wisconsin and Illinois may eventually allow investors in the Brazilian and Indonesian forest-preservation projects to earn credits that can be used in emerging regional U.S. emissions-trading programs.
California is devising a so-called cap-and-trade program as part of the Western Climate Initiative along with six other states and four Canadian provinces.
Wisconsin and Illinois are part of the Midwestern Regional Greenhouse Gas Accord. Ten Northeastern states have created a trading system opened earlier this year known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
United Nations negotiators in Bali, Indonesia, last year called for the next global climate-change treaty to reward developing nations for preserving forests. The existing accord, the Kyoto Protocol, expires in 2012 and didn't include deforestation credits. The next rounds of talks are scheduled to be held Dec. 1-12 in Poznan, Poland.
Janson-Smith said remote sensor imagery, satellite photos and on-the-ground verification are methods that can be used to ensure the forests aren't being burned down.
``Everyone recognizes the importance of including tropical forests in future climate agreements, but this is the first time we have concrete action towards that end,'' he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Adam Satariano in San Francisco at asatariano1@bloomberg.net

Sparrow numbers 'plummet by 68%'

The population of house sparrows in Britain has fallen by 68% in the past three decades, according to the RSPB.

A report by the charity said the paving over of front gardens and removal of trees had caused a big decline in insects which the birds eat.

It suggests that sparrows are now disappearing altogether from cities such as London, Bristol and Edinburgh.

Dr Will Peach, from the RSPB, said many gardens had become "no-go areas for once-common British birds".

Starving chicks

Scientists from the RSPB joined forces with De Montfort University and Natural England to investigate the decline of the house sparrow.

They studied numbers in Leicester over a three-year period and found that they fell by nearly a third.

Dr Peach said every pair of house sparrows must raise at least five chicks a year to maintain the population, but many were starving to death in their nests or were too weak to live long after fledging.

The study did find that chick survival was higher in areas where insects, such as aphids, were more abundant. [Gardeners can help by] being lazy, doing nothing and allowing the garden to be a little bit scruffy

Dr Will Peach, RSPB

Dr Peach said: "Peanuts and seeds are great for birds for most of the year, but sparrows need insects in summer - and lots of them - to feed their hungry young.

"Honeysuckle, wild roses, hawthorn or fruit trees are perfect for insects and therefore house sparrows.

"The trend towards paving of front gardens and laying decking in the back, and the popularity of ornamental plants from other parts of the world, has made many gardens no-go areas for once common British birds."

He said gardeners could help sparrows by "being lazy, doing nothing and allowing the garden to be a little bit scruffy".

The study, published in the journal Animal Conservation, concluded that the decline in house sparrows in Britain began in the mid-1980s.

In London, numbers fell by 60% between 1994 and 2004.

The house sparrow has been added to the list of species identified by the UK Biodiversity Action Plan as in need of greater protection.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7738798.stm

animals and plants facing possible extinction

Bush 'seeks to ease wildlife law'
By Jonathan Beale BBC News, Washington

The Bush administration wants to help mining and drilling projects go ahead
US environmentalists have accused President George W Bush of trying to rush through changes to the Endangered Species Act in his last days in office.
They say the changes could take away protection for animals and plants facing possible extinction.
The Bush administration wants to make it easier for drilling, mining and major construction projects to go ahead without a full scientific assessment.
Under current rules, the impact of such projects must be assessed by experts.
The changes proposed by the Bush administration would let federal agencies make the decisions without a full scientific assessment as to the likely impact on the environment.
Mr Bush has already been criticised by environmentalists for adding fewer than 10 species of plant and animals a year to the endangered list.
That contrasts with former President Bill Clinton, who added an average of 65 species a year.
Mr Bush has until Friday to publish the new rules, if they are to take effect before he leaves office.
If he presses ahead, environmental groups and some states are almost certain to challenge the decision in the courts

Bad Facts about our earth

1. If you throw away 2 aluminum cans, you waste more energy than 1,000,000,000 (one billion) of the world's poorest people use a day.
2. Making a new can from scratch uses the uses the energy equal to half a can of gasoline.
   About one third of what an average American throws out is packaging.
   More than 1,000,000,000 (one billion) trees are used to make disposable diapers every year.
3. In one minute, 50 acres of rainforest are destroyed.
   Some rain has a pH of 3 or 4. (which is pretty acidic, considering 7 is neutral, not acidic, and battery acid has a pH of 1). Some fish, such as lake trout and smallmouth bass, have trouble reproducing at a pH of 6, which is only slightly acidic. Some clams and snails can't survive at all. Most crayfish are dead at a pH of 5. You can see how bad this is for the environment.
4. On average, a person in the US uses energy two times more than a person in Japan or West Germany does, and 50 times more than a person in India.
   About 90% of the energy used in lighting a standard (incandescent) light bulb is lost as heat.
5. Air conditioning uses 10 times more energy than a fan, therefore, it creates 10 times the pollutants.
   It takes half the output of the Alaskan pipeline to heat the air that escapes from all the homes in the US during a year.
6. Cars and pick-up trucks are responsible for about 20% of the carbon dioxide released into the air.
   There are about 500 million automobiles on the planet, burning an average of 2 gallons of fuel a day. Each gallon releases 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air.
   About 80% of our trash goes to landfills, 10% is incinerated, and 10% is recycled.
7. Since there is little oxygen underground, where we bury our garbage, to help bacteria eat the garbage, almost nothing happens to it. Scientists have dug into landfills and found ears of corn still intact after 20 years, and newspapers still readable after 30.
8. The average American makes about 3.5 pounds of trash a day.
   In a year, the average American uses as much wood in the form of paper as the average resident of the developing world burns as fuel.

http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/8319/savethearth.html

Global Warming

Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century, and its projected continuation.
The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 100 years ending in 2005.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.

(image from : www.effectofglobalwarming.com/global-warming.html)

Increasing global temperature is expected to cause sea level to rise, an increase in the intensity of extreme weather events, and significant changes to the amount and pattern of precipitation, likely leading to an expanse of tropical areas and increased pace of desertification. Other expected effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, modifications of trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.