Divorce Your Car!

The Gulf Spill, One Year Later: Still a Good Reason to Get Off Oil

2011-04-20T15:35:00.003-04:00

Today marks one year since the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform blew up, killing eleven workers and initiating what’s been called the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. This week, news outlets are running retrospectives of this crisis that has not yet ended. There is still oil to clean up, there are still claims to process, and there are still visible environmental effects around the Gulf of this huge spill.

In a segment a few days ago, NPR reporter Debbie Elliott mentioned the significance of two ongoing Gulf spill stories: the many long-term ecological effects that remain unknown, and the significant mental health impacts on Gulf residents that continue to grow. As an example of the latter, Elliott noted that calls to an Alabama mental health hotline tripled just last month, long after the Deepwater Horizon leak was capped.

It’s a sad circumstance whose repetition could be avoided if only we could wean ourselves from oil. With an eye toward recovering from oil addiction, I ran a series of posts on this blog starting on June 21 last year and running daily for a month as crude continued to gush from the broken BP well into the Gulf.

These posts suggested simple strategies we might all pursue to cut our use of crude, things like using bike trailers, walking kids to school, taking Amtrak, avoiding petroleum-based perfumes and body-care products, or eating food produced with less fossil fuel. The series ended with a four-part story (starting here) about a hypothetical small town that reduced its use of oil with several simple-to-institute measures.

It’s still a good time to do these things, and I hope readers will return to these posts and reconsider the ideas they suggest. Not only is the Gulf still struggling a year later from the oil spill’s ugly effects, but gas costs have once again spiked. We might no longer have a spill disaster topping the headlines, but we still have a long list of good reasons -- and many good ways -- to get off oil.

"The Greenest Routes from A to B" 3/24 at MTU

2011-03-15T09:20:00.013-04:00

From pedestrian streets to urban bikesharing to modern streetcars to renewable fuels, innovative options for green travel are expanding around North America and the world. What makes these travel modes green? And which are the greenest ways to get around?

I’ll be talking about some of the best examples of green transport at Michigan Technological University on Thursday evening, March 24th at 7 p.m. My one-hour presentation, “The Greenest Routes from A to B,” is part of MTU’s Earth Week, organized and sponsored by Students for Environmental Sustainability.

The group will give out copies of Divorce Your Car! to the earliest arrivals at the event, while supplies last. There will be about a half-hour for questions and discussion after the presentation.

If you’re anywhere near Houghton on March 24th, please join us in Room U115 of the MTU M&M building. I’m delighted to be able to present news of some exciting recent developments in green travel, and I look forward to seeing you there!

Photo credits: Katie Alvord; B-cycle; www.pedbikeimages.org

Transportation Transformation, Installment Three: Bikes Bikes Bikes Bikes

2011-02-03T17:59:00.004-05:00

A guest post by
Nelson Sommerfeldt

Bikes, my favorite mode of transport. To be honest, I have yet to fully embrace the bicycle as my primary vehicle. A few factors play into that. One, like most things bikes are expensive here, even second hand. Two, if I’m going to ride almost every trip I require at least a decent level of performance, meaning I won’t settle for a clunker scraped together from the parts bin. Lastly, public transportation is so cheap, easy and comfortable is it difficult to give up. But like many things, making a smooth transition is important to long-term acceptance. I’ve already made the move from car to public transport, and by the end of our stay here I hope to be a full-fledged cycling commuter.

For the first few months here I was able to participate in Stockholm’s city bike program. (If you are unfamiliar with bike sharing programs, see the explanation in my first installment). When I was considering transportation options, using public transport combined with the city bikes was the most cost-effective option. Any used bikes I found that I liked were $600 to $1100, and that didn’t always include fenders and a rack. $800 gets me public transportation for the entire school year, so I knew that if I was to get a bike for commuting I would have to make it my exclusive choice for travel. Being a relative rookie when it comes to commuting I was nervous about my dedication, especially with my first Swedish winter approaching. Paying less than $30 to use the city’s bikes sounded like a much better option.

Bike sharing is a great concept and is quite popular in Stockholm, but I haven’t always been so excited to grab a bike. I always have three concerns when checking one out: getting a newer model that fits me, having air in the tires, and finding gears that work. There are two generations of bikes, and only the newer ones come close to fitting my lanky 6-foot-4 frame. Sometimes, there might only be one newer bike in the rack, and I have to spend several minutes checking in and out all the other bikes to get it. Once I get the right frame, I have to check the tires for adequate air. I only made the mistake of neglecting this early on. Most of the city bike tires were low on air, which I didn’t realize until October when they got a top-up and then I noticed how much faster they were. When tire pressure is deemed acceptable, that's when I’ll take the bike. Once riding, you quickly learn how many usable gears you have, which most of the time is two, in any combination. All city bikes are equipped with 3-speed internally geared hubs, but most have been abused to the point where two and sometimes only one gear still work. For some trips this is a non-issue, but for the moderately hilly, 4 km ride to campus, it is nice to have some gears so I don’t get too sweaty for class. So while all of these things are relatively minor on their own, combined it makes selecting city bikes over public transportation somewhat difficult. But hey, it's only $30, right?

Certainly, the city bikes have their place. For quick errands during the day they are hard to beat. Depending on where in the city you are going, they can be significantly faster than buses or trains. And if the weather is nice in the morning, but then rains in the afternoon (which it did A LOT this fall) it's nice not to have your own bike to deal with. But ultimately they are built to be generically utilitarian and thus not much fun to ride. I do plan to sign up for the program again next summer because it can be very convenient and is so cheap, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to throwing a leg over those blue beasts.

But there is the chance next year will be different. I had a major awakening in mid-October when I was riding my mountain bike to the Nacka nature reserve. Bikes aren’t allowed on trains or buses in the city, so I rode from my apartment in the north to the trails in the south, about a 50 minute trip. Riding my own bike through the city was so much more fun and faster than riding the generic city bike that it reignited my desire to get a bike for commuting. Even now in winter, bike lanes are all plowed, rocked (they use pea gravel instead of sand, much more bike friendly) and lit with the same consideration as roads. So if all goes well, next fall I’ll be able to get my own commuter and become fully self-propelled!

It's become clear the main ingredient to making bicycle commuting accessible is the infrastructure. So many of the roads here have been built to handle every type of traffic, which really makes riding in the city fun. Back home in Michigan, I try to ride legally on the roads in town, but they are so crowded with cars as it is that I feel like I’m interrupting traffic, and sometimes drivers let me know I’m interrupting so I feel even more anxious and unsafe. If cities really want to promote cycling, the infrastructure has to be in place so bikers know where they are safe to go and drivers know where bikers will be.

While I know the name of the game here is “divorce your car,” I’ve learned that cars aren’t always a necessary evil, but a necessary tool. As the book itself points out, there are ways to fit cars optimally into the transportation mix. I’ve recently started understanding how that can work, so next time I will discuss Stockholm and its cars. All of them, not just the Volvos and Saabs.

Hej då!

Photo credits: ©2011 Nelson Sommerfeldt

"Save the Planet One Trip at a Time"

2011-01-31T18:03:00.003-05:00

In case you haven’t seen it yet, the latest essay recounting my particular approach to car divorce appeared in the December 2010 / January 2011 issue of The Progressive. “Save the Planet One Trip at a Time” tells how I get around these days and suggests a few ways we can all free ourselves from the “need” to drive so much.

I first started reading The Progressive in the 1980s when I worked at the Napa City-County Library. You have to love a journal that's been around so long -- more than 100 years now -- and that takes such a strong stand against disenfranchisement, and for peace, social justice, and the environment.

The December 2010 / January 2011 special issue on “Saving the Earth” continues that long tradition. The entire issue is nicely done and well worth a look, with essays and interviews by and with Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, and others. Check it out by going to www.progressive.org, where subscribers can access full text of the magazine online.

Transportation Transformation, Installment Two: Trains + Buses = Mobility

2010-10-20T11:29:00.013-04:00

A guest post by
Nelson Sommerfeldt

In my first installment, I introduced the Stockholm County public transportation system. It consists primarily of a complicated network of trains and buses that thoroughly cover Stockholm City, but also reach impressively far into the rural areas of the county. As you might expect, traveling within the city is extremely easy almost any time of day. When you live in the suburbs, as I do, traveling does require a bit more planning. But you adapt and it becomes a part of how you live. Does that mean I’ve lost my mobility freedom? Become a slave to someone else’s schedule? To a small degree, yes, but it’s hardly a net loss.

SL, which stands for Storstockholms Lokaltrafik AB, is a corporation wholly owned and managed by the Stockholm County Council that manages all public transportation in Stockholm County. Roughly half of the operating budget is funded by county taxes and the other half by ticket revenues. The system is incredibly complex, running hundreds of routes, encompassing thousands of stops and carrying hundreds of thousands of people every day. An impressive machine to operate indeed.

Using public transportation is proving to be many times less expensive than owning a car. I purchase tickets on a monthly basis, which gives me unlimited travel on any route during that time. With my student discount, one month costs $70, roughly $2.33 per day. Back home I was married to a lovely 2005 Subaru Outback averaging 20 mpg, and when I left the US I was paying an average of $3.00 for a gallon of 92 octane gasoline. I was fortunate enough to own my car outright, so I won’t include a monthly loan payment. However, insurance still cost me around $120 per month ($4 per day) and with my car being a bit older, maintenance costs were about $1000 per year ($2.75 per day). Because of many long distance road trips, I had many more miles than the average person, 130,000 in 6 years. For the sake of comparison we’ll say I averaged 30 miles of local travel per day, half of the total mileage. All these numbers add up to a monthly car ownership bill of $338, or $11.27 per day. I’m saving $268 per month in transportation costs, and that doesn’t even include a loan payment! And this is for owning my car in the US, owning a car in Sweden is far more expensive (i.e. $30k for a Ford Focus and $7.00/gal gas) so the savings are even more extreme when compared locally.

The primary argument for owning a car is that it gives you personal mobility freedom. However, nearly all of my traveling needs are met with SL. My daily commute to campus is 5.6 miles and takes about 30 minutes using two buses. The timing is perfect: I have almost no wait in the transfer and I arrive on campus at exactly the time I need. SL statistics say the same commute would take about 15 minutes in a car, not including time to find a parking space. However, I usually spend that time on the bus checking my schedule, emails or Facebook on my phone, something I couldn’t do driving a car in city traffic. So really, those 15 extra minutes on the bus are actually 15 minutes I would have spent sitting at my desk anyway. It’s hard to count it as lost time. And while you can carry rather large packages on the bus (I took a bike box home), it’s true that I could never move a couch or mattress on the bus or train. But on the very rare occasion that I do need to do that, I can rent a car with a trailer from almost any gas station for 2 hours and pay only $75 plus fuel. So for an extra $268 per month in my pocket, I am not giving up much.

It’s not all roses with SL, though. There are times when I get frustrated dealing with busses and trains. My biggest pet peeve is when I just miss a stop, and end up having to wait 10, 15 or 20 minutes for the next ride. I have mitigated this significantly since I started using SL’s mobile site, allowing me to type in addresses and store my most frequently used stops to calculate exactly when I need to be there and how long my trip will take. For instance, once a week I stop by the grocery store on my way home from school. This is often at random times, so when I’m riding the train there, I will look up when the next bus heading home will be leaving. This gives me a goal, to buy only what I need and get in and out of the store quickly to catch the bus. While this usually works well, most recently I picked the wrong check out line, behind a woman buying loads of weird produce and the new guy at the register having to look it all up. So I ended up just missing the bus and had to wait 20 minutes for the next one. But as I get better and better about moving within bus and train schedules, most of the time I’m catching rides right on time or waiting just a few minutes. I see this becoming less of an issue as I hone my public transportation skills.

Along the same lines, there is a challenge in traveling to or from home during odd times of day. For example, if I’m in the city on a Friday or Saturday night, I usually set an alarm on my phone to remind me that I need to head home. Around midnight, buses in my neighborhood switch to a one-hour rotation and then stop running at 2:00 a.m. So if I miss a particular trip I will have to wait another hour or possibly walk home. While this does dictate how I behave during these times, it has yet to really bother me. In fact, I kind of like it. It helps keep me aware of the time and prevents me from inadvertently staying out later than I’d like.

Overall I am extremely pleased traveling with SL. The few inconveniences I do have are surely worth the significant monetary savings. In a later installment, I’ll discuss SL’s initiative to eliminate CO2 emissions from public transport, and eventually from all vehicles in the Stockholm City. But next time it’s all about the ultimate CO2 fighter and super-fun joyride, bicycles. I’ve been using the City Bike program for the past six weeks, and I’ll report on all the good and bad of riding bikes in Stockholm.

Hej då!

Photos: Both from Storstockholms Lokaltrafik (SL)

Transportation Transformation, Installment One: Welcome to Stockholm

2010-09-28T16:59:00.011-04:00

A guest post by
Nelson Sommerfeldt

Editor's note: Location and community design make a huge difference in our ability to live car-free. This July, Nelson and Melanie Sommerfeldt (pictured at right) began exploring this first-hand when they moved from Michigan's rural, car-dependent Upper Peninsula to urban, bike-and-transit-friendly Stockholm, Sweden. In this first in a series of guest posts, Nelson writes of the transition, of what he and Melanie have seen so far of Stockholm's transport systems, and of their goal to turn this move into a permanent car divorce. -KTA

Ever since I was 16 and had a permit to drive I’ve had a car. Until now.

In July of 2010 I moved from humble little Houghton in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Stockholm, Sweden, the self-proclaimed “Capital of Scandinavia.” The reason for the move is to complete a Master’s degree in Sustainable Energy Engineering at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, the Royal Institute of Technology. As you might expect, I’m a tree-hugging, eco-freak who wants to make things difficult for us Americans by suggesting we might have to change a few things about how we operate if we are to continue to enjoy the planet as we’ve known it for the past one million years. While I consider sustainability a holistic problem, transportation is an easy target but far from an easy topic.

In the quest to find out what sustainability is, and how to achieve it, I have come to Sweden with an experiment in mind. As we left the U.S., both my wife Melanie and I divorced our cars. Not too surprising since we didn’t want to let them sit idle for two years and they were too big for carry-on. But the real challenge will come when we return home. Will we be able to avoid a shotgun wedding? It’s a particularly challenging notion since we plan to return to Houghton, a rural town designed around motor transport and 270 inches of annual snowfall. The idea is that while here, we can learn how to adapt to public and non-motorized transportation as a regular way of life. Then, upon our return, we can use that experience to continue living car-free. It's much easier to get off the drug when you don’t have access to it, and this is how we hope to get clean. So, let me introduce you to the rehab center.

As one might expect, it is quite easy to not own a car in Stockholm. Stockholm County manages a vast transportation network, consisting of an underground rail system known as tunnelbana, buses that criss-cross the entire city and county, several light rail commuter trains that extend into the suburbs and rural towns, and even commuter ferries that dock downtown. This system can all be accessed with a single card and for very reasonable prices. As a student I am offered discounts, so I can travel as much as I want for as little as $2.15 per day. But even the average adult can travel for $3.30 a day, still a very reasonable price. Oh, and all of the buses run on either biodiesel, ethanol, or natural gas. It’s a part of the city’s goal to be fossil-fuel-free by 2050, but more on that in later installments.

In addition to the motorized public transportation, the city runs a bike-share program similar to systems in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Portland and Minneapolis. There are stations set up all around Stockholm where you can check out a bike, use it for up to three hours, then return it to any other station. This service can be used for 200 SEK, or around $28 for an entire seven-month season. And you never have to worry about any of the costs of storage or actually owning the bike. Once you have a bike, it is a breeze to get around town. The city is covered in bike paths, many of them completely separated from the road; often they have their own intersections and stop lights. Even when you don’t have stop lights, cyclists -- and pedestrians -- are always given the right of way at road crossings. And speaking of pedestrians, there are sidewalks everywhere! When we first arrived, we thought we would have to avoid major road intersections in the city, expecting massive car infrastructure with no pedestrian access. That’s how it is at home, right? Not so here. The pedestrian infrastructure is just as significant as the auto, with hundreds of people making use of it. It’s quite refreshing, really, the city is very considerate of all forms of transport.

To be certain, there are lots of cars in Stockholm. Almost 300,000 of them are in use in the city according to the 2007 Stockholm City Research and Statistics Data Guide. The traffic congestion can get quite tough during the mornings and evenings, enough so that Stockholm was ranked as one of the 20 worst cities to commute into (by car) in a 2010 IBM survey. In 2007, the city implemented a graduated toll system at all major inroads, charging more for entries during the busiest times and gradually less for less busy times. The highest tolls are 20 SEK, about $3.00, and you get charged going in and out. Then once you make it into the city, an annual parking pass can cost you 5000 SEK, which is roughly $2.50 per working day. The revenues generated by the tolls are to be used to maintain and improve roads in the city. In fact, one of the hot topics for this year’s national election (which just ended earlier this month) is the proposal of a highway tunnel that would travel north/south all the way under Stockholm to act as a bypass and reduce traffic through the city center. The party in favor of it won.

So with all of the options available, you would think that transportation here is easy, right? Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no. I, much like many eco-freaks, would like to see more investment in diversifying America’s transportation system: build or expand light rail, add bus routes and improve bike paths. So naturally, living in Stockholm is a very exciting opportunity to be able to come into a very mature and diverse city transportation system. I will be writing several more installments here on the Divorce Your Car blog reporting both the ups and downs of my experiences in going car-free, and hope it will help paint a better picture in your mind of sustainable transportation systems and maybe give you more ideas about how to divorce your car.

Hej då!

Celebrating World Carfree Day

2010-09-22T09:25:00.014-04:00

Happy World Carfree Day! Cruise the international news online, and you'll find evidence of some of the roughly 1,000 Carfree Day events being held today in a reported 40 countries around the globe. Hong Kong's mayor, for instance, left his limo in the garage this morning and walked to work - a distance of only about 300 meters, but hey, it's significant that he took part. Elsewhere, three thousand cyclists pedaled in a mass bike-ride held in Taichung, Taiwan; Curitiba, Brazil, had scheduled events throughout the day; Vienna planned street parties; and groups in the U.S., including in Chicago and Washington, D.C., encouraged motorists to leave their cars at home.

Since 2000, September 22 has been recognized around the globe as World Carfree Day. Events organized to celebrate the day aim to demonstrate the advantages of car-free living. The hope is that this will encourage the adoption of more car-free days throughout the year and more sustainable transport overall. As I write this, World Carfree Day events are underway in scores of countries and communities; some organizers have posted links on the World Carfree Day Facebook page while specific cities, including Toronto, Mumbai, Wellington, New Zealand, and Metro DC, have their own Facebook listings; and there has even been an odd attempt to organize counter-demonstrations, as reported by Sarah Goodyear in Grist.

I'm out in the boonies, so I plan to celebrate by staying out of any motor vehicles today and taking a long walk in the autumn woods near our house. I've marked this day, too, by renewing my support of the World Carfree Network.

I'm also prepping to do something new on this blog: for the first time, I'll be hosting some guest blog posts. For starters, I'm very excited that Nelson Sommerfeldt will be guest-blogging here about his recent "Transportation Transformation" -- he and his wife Melanie Johnson Sommerfeldt just went car-free as they moved from car-dependent Houghton, Michigan, to bike-and-transit-friendly Stockholm, Sweden. Nelson and Melanie hope to continue this car divorce not only throughout the two years they're in Sweden, but also after they return to Michigan. A post from Nelson is coming up next, so stay tuned!

The scenes of car-free living above are from Madison, Wisconsin (photo credit: Katie Alvord); Utrecht, Holland (photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org / Ryan Snyder); Houghton, Michigan (photo credit: Mary Been); and Toronto, Canada (photo credit: Katie Alvord).

Yet Another Reason to Divorce Your Car

2010-08-30T18:32:00.007-04:00

Alberta's Athabasca River runs through what once was a boreal wilderness, but is now the industrialized site of the world's largest energy project: Canada's oil sands, also known as tar sands. Every major oil company has a stake in developing this dirty resource, which involves mining with a complex of roads, pipes, pumps, and horizontal wells; processing with massive amounts of energy and water; and mega-production of waste, including toxic heavy metals funneled into huge, leaky tailings ponds.

Today a team of scientists released findings which confirm that oil sands development sends a raft of priority pollutants -- mercury, nickel, thallium, lead, cadmium, copper, silver and zinc among them -- into the Athabasca River and its tributaries. By discovering many of these contaminants in concentrations higher near the tar sands than farther away, or higher downstream from tar sands mining than upstream, the study shoots holes in government and industry claims that the unhealthy levels of these elements in the Athabasca watershed are natural. It also gives weight to concerns that increased cancer rates in the region might be linked to the very polluting processes involved in extraction of bitumen -- later refined into gasoline and other oil products -- from these sands.

This is important information for every every big user of petroleum, including every U.S. driver. Our thirst for oil and gasoline has used up a huge percentage of the easier, "cleaner" supplies of petroleum feedstocks, diverting us more and more into dirtier and more dangerous sources: deep-water wells, for instance, and so-called "alternatives" like oil shales and sands. Since 2001, writes Andrew Nikiforuk in his award-winning book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, Canada's oil sands have made it the single largest exporter of oil to the U.S.

Andrew Nikiforuk explains the destruction of boreal ecosystems by tar sands development to an audience at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wisconsin, October 2009.

I met Nikiforuk at last year's annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. He wrote Tar Sands, he said, because he got mad about what the development of these fields was doing to his home, and to his friends. From rare cancers to social degeneracy, extraction of bitumen from tar sands has visited hellish scenarios on the region. Nikiforuk writes:

As a twenty-year resident of Calgary, I have watched the 'human ecosystem wastage' escalate year by year, as hundreds of fortune seekers pour into my city every week. Every day on my way to work I pass another homeless man ruined by crack cocaine or bad bitumen luck .... Panhandlers dot the streets .... Just three blocks from our house in a so-called desirable neighbourhood, a man's arm was found in a Dumpster. Police found the rest of the body somewhere else .... Avarice fills the Calgary air, and most people run like hamsters on a treadmill .... My three sons believe that driving a BMW or a Porsche is normal,because a bitumen boom fills the streets with flashy cars. The traffic is overwhelming .... The [drug] use ... the wife beatings, the road accidents, the destruction of wildlife, the uprooting of familes, the debasement of property rights ... the whole unmitigated frenzy .... Canada ... is in the throes of an addiction.

The book goes on to document the incredible environmental damage visited on northern Alberta by this rush to feed our oil habit. For instance:

The open-pit mining operations look more hellish than an Appalachian coal field. To coax just one barrel of bitumen from the Athabasca sand pudding, companies must mow down hundreds of trees, roll up acres of soil, drain wetlands, dig up four tons of earth to secure two tons of bituminous sand, and then give those two tons a hot wash. The process costs approximately $100,000 per flowing barrel, making bitumen one of the planet's most expensive fossil fuels.

Tar Sands also quotes David Schindler, a prominent water ecologist and one of the authors of today's study, who notes that the industry's increased demands for water have exacerbated climate-change-linked declines in runoff into the Athabasca watershed. Will enough water remain for fish and other wildlife to survive? Good question, especially when they likely also suffer from the higher pollutant concentrations found by the study announced today.

When I bought my copy of Tar Sands from Andrew Nikiforuk last year, he signed it with the inscription: "Another reason to Divorce Your Car!" Today's scientific research yet again confirms that we have good reasons to think twice about driving, and about all our uses of petroleum.

For some images of what tar sands development is doing to the landscape, see for instance these images taken by Lindsay Telfer and posted at the Sierra Club Canada site.

Recovering from Oil Dependence: Urging the Feds to Get With the Program

2010-07-20T15:18:00.005-04:00

This is the last in a series of 30 blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

For the 30th of my 30 posts in 30 days, I’m writing a letter to Congress. I’m not doing this because I look to the U.S. government – which has bumbled over energy policy for years – to solve our oil dependence problem. If you’ve read the last 29 posts, you’ll know I think we can do a great deal at the local and individual level to ease petroleum addiction. In fact, some of the most creative paths to oil freedom are being forged by citizens and communities.

That said, having the Feds get with the program would make recovering from petroleum dependence a whole lot easier. Our national government could do several things to help us get off oil. In my letter, I’ve included a few that make sense to me. Below is my missive; I’m sending versions of this to our local Congressional Representative, Bart Stupak; to Michigan Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow; and to President Barack Obama. I invite you to join me in a virtual letter-writing party and pen your own note to the Feds.

Dear Representative Stupak, Senator Levin, Senator Stabenow, and President Obama:

I write to urge the passage of legislation to help free our country from its costly, crippling dependence on petroleum. Toxic air and water pollution, massive military expenditures to secure oil supplies, and climate change concerns have already given us reasons enough to wean ourselves from oil. Now, we’ve added the stunning economic and environmental damage from the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to the list of reasons we so desperately need big changes in our petroleum-centric national energy policy.

I strongly favor the measures below to help us reduce our consumption of oil:

Please pass some form of carbon pricing. I favor a robust carbon tax, phased in over time, starting low and increasing at regular intervals to discourage the use of fossil fuels and encourage the use of renewable energy. Such a tax could help fund alternatives to gasoline use. It could also fund recovery from some of the ongoing environmental and public health damage done by burning fossil fuels. In addition, it would provide a clear signal in the marketplace, allowing businesses to invest in cleaner energy with more economic certainty.

Please eliminate all tax credits and deductions currently provided to the oil industry. I find it ludicrous that the most profitable companies in the world – ExxonMobil comes to mind – receive what amounts to about $4 billion per year in tax breaks from the U.S. government, as reported recently by the New York Times. These tax breaks are inappropriate favors to an industry that doesn’t need or deserve them. They also constitute a huge barrier to the competitiveness of alternative energy sources.

Please significantly increase funding for transit, bicycling, and walking facilities. I suggest doing this with revenues from carbon pricing and from eliminating oil industry tax breaks. Since about 70% of the petroleum we consume in this country gets used for transportation, such measures have huge potential to reduce our use of oil and gasoline. They are popular at the local level, as well; a good example is the Safe Routes to School program, which has helped improve child safety and reduce the need for parents to drive. Safe Routes to School has also improved walking and cycling conditions for all community members. This and similar programs deserve to be expanded. I'd like to see Amtrak's long-distance trains included in this, as well.

Please establish stronger federal tax credits for energy efficiency. The amount of energy our country wastes is mind-boggling and unnecessary. Other economies in the developed world consume less energy per unit GDP and rank more highly on quality- of-life measures. We can rebuild our economy more efficiently and effectively if we use energy more efficiently.

Please improve energy efficiency in the transportation sector by imposing a national feebate/rebate system for car purchases. A system of high purchase taxes on gas-guzzling larger luxury cars, with corresponding credits on fuel-efficient vehicles, could be structured to be revenue-neutral; that is, the high taxes on gas guzzlers would pay for the administration of the program and for the credits to buyers of fuel-efficient vehicles.

The best thing you can do for the country now is to help pass a more rational energy policy that includes these and similar measures. I appreciate your attention to my concerns and look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Katie Alvord

A Town Recovers from Oil Dependence, Part 4

2010-07-19T15:45:00.014-04:00

This is #29 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

In posts over the last few days, I’ve written of several changes in a town that’s taking steps to recover from oil dependence. Bit by bit, small efforts that individuals are pursuing to become more free of petroleum and cars (the heaviest oil consumers) are adding up to a bigger shift. Here’s what has happened in our town so far:

A cyclist started a bicycle repair program for youth, adding bicycles to the town fleet and getting more teens to cycle.
The repair program created a town-wide bicycle sharing project making it easier for yet more folks to bicycle.
Another cyclist started a bicycle delivery service which, with cargo bikes, can deliver up to a few hundred pounds of goods at a time.
Higher visibility of bikes has inspired more businesses to add bike racks.
A concerned parent and teacher got the school district to join Safe Routes to School.
Local schools took part in Walk to School Day.
Walking School Buses have formed to help kids walk safely to school on a regular basis.
Local Girl Scouts drafted a map of safe walking, cycling and transit routes for kids.
By participating in Park(ing) Day and using Street Reclaiming tips, a neighborhood group turned a few parking spaces into mini-parks.
With help from America Walks, concerned citizens started a walking advocacy group which has launched campaigns to assess the town's walkability and to get drivers to slow down.
One worker at a major business with a big but overcrowded parking lot convinced management of the benefits of starting a telecommuting program, which was joined by about a third of the company’s employees.
Another worker at the same company started a biodiesel vanpooling program.
Seeing the increased use of biodiesel for this program, a service station in town added a biodiesel pump, which encouraged more residents to use this alternative fuel.
With growth in telecommuting and vanpooling, the company was able to sell off part of its parking lot to a developer who built a solar apartment complex.
Company employees moved in to the solar apartments and started walking to work.
A carsharing business was established in town.

These cascading changes have begun with citizen and small business initiative, but now, with more people walking, cycling, telecommuting and sharing transportation, the town government has been inspired to do more. Here are some of the actions they take:

As they see the growth of cycling in town, they designate bike routes with painting and signage and also fund new bike paths.
After seeing the success of local vanpooling, they expand their transit system with biodiesel buses and collaborate with the school district to convert school buses to biodiesel as well.
They add a free electric trolley running a route in the downtown area similar to the low-fare electric buses in Santa Barbara.
They add bike racks to all buses in the system.
In response to requests from citizens groups, they increase traffic calming measures on neighborhood streets, using bollards, roundabouts, road diets, and other techniques that slow traffic and encourage walking and cycling.
They vote to increase parking fees but gives exceptions to carshare cars and vehicles not powered by petroleum.
They vote in a zoning plan to encourage mixed use zoning and higher densities near transit stops.
They approve plans to convert the town’s strip malls into village-like neighborhoods, turning some retail space into apartments and ripping up parking lots for parks, more homes, schools and libraries.
They enact an urban growth boundary to keep the town compact – which saves money on infrastructure such as sewers and streets and also saves energy.
They vote in a building code that requires energy efficiency measures in new construction, in remodels, and at time of sale for existing homes.
They start closing central streets in town one night a week for a community market selling local goods and farm produce; this proves so popular that ultimately it becomes a permanent car-free area.

All these changes give people many more options for getting around town without using cars and gasoline, reducing the overall amount of petroleum used in this town. All the measures I've listed here are based on programs that have been carried out successfully in towns around the U.S. and the world.

In a similar scenario I wrote for Divorce Your Car! I calculated that changes like the ones above could allow the vehicle fleet to be reduced to one-tenth what it is now – and in a manner that still met everyone’s travel needs. If such a reduced vehicle fleet can then be powered by alternatives to petroleum – a much more realistic prospect if we’re not trying to keep hundreds of millions of cars on the road – we can go a long way toward recovering from petroleum dependence.

As we watch the latest news from the Gulf of Mexico, where today oil is leaking from a seafloor damaged by deepwater drilling and experts have estimated that years will be needed for recovery from the spill disaster, it should be clear that this is a direction we need to go.

Thanks to www.pedbikeimages.org for the photo of school kids crossing the street. All other photos were taken by me.

A Town Recovers from Oil Dependence, Part 3

2010-07-18T12:53:00.007-04:00

This is #28 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Our saga of one town’s recovery from oil dependence left off yesterday with a pedestrian in a crosswalk getting hit by a car. Sadly, this is too often what it takes to motivate improvement of walking facilities. Now, as our saga continues, the senior citizen in our cast of characters is upset enough about her friend getting hit that she contacts America Walks for advice.

Based on their feedback, she and a few other concerned citizens form their own walking advocacy group and join America Walks. They start to network with other groups who are members. Based on strategies used in Atlanta by Pedestrians Educating Drivers on Safety (PEDS), they start a yard-sign campaign to encourage drivers to slow down, and encourage pedestrians to use whistles when crossing streets to get the attention of drivers. They also organize a sign-carrying campaign similar to the one used by the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition to educate drivers about pedestrian rights. More drivers start paying attention to pedestrians. As pedestrians gain more visibility, more people start to feel safer walking.

Our senior and her walking group go further by signing up for a free webinar announced on the AmericaWalks website, an online presentation on pedestrian safety from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC) (this actually does start on Tuesday, July 20, 2010, and continues into the fall with biweekly sessions). They download the walkability checklist written up by the PBIC, FHWA, and Partnership for a Walkable America and walk their downtown streets to perform a walkability audit. They also start raising money to see if they can bring in Dan Burden of Walkable Communities Inc. to give one of his inspiring presentations on how much they might improve their town with walkability measures.

Some of the walking group members are volunteer leaders for Walking School Buses. They notice that the crosswalk where their friend was hit is also used by kids on the way to one of the schools. They team up with the local Safe Routes to School effort and get a little money through the federal program to make it safer. The crosswalk where our senior’s friend got hit is outfitted with pedestrian flags, which can be carried by walkers as they cross the street to raise their visibility.

Above: Dog carries pedestrian flag to help street-crossers. Photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org / Jan Moser
Below: Pedestrian flags waiting to be used. A similar holder at the other side of the street holds flags after pedestrians finish crossing. Photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org / Dan Burden
Photo credit for crosswalk image at top of post: www.pedbikeimages.org / Dan Burden

As conditions in our town are improving for pedestrians, conditions in a huge parking lot at one of the town’s major employers are getting more crowded. A couple of workers finally get so tired of circling the lot looking for empty spaces that they decide, independently of each other, to do something about it.

The first employee writes up and submits a telecommuting proposal to her employer, detailing how the company could benefit from such a program. The company agrees to a telecommuting trial, and enough employees love it that it grows. Soon, about a third of employees are telecommuting one or two days a week.

The second employee organizes a vanpool. After learning that there is a source of biodiesel not far away, he leases a diesel van, gets a few other commuters to sign on, and works out a deal with the company for preferential parking. The vanpool riders save money and stress, so pretty soon there are a few more biodiesel vanpools – enough that one of the filling stations in town adds a biodiesel pump. With this available, people with diesel cars and trucks start using biodiesel more often.

At this point vanpools and telecommuting have emptied enough of the company’s parking lot that management is wondering what to do with all the extra real estate. They sell off a chunk of unused parking lot to a green developer who builds apartments with solar photovoltaics for electricity, solar water heating, and permaculture landscaping. When the apartments open, some of the company’s employees move in and start walking to work.

This increases density in town enough to attract the attention of a carsharing business – maybe Zipcar. They establish a small fleet of carsharing cars parked in strategic locations around town, including a couple at the new solar apartment complex. The carsharing fleet includes hybrid cars and a biodiesel truck. Seeing how much time and money they can save by carsharing, people start joining. Several households find that they are able to sell their second cars and use carsharing instead when they have the need for more than one car at a time.

So far, citizens and businesses have initiated most of the changes in our town. Soon, though, the town government notices all the improvements wrought by these efforts and decides to make some changes of their own.

To be continued….

A Town Recovers from Oil Dependence, Part 2

2010-07-17T10:25:00.000-04:00

This is #27 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

In yesterday's post, I began describing a fictional transition town in which a few citizens move toward greater freedom from car and oil dependence. We had reached a point where the local school district gets involved with Safe Routes to School and several Walking School Buses are organized.

These Walking Buses, plus a carfree vacation to Maine that includes a stop in the very walkable town of Portland, gives the local Girl Scout leader an idea. While traveling, she picks up a great little map produced by the regional government's Kids and Transportation program, "The Kids Guide to Getting Around Portland." She decides her troop can create a map fashioned after Portland's, showing ways kids can get around by foot, bike and bus, as well as the safest routes to schools, and earn merit badges in the process.

Walkable Portland, Maine
Photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org/ Photographer: Dan Burden

When completed, the Girl Scouts' draft map gets written up in the local newspaper. This (and a grant proposal written by the Girl Scout leader) prompts the local community foundation to provide money to produce the map, and pretty soon kids are using it to walk, bike and bus around town. Soccer parents breathe a sigh of relief as their driving mileage drops accordingly; with less chauffeuring to do, they actually get a little time to themselves.

More people are biking and walking, but too many cars still speed on the town's streets, according to the town's neighborhood improvement group. One of the group's leaders has just read the book Street Reclaiming by David Engwicht as well as finding pictures on the web of Park(ing) Day, where people reclaim parking spaces as mini-parks. He enthuses about both the book and Park(ing) Day to other members of the neighborhood improvement group.

Turning a parking space into a park on National Park(ing) Day.
Photo from http://bike-pgh.org/2008/09/pittsburgh-parking-day-2008/

Park(ing) Day is held in September each year, and the neighborhood group makes plans to participate in the next one. In the meantime, the group starts a little psychological street reclaiming by hanging banners across the street; then they pick some strategically located parking spaces and turn them into mini-parks by furnishing them with potted plants and outdoor furniture. They notice that traffic slows near these changes; eventually the group leaves the plants and furniture out permanently in those locations. These communal outdoor living rooms become favorite hangouts for the neighbors. Other neighborhoods around town take notice and decide to do some street reclaiming of their own.

All this looks good to our senior citizen, but she's still having trouble crossing the street downtown; too many cars zip through ignoring pedestrian rights. She grumbles a little, but basically puts up with this. Then one of her friends is hit by a car while walking across the street in a crosswalk ....

.... to be continued tomorrow ....

A Town Recovers from Oil Dependence, Part 1

2010-07-16T09:13:00.000-04:00

This is #26 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has a lot of us rethinking our relationship with petroleum. Could we possibly be on the verge of transitioning away from oil dependence?

Ten years ago when I wrote Divorce Your Car! I quoted British transport analyst John Whitelegg about the closely-related phenomenon of car dependence. Whitelegg believed that a critical mass of people recognized that:

"The time for change has arrived and that change has to involve a transition from auto-dependency and all that goes with it to lower levels of car use and higher levels of accessibility and environmental quality."

While Whitelegg pointed out that "the existence of such a critical mass ... does not guarantee that this change will take place in the short term," any change like this has more chance to manifest if it springs from the grassroots.

Looking at this today, I can only think that the Gulf oil disaster must have added to the crowd desiring freedom from car and oil dependence. If such a critical mass of people is growing, then small changes such as some of the examples in this series of posts -- as well as the many examples in Divorce Your Car! -- could be components of a bigger shift. Walking school buses, bike delivery services, transit investment, more telecommuters, and efforts to limit sprawl have the potential to add up to a tipping point and a major transition.

Let's consider how such a transition might happen and how it might look in a town of, say, 50,000 people. Suppose this town includes the following cast of characters (who will show up in these posts over the next few days):

two active cyclists,
some teenagers hanging around with nothing to do,
a parent concerned about the safety of his children walking to school,
a sympathetic teacher,
a neighborhood improvement group,
a Girl Scout leader looking for troop projects,
a senior citizen concerned about her own safety crossing streets, and
a couple of employees with parking hassles at work.

Starting with some simple actions from these people, this town – today a typical car-dependent community – could soon look very different.

Suppose one of the two cyclists notices the teenagers hanging around with nothing to do, maybe getting into a little trouble. This cyclist knows about youth bicycle repair programs such as those at Eugene, Oregon's Center for Appropriate Transport and the Boston-based Bikes Not Bombs. He teams up with the industrial arts programs at local schools to start a youth bicycle workshop. This expands opportunities for the town's teens, many of whom start cycling around town on bikes they've built or repaired themselves. Within a few years, the shop starts a community bicycle sharing program, which gets more townspeople cycling.

Our other cyclist decides to start a bicycle delivery service like the one mentioned earlier in this series, Pedal Express. She gets Jim Gregory's book Cycling for Profit, follows its instructions to start her business, and is soon delivering groceries, meals-on-wheels, and other items by bike. Within a few years and as she adds employees, she adds recycling pick-up and a diaper delivery service, featuring organic cotton diapers washed in laundry soap without scents or petrochemical ingredients.

Both these cyclists make bicycling more visible to the town's business community. When they suggest better bike racks at area businesses, several stores and offices comply. The bookstore installs racks inspired by the ones at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon; other businesses even supply bike lockers or covered bike parking. Seeing the bike racks and lockers, another few town residents start biking.

On a recent trip through Portland, Oregon, I was delighted to spot these bike racks sporting bicycle book titles in front of Powell's Books (above and below).

Meanwhile, our concerned parent reads about Safe Routes to School and Walking School Buses and decides these look like great ideas. He connects with the sympathetic teacher and together, they get the local school to participate in Walk to School Day. Its success leads the school district to affiliate with Safe Routes to School, and kicks off the organization of several Walking School Buses.

Walking School Bus in London, Ontario on International Walk to School
Day. Thanks for this image go to Green Communities Canada's Active and
Safe Routes to School program at www.saferoutestoschool.ca

Soon, groups of children wearing colorful scarves or caps designating their Walking Buses can be seen around town with volunteer adult leaders who deliver them to local schools. Many of the Walking Bus leaders are retired folks who love spending time with the kids and helping out with community safety. The kids and bus leaders all get healthier and lose a little weight, since they're getting regular moderate exercise on the way to school. Michelle Obama comes to visit and talks about this community as a great example for her Let's Move initiative.

To be continued ......

Catastrophes and Transitions

2010-07-15T16:04:00.000-04:00

This is #25 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

This morning's news reported a resumption in tests after yet more delays in British Petroleum's efforts to contain oil and gas spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. I scanned this story, then wandered into the burgeoning periphery of Gulf catastrophe reporting to read of related concerns – among them, contamination of crab larvae with spots of oil; the huge amount of methane in the water near the mammoth leak; and damage to the seafloor that appears related to the shattered Deepwater Horizon well.

One story lurking on the blogosphere examined the possibility of a catastrophic explosion of methane from the seabed of the Gulf. Based on geologic theories, wrote Terrence Aym on Helium, an explosive release of methane might decimate the entire region and lead from there to planet-wide extinctions. Changes in seafloor structure resulting from the Gulf disaster, said the story, might make such a catastrophe more likely.

I don't have the expertise to evaluate such a risk, but whether or not such a scenario plays out, we have plenty of catastrophes to address already. The disaster in the Gulf has widespread consequences that we are only beginning to see. And even before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, we were dealing with ongoing catastrophes like climate change, the economic volatility of oil production peaks, and the massive military costs of ensuring a largely-imported oil supply.

The catastrophe at the root of all these others is our entire petroleum economy, what some -- including Van Jones, who says this in Josh Tickell's movie Fuel -- have called the petroleum-industrial complex. Even without the BP blowout, even if climate change and peak oil and wars for oil aren't concerns, petroleum has still killed and sickened and poisoned the planet for the last 150 years. The air and water pollution petroleum creates, the toxic chemicals it releases just in the process of "normal" use, the geopolitical tensions it engenders, all are reasons enough to get off oil.

Here's the irony: giving up petroleum is not a sacrifice. In fact, we can be better off without it. Consider, for instance:

-Reducing the petroleum we use for food production by going organic and local gives us fresher, more nutritious food.
-Reducing petroleum use by avoiding petrochemical scents and synthetics in body care products reduces the risk of cancer, allergies and hormone imbalances.
-Using biodiesel instead of petroleum diesel in school buses reduces respiratory illness in children.
-Money invested in walking and cycling facilities helps people near those facilities to live longer and lose weight as they get more exercise – pleasantly, in the course of their daily lives.
-Money invested in trains and transit – including free transit – provides more jobs than building highways, and results in a more egalitarian transportation system, providing more mobility to more people.

I could go on – I could write a book – and oh, yeah, I did in fact write a book based entirely on this idea that we can live better by driving less and burning less oil.

If that's the case, why doesn't our society just do it? The problem lies in making the transition. In places we've begun to shift away from oil dependence, but there is enough money, power and inertia vested in the oil-addicted system to make this change a challenge at best. Look, for example, at California's AB32, the highly praised Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which has already increased investment and created new jobs in the Golden State's green economy. Now an oil-industry-funded measure seeks to overturn that law. California voters will decide in November whether to believe slick oil-company PR protecting the old system, or trust in the new cleaner energy paradigm; their ballots will affect prospects for recovering from oil dependence nationwide.

We have so many good reasons to continue a shift away from petroleum use, to recover from our oil addiction, but how can we navigate a transition with such difficulties? I like the potential that lies in the Transition Town Movement, or Transition Network. Begun in Ireland and England about five years ago, the movement originally sought to reduce CO2 emissions to address climate change and peak oil. It now has more than 300 member communities from around the world, including in the United States.

San Francisco is one of many Transition towns in the United States.

Transition towns are places that can bring together many of the specific measures I've written about in this series. They are places where people can see in action the kinds of programs and lifestyles that allow us to live without oil. I like the idea of transition towns because they start at the bottom up, without waiting for national government leadership. I also like the idea because transition towns can help people visualize how to live without oil.

In the last chapter of Divorce Your Car! I describe a sort of transition town, where a whole community becomes less car-dependent as a result of several small citizen initiatives. To write it, I took several real-life programs and combined them in one fictional place. I plan to revisit and update that material in the next few posts, because with all the oil-related catastrophes now underway, it's a good time to turn this kind of fiction into reality.

Gulf Disaster’s Possible Health Effects: Environmental Illness?

2010-07-14T17:53:00.000-04:00

This is #24 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

An engrossing recent report from Elizabeth Grossman paints a telling picture of conditions on the Gulf as workers attempt to clean up oil from the shattered Deepwater Horizon well. Grossman's narrative follows Captain Dave Willman as he heads out in his vessel to skim, recounting the captain’s actions, observations -- and some of his symptoms:

"They're flying dispersant over us. They're lighting fires sometimes starting at 6:30 in the morning," he tells me …. "There's smoke in the air. There's oil, there's benzene, there's dispersant ...."

In the heat and sun out on the water, he says, you can almost see the "sheen evaporate off the top of the Gulf of Mexico."

"And I feel really funky when we are out there," he tells me. "When I wake up out there, my heart starts fluttering. It's like you smoked a pack of cigarettes then held your breath," says Willman, who says he hasn't smoked in 9 months. "I get an immediate headache when I come in contact with crude oil," he says. "And my skin itches like it's cracking." His wife, Misty, says she's experienced what she calls "heart flutters," what she describes as feeling like unexpected rushes of adrenalin. "Everyone out there is coughing," says Willman. "People are spitting stuff up in the morning and you can feel your blood pressure."

"I'm 35 years old. I'm a healthy guy. But I don't feel myself. I'm light-headed and get dizzy. I'm getting headaches and my eyes burn. I get mood swings and I can't stop scratching…."

A number of these symptoms - headaches, dizziness, skin itching - are consistent with oil vapor and solvent exposure, explains Dr. Rose Goldman, associate professor of environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It's a complex system," she says of potential exposure out on the oiled waters of the Gulf. There are volatile organic compounds coming off the oil. There may be an oil and water mist mixture. If there's burning nearby there will be smoke and particulates, and there's heat ….

"I don't want to be out there in this crap much longer," says Willman. "I want to know the long term effects of this stuff…." (from "Out in the Oil with Captain Dave" by Elizabeth Grossman, posted on July 8, 2010 by The Pump Handle)

Having spent the last few years helping a spouse deal with environmental illness -- also known as multiple chemical sensitivities, or MCS -- I can speculate on what some of those long-term effects might be.

MCS is poorly understood, but often seems to develop after chemical injury, or exposure to such a quantity of chemicals that a person's body loses the ability to function properly. A common phenomenon seen in MCS is "spreading" -- a progressive increase in reactivity to a wide range of chemicals beyond that causing the original injury, at lower and lower exposure levels.

Gulf workers who develop MCS risk becoming extremely sensitive to even small quantities of petrochemicals. They might reach the point of being sickened simply by standing too close to someone whose clothes have been washed in standard laundry detergent. They might become unable to walk into hardware stores, where the quantity of synthetic molecules off-gassing from home and garden products will bring on symptoms: perhaps numbness and tingling in extremities, perhaps loss of muscle coordination, perhaps migraines, for some even seizures. Walking through a neighborhood could become like walking a gauntlet, if one neighbor’s dryer vent is sending fabric softener scents into the air, or another’s lawn is wafting weed-and-feed fumes.

Not everyone exposed to toxicants gets this particular kind of sickness; as one specialist explained to us, genetic make-up might influence whether MCS develops in those who suffer from toxic chemical exposures (cancer and other degenerative diseases are also potential results from such exposures). According to an overview by Cynthia Wilson of the Chemical Injury Information Network, research now suggests MCS might be some combination of central nervous system damage (such as from chemical exposures) and detoxification enzyme deficiencies (possibly related to genetic make-up).

Our incomplete understanding of MCS makes dealing with the condition a challenge. So does the fact that it's not yet recognized as a diagnosable condition by the American Medical Association or the World Health Organization. It shares characteristics with Gulf War Syndrome; perhaps --unfortunately -- we will also see the development of Gulf Spill Syndrome.

For those who do end up suffering long-term chemical sensitivities or environmental illness as a result of oil spill exposures, below are a few resources that might help. Sadly, I suspect that full recovery from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could require helping many who develop this condition; cutting our use of petroleum products will also be an important part of that.

Chemical Injury Information Network – Provides support and advocacy for those with MCS. Maintains an excellent library of helpful reports on chemical injuries and MCS, and publishes the informative newsletter Our Toxic Times; the July 2010 issue includes significant coverage of the Gulf spill.

Human Ecology Action League (HEAL) – Another source of information and support for those with MCS; seeks to “encourage healthy lifestyles that minimize potentially hazardous environmental exposures.” HEAL’s newsletter The Human Ecologist has won an Utne Independent Press Award; the group also publishes a travel directory and materials about the health risks of fragrances.

MCS America (MCSA) -- Advocates official medical and legal recognition of MCS and provides resources to support those with the condition. Lobbies to reduce use of environmental toxicants. Now in the process of constructing an informational page on petroleum products, with links. Also links to referral lists of doctors, dentists and housing sources on its website.

American Academy of Environmental Medicine -- International association of physicians and other health care professionals interested in environmental health; provides research and education in recognition, treatment and prevention of chemically-induced illnesses. Practitioners who belong to AAEM may be more versed in treatments for people with MCS / environmental illness. The group can also provide training and assistance to non-member physicians. AAEM’s website allows you to search and find members by state, country, and member type.

Walking Away from Oil

2010-07-13T17:33:00.000-04:00

This is #23 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

How much can walking help us to recover from our addiction to oil? More than most of us think, because driving even for short trips remains a habit in the U.S. Consider these numbers:

-More than a quarter of U.S. car trips are one mile or less; when Divorce Your Car! came out, 13.7% were a half mile or less.
-Looked at another way, about 60% of all U.S. trips one mile or less are traveled in a private car, truck, or SUV. (This came from a League of American Bicyclists analysis of federal travel statistics that was so helpful it inspired me to send in my way-overdue LAB membership renewal.)
-As of 2001, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports, private vehicles accounted for half of trips between ¼ and ½ mile taken to and from school.

Even for kids, ½ mile is generally less than a 15 minute walk. Something’s wrong when so many of us use petroleum to ferry kids such short distances. But here's the good news: these numbers represent a huge opportunity to reduce dependence on oil.

How can we do this? I like to think of it as recultivating a culture of walking. With our motorized mindset, we tend to underestimate what we can accomplish on two feet. Perhaps we can start by expanding the notion of "walking distance."

It might help if we recognized that driving short distances doesn't save much time. Consider one recent study that determined every hour behind the wheel leads to a 20-minute loss of life expectancy due to car crash risks. In addition, every car trip taken instead of a walk shortens life expectancy, because as numerous studies show, walking extends life spans. Factor in calculations by Ivan Illich of all the hours we spend maintaining, earning money for, and otherwise attending to automobiles, and we might even lose time by driving. As Illich famously figured, "The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles; less than 5 miles per hour."

We can also support a walking culture by giving pedestrians priority. I got early training in pedestrian rights from my father. In leading my sisters and I across busy streets, Dad would routinely glare at oncoming traffic and call out, "5-6-0-A!" At the time, this was the vehicle code section that gave pedestrians the right of way in California. He repeated this often enough to instill in me a sense of righteous indignation at any cars that might whiz by, ignoring the state-given rights so clearly important to my Dad.

Photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org

Most states have pedestrian right-of-way laws like this, but they are too often ignored or unenforced. Some walking groups have worked to improve this situation; one creative approach used by the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition in Oregon involved successive Burma-Shave-style signs of doggerel verse. As group members carried these placards across intersections, motorists would read – sign by sign – verses like: "When Mary tried/ To cross the road/ Not a single /Driver slowed./ As you hurry/ Home today/ Give pedestrians/ The right of way."

Here are a few more groups, agencies and programs taking steps to support walking:

America Walks - A resource and umbrella group for local, regional and state pedestrian advocacy organizations from across the country; the only national group that works exclusively on pedestrian advocacy

America’s Walking – This PBS series hosted by walking expert Mark Fenton has a companion website with excellent resources on its “Call to Action” page

Let's Move – First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative has walking as part of the program to get active in communities

Partnership for a Walkable America -- National coalition of public agencies and private non-profits works to increase regular walking across the country; PWA started Walk to School Day, held every October and now celebrated internationally

Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center -- Provides information and training to engineers, public officials, walking advocates and citizens to support and promote walking and bicycling

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) – Now a federally funded program to help school kids walk and bike to and from school; infrastructure changes funded by SRTS help whole communities to walk more

Walkable and Livable Communities Institute – Helps communities find ways to become more walkable; non-profit led by walkability consultant Dan Burden

World Carfree Network – Promotion of carfree cities by this international organization aims to make public spaces more pedestrian-friendly

I'm sure I'm missing some, and invite you to add to this list in the comments section below. The work of these groups and the walking all of us do can not only reduce oil dependence but also cut traffic congestion, diminish pollution, work off extra weight and extend our lives. Why use toxic petroleum to fuel short driving trips when we can gain all that by walking instead?

Changing Fuel: Josh Tickell's Biodiesel Mission

2010-07-12T19:01:00.000-04:00

This is #22 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday I wrote here about ways we can cut crude oil consumption as we eat. If you read that post, you might have noticed that diesel fuel supplies a lot of the petroleum energy we use to produce and ship food.

In fact, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service, 27% of energy for agricultural production comes from diesel. Additional diesel is used as we ship food items an average of 1500 miles from farm to table.

Josh Tickell, director of the award-winning documentary Fuel, wants this – and all the other ways we use diesel – to shift. With the slogan "Change Your Fuel, Change Your World," he advocates using biodiesel instead of the petroleum form, and has dedicated his (not yet very long) life to fomenting that switch.

I first wrote about Josh Tickell (he pronounces it Tih-KELL) in Divorce Your Car! when he was touring the U.S. in the Veggie Van. A Winnebago with a two-liter diesel engine, the brightly painted Veggie Van needed no alterations to run on pure biodiesel. The van towed a Green Grease Machine used to strain food matter out of used vegetable oil obtained from fast food restaurants, and then "crack" the oil molecules into smaller units for easier burning.

Fuel, which recently came out on DVD, has some great scenes of the Veggie Van on tour, especially as Tickell pulls into fast-food drive-thrus to ask for all their used frying oil. Later, the film visits Carl's Corner truck stop in Texas, one of many stations in the U.S. selling biodiesel, to interview truckers as they fill up on the light gold fuel. It also includes footage on the move to switch school buses to biodiesel, in part because diesel fumes can accumulate and concentrate inside buses. Children are particularly vulnerable to suffering respiratory problems – including lung damage – from petroleum diesel pollutants; for air quality, biodiesel is a big improvement, reducing emissions up to 75%, depending on the blend (generally ranging from 100% plant-derived biodiesel to a mix of 20% plant diesel with 80% petroleum diesel). To the extent that it cuts consumption of crude oil, biodiesel also reduces the risk of severe environmental impacts that go along with every stage of extracting, refining, and burning petroleum products.

If you follow biofuels news, you might be stopping here and saying, "Wait – what about the studies that determined biofuels are actually WORSE for the environment than oil?" Fuel covers that as well, recounting the political and economic fallout from the finding that biofuel production could generate more greenhouse gases than conventional fuels due to the clearing of natural land to grow biofuel source crops. About the same time, food riots and price hikes occurred because some biofuels production had already begun to displace food crops. With government support withdrawn, the biofuels market suffered.

This also sent Tickell back to the biodiesel drawing board, then out to find ways that biodiesel might be made without affecting the food supply or resulting in net increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Fuel shows how he finds these, following him to interviews with researchers and entrepreneurs making biodiesel from algae, or from waste products. As with many things, we see that how sustainable biodiesel might be, and how much it might help us recover from oil addiction, depends on how we make and use it, and how much.

As he advocates biodiesel, Tickell acknowledges it can't do the whole job of getting us off oil. To his credit, he also talks about the need for energy efficiency. This echoes my own perspective that widespread conversion to any different fuel is not a panacea. We can benefit from powering motor vehicles as cleanly as possible, but we also – and especially – need to reduce how much we use them.

Tickell made this movie well before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. It was particularly compelling, then, to see all the scenes this film shows of the oil industry in Louisiana. It turns out Tickell's mother comes from that state (his father's from Australia) and we see in the film how he was shaped by spending part of his childhood there. Well before the current Gulf disaster, Fuel tells us, oil drilling and refining had turned parts of Louisiana into a Cancer Alley; in Fuel, Tickell hints that some of his family members sickened and died for this reason.

Watching this film now, as millions more gallons of oil gush into the Gulf, decimating fisheries, fouling the air, and sickening people exposed, only lends more urgency to Tickell's message. Fuel is the story of one man's search for a way out of oil addiction. Others among us might find different routes, but it's the kind of journey we all need to follow.

Eating Fewer Fossil Fuels

2010-07-11T21:31:00.000-04:00

This is #21 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

I know. You’re probably thinking, “I don’t EAT fossil fuels!” In essence, though, you do – we all do – because our current food system relies so heavily on inputs of petroleum and natural gas at every stage.

Most fields are plowed and planted using petroleum diesel. Commercial farms use fertilizers manufactured from natural gas feedstocks, and pesticides derived from petroleum. Harvesting by machine consumes additional diesel. Processing and packaging require energy and petrochemical plastic while distribution consumes yet more diesel as well as gasoline.

A 1994 study led by David Pimentel of Cornell University examined these issues and calculated that feeding each American consumes about 400 gallons of oil equivalents per year. Based on that figure, each of us consumes a little over a gallon of oil per day when we eat – and as we do this, we feed the demand for oil that leads to risky deepwater drilling and the degradation of ecosystems like the Gulf of Mexico.

Eating less petroleum is thus another important part of recovery from oil dependence. Fortunately there are several delicious ways to cut back on consuming crude when we eat.

1) Eat organic. About 2/3 of petroleum-derived pesticides used in the U.S. are used by agriculture, says a background report from the Congressional Research Service. You can avoid that by eating certified organic foods – which are better for you, anyway, based on recent research. A study from University of California at Davis, for instance, found that strawberries grown without pesticides contain more antioxidants – good news for all my friends who’ve been picking organic strawberries this season here in Upper Michigan.

2) Avoid processed and plastic-packaged foods. Processing and packaging consume fossil energy as well as adding petroleum-derived plastic to the food chain. Packaging food in plastic not only increases our use of oil, it can add undesirable chemicals to the food itself. As noted in this fact sheet from Berkeley, California’s Ecology Center, compounds in plastic wrappings can migrate into food; eating that food can expose you to hormone disrupters and possible carcinogens.

3) Skip the factory-farmed meats. As Michael Pollan has written in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it takes nearly a barrel of oil to grow just one factory-farmed steer to slaughter weight. All the hormone and antibiotic residues in factory-farmed meat are another good reason to avoid it. Even though I don’t have numbers I suspect the equation changes for locally raised, organic, grass-fed meat and hunted game, neither of which are likely to consume as much petroleum as factory farming. Author and organic grower Eliot Coleman, for instance, has argued that more fossil fuel is used and CO2 generated by “a vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil” than by local production of a grass-fed steer. I’m not advocating for or against vegetarianism here, just saying that the decision of whether to eat meat at all is complicated. However, whether to eat factory-farmed meats is much more black and white, as the evidence against factory farming is so compelling.

This Farmer's Market stall features organic produce.

4) Eat more locally. Like the meat issue, this can also get complicated. Writer Sarah DeWeerdt pointed out in a recent World Watch Magazine article that how much local eating cuts energy consumption can vary. Still, the petroleum we use to transport food is significant. Paying attention to where food comes from can help reduce the average 1500 miles that standard grocery items travel as they’re trucked from farm to table. Check labels in grocery stores to see where foods are from; get to know growers in your area and buy direct from them; attend farmer’s markets and buy from growers there. Farmer’s markets, often lively and beautiful events, have the added benefit of featuring many certified organic growers.

5) Grow your own. There’s nothing more local, tasty, and petroleum-free than fresh-picked organically-grown produce from your own garden. The garden photos in this post come from ours, which provides us with wonderful salads and vegetables. The kind of garden space we have is nice, but not required; even apartment dwellers can grow some of their own food by gardening in containers. And just about anyone can grow sprouts, a wonderful source of fresh, raw nutrition. It’s a favorite approach to food growing for my friend Jill Nussinow, The Veggie Queen, who gives these instructions for sprouting on her blog, along with her recipe for Rainbow Sprout Salad.

Our passive solar greenhouse helps us grow our own greens, like these collards and kale, during long winters.

There’s plenty more interesting reading about making our food more sustainable and less petroleum-based all over the web; one I like is the Locavores site, locavore being a coined word referring to one who eats from within a specified local area. One tragedy we are witnessing now is how drilling for oil has made the accessing of local foods – mainly fisheries – difficult, unhealthy and/or impossible for a big segment of the Gulf coast population. This lost access to local food is a big part of what shocked Gulf residents now lament. Like oil and water, oil and sustainable food don’t mix, and I’m hoping we will fully understand that before it’s too late.

Images of a Less Oil-Dependent World

2010-07-10T14:46:00.000-04:00

This is #20 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Surrounded as we are by highways, cars, motorboats, jet planes and video feeds of yet more crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, it can be hard to imagine a modern world free from dependence on petroleum. Still, visualizing our recovery from oil addiction is an important part of achieving it, and good photography can help.

The world already contains counterpoints to oil dependence: ingenious uses of human power, like the cargo bikes in this post of mine and this one from Alan Durning; less costly and more efficient systems of mobility, like the carsharing I wrote about yesterday; places and events where pedestrians and cyclists take precedence over cars, like the street conversion organized recently by the World Carfree Network to top off its Towards Carfree Cities Conference in York, England. Good photography can remind us that such things exist, and can help us visualize more of them.

Enjoying the day on a pedestrian boulevard in Asheville, North Carolina.
Photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org /Dan Burden

One very nice source of reduced-petroleum pictures is the Image Library of the Pedestrian and Bicycling Information Center (PBIC). The images in today's post, downloaded from that site, illustrate pedestrian boulevards and fit my perception of what a world recovered from oil dependence could look like. It's encouraging to see these pictures and know that there are, in fact, places in the world – and even in the U.S. – where people can live, work and socialize without cars and without using so much oil.

A street for people in Utrecht, Holland.
Photo credit: www.pedbikeimages.org / Ryan Snyder

The PBIC Image Library includes a wealth of shots by several good photographers – one being Dan Burden, a former National Geographic photographer who now consults around the world to help make communities more livable and walkable. PBIC's photo collection features views of all kinds of bicycle and pedestrian facilities, as well as pictures of transit and other urban design features. The images are free to download for non-commercial use; the service asks users to include photo credits.

It's a great source of inspiration for visualizing our recovery from petroleum dependence, and for achieving an oil-free future.

Carsharing to Cut Oil Dependence

2010-07-09T18:38:00.000-04:00

This is #19 in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Today I applied to join Zipcar.

I've wanted to join a carsharing service for some time, but one thing has held me up: carsharing has not yet expanded into my area. However, Zipcar – currently the largest carsharing service in the world, and in the U.S. – has now grown enough that it's worthwhile for me to join and use when I travel. This morning I signed up for their "Occasional" plan.

Why do this? I travel car-free as much as I can, but for some trips, driving is the most practical option. In those cases I choose to rent cars, and try to get hybrids when I can. Sometimes, though, I only want a car for less than the full day most rental companies use as a minimum. That's when carsharing, which allows members to reserve cars by the hour, becomes a very useful option.

I'm also joining because I'd like to see the practice of carsharing grow. Studies show that more carsharing means fewer cars; the Zipcar website estimates that every carshare vehicle takes 15 to 20 personally-owned vehicles off the road. Not only does carsharing cut the number of vehicles, it also reduces miles of driving. Because carsharing is priced differently than car ownership, with members paying for their actual use of a vehicle and not for all the costs associated with having one sit in the garage, carsharing users drive more judiciously than car owners. In a retrospective study, Susan Shaheen and co-authors from University of California, Berkeley's Transportation Sustainability Research Center report that carsharing cuts vehicle miles traveled by about 44% on average. It also leads to greater use of transit, cycling and walking as well as reduced parking demand. That all adds up to significant reductions in oil and gas consumption.

A Zipcar sits waiting for use in its reserved parking space. Most carsharing services offer a variety of vehicle types for use by members.

Another big reason carsharing now enjoys sizable growth, and maybe the biggest: it saves people money. Zipcar estimates its members can save around $500 per month if they use carsharing instead of owning a car. Susan Shaheen et al found that carsharing members save $154 to $435 per month, a more conservative range but still substantial.

I like the way carsharing works. With Zipcar, once you join, you can reserve a car by the hour or by the day anywhere in the system. Reservations can be made by phone or online. A smartcard gives you access to the nearest car, parked in some central location in the area served. The company pays for the gas: your rates cover fuel costs, insurance, roadside assistance, and mileage.

A Zipcar member accesses a reserved car by waving a smartcard over a card reader inside the car's windshield.

Many members use carsharing in place of a second car, and some use it in place of owning any car at all. This second option works well for those who live in urban areas served by good transit, where car ownership is often a costly hassle.

When Divorce Your Car! came out ten years ago, carsharing had reached a healthy adolescence in Europe and the pre-teen stage in Canada, but was in early infancy in the United States. Today, the field is maturing, with 27 different carsharing programs in about 50 U.S. cities, nearly 7,600 vehicles and approaching half a million members. Besides Zipcar, a number of smaller carsharing services exist in the U.S., some for profit, some non-profit. You can check the CarSharing.Net website for a list of services and locations, with links.

I see carsharing as part of a new approach that can help us recover from oil dependence. Carsharing services tend to share that goal, thus using a high percentage of fuel-efficient or hybrid vehicles in their fleets. The Zipcar website lists a plug-in hybrid getting over 100 mpg as one of its San Francisco cars. A short distance to the north, in Sebastopol, California, SolarCarShare – a project of the Post-Carbon Institute – is about to launch with a small fleet consisting entirely of electric vehicles and hybrids. The service has installed electric charging stations around town with the intention of using renewables – solar and wind – to power them.

CityCarShare vehicles - a disabled-accessible van and two hybrids -- sit waiting for users in Berkeley, California, where the carsharing service shares vehicles with the city government -- see below.

I'm hoping it's only a matter of time before carsharing opens near me. Right now, the biggest growth market for carsharing is on college campuses, and I live not far from two universities. Zipcar currently has plans to expand, and as they do, I hope they'll look this way.

By the way, to sign up for Zipcar, cover the $25 application fee and pay $50 for a year's membership, I used my Amtrak Guest Rewards credit card, which sends Amtrak a cut of my purchases and nets me points to redeem for train travel in exchange. Instead of swiping my credit card at a gas pump, it feels good to have voted with my dollars for a different kind of transportation. It's one that gives me travel options without requiring car ownership; it has the potential to save me money; and -- hardly least on the list -- it uses a lot less oil.

Thanks to the Zipcar managers from Portland, Oregon, who originally supplied me with the top three images above for a presentation about reducing dependence on automobiles.

The Toxicity of Oil

2010-07-08T20:18:00.000-04:00

This is the eighteenth in a series of posts about recovering from the Gulf oil disaster and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

In the last couple of months, Gulf-area poison control centers have received 651 "exposure calls" related to crude oil toxicants. Symptoms reported by callers have included headaches, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, throat irritation, eye pain, coughing or choking and dizziness. According to the Gulf Oil Spill page of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, most exposures have occurred via inhalation, with dermal contact also reported.

You can see some graphic documentation of crude oil’s effect on skin in a photo of some rash-afflicted legs posted yesterday with commentary by Riki Ott on the Huffington Post.

I viewed the rashy-legs picture after finishing yesterday's write-ups on the toxic petroleum byproducts contained in perfume, one on this blog and the other at the North Coast Holistics blog. At the same time, I discovered a fabulous piece by Stacy Malkan – ironically, or maybe not so, with the same title I had just given one of mine, "Petroleum in Perfume" – which eloquently relates toxic petrochemicals in fragrances to the Gulf spill disaster. It's a must-read, emphasizing the need to move away from past toxic practices and adopt new, greener approaches in all spheres of industry and life. Let's rethink petrochemicals, Malkan writes, and "move the entire economy toward renewable energy, clean production and green, safe chemistry."

As author of Not Just a Pretty Face:The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry and cofounder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, Malkan advocates that approach on a regular basis. The Campaign calls for elimination of toxic ingredients -- chemicals linked to birth defects, cancer, and other health issues -- in body care products. A recent analysis by the Campaign shows that top-selling perfumes contain hazardous compounds and secret petrochemicals.

That's not unlike the dispersant Corexit 9500 now being used to "clean up" in the Gulf. A few weeks ago, an article by Elana Schor in the New York Times (originally from Greenwire) reported that Nalco, producer of Corexit, had issued press releases noting that the dispersant's ingredients also occur in several common household products. Apparently fashioned to reassure the public, the release I found at Nalco's website noted that various unnamed ingredients in Corexit are also used in beverage mixtures, skin cream, body shampoo, and baby bath liquid.

This was not reassuring to me -- in fact, it had the opposite effect. It’s another indicator that the use of potentially harmful petrochemicals in common products has been undisclosed and unregulated for far too long. It's also another good reason to support the goals of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, as well as all campaigns working to reduce our use of oil.

To tie this back to transportation, we also get plenty of personal exposure to toxic petroleum byproducts from cars. We're exposed at gas stations, in garages, and from tailpipe exhaust. Studies have consistently found higher cancer rates among people living closer to busy roads, where exhaust reaches highest concentrations. Inside cars, exposures might be even worse. Some studies have found pollution levels within cars to be higher than outside them. In addition, "new car smell" is loaded with endocrine disrupters, compounds that off-gas from petrochemical auto interiors, get into our bodies, and mess with hormone function.

We have some big reasons compelling us to end our dependence on oil, with the Gulf disaster, climate change, and the huge military cost of procuring oil all on the list. Petroleum toxicity is one more, and with the ever-increasing incidence of cancers and chronic illnesses linked to petrochemical exposures, it is no less important.

Petroleum in Perfume

2010-07-07T22:47:00.001-04:00

This is the seventeenth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday I wrote about author Lynne McTaggart’s new lyrics for Paul Simon’s old song, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” McTaggart’s stanzas for her “50 Ways to Leave Crude Oil” focus almost entirely on transportation, with good reason. In the U.S., close to 70% of all the oil we guzzle goes to moving us around, 60% of it to moving around on highways. Transportation is thus by far the biggest contributor to our oil addiction.

Still, there are many other ways in which petroleum spills into our daily existence. As McTaggart writes, “All of our modern-day lives are utterly intertwined with petroleum use.” Another author, Paul Blanc, MD, sheds light on why petroleum byproducts became ubiquitous as he tells a story of benzene in his book How Everyday Products Make People Sick:

"Shortly after World War II, the petrochemical industry discovered an effective way of ‘cracking’ gasoline to yield a number of by-products, including benzene. …. As postwar refining for automobile gasoline expanded exponentially, benzene was ever more abundant. In fact there was an awful lot on the market to be unloaded."

The petrochemical industry went on to develop numerous uses for benzene, despite its link with leukemia and fatal cases of anemia. Benzene can be found today in many consumer goods, including some perfumes and body care products. This pattern repeated with other petroleum byproducts, to the point that today, the website of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association features a chart boasting how many common products come from crude oil.

About ten percent of the crude used in this country feeds the manufacture of plastics, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and a variety of other goods including cosmetics and perfumes. That’s why Lynne McTaggart’s post mentioned above goes on to suggest avoiding use of such products, including artificial fragrances. As Dr. Louisa Williams points out in her excellent volume Radical Medicine, 95% of the ingredients used in fragrances are synthetic chemicals derived from petroleum.

That makes eliminating artificially fragranced products from your life a great way to step a little further out of the petroleum economy. It’s also critical enough for health that I’ve written a separate post on my North Coast Holistics blog to delve more deeply into the dangers of using petro-based perfumes, and what we can do instead.

To cut the quantity of petroleum-based perfumes wafting into your life, here are some quick tips:

Generally, avoid products with the word “fragrance” in the label. It usually indicates the presence of synthetic and variously toxic chemicals in the product formulation.
Look instead for fragrance-free products or those that use ONLY true essential oils for scent (although even those can stimulate allergies or asthma in some people).
Apply this guideline not only to body care products, but also to cleaning products such as laundry detergent. More companies now make household cleaning products without synthetic fragrance; for instance, Seventh Generation has a complete line of unscented cleaners called “Free and Clear.”
Just say NO! to air fresheners, which must have the most oxymoronic name of any product on the planet as they are actually major indoor air polluters.

Following these tips can help cut petroleum use and protect your health. For further details, check this post. Thanks again to Lynne McTaggart for the inspiration, as well as to all the authors whose books provided information for this post.

There must be more than 50 ways .... Lynne McTaggart's new lyrics and list of ways to leave crude oil

2010-07-06T17:41:00.001-04:00

This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday my dear friend Jill Nussinow (a wonderful cook, writer, and vegetarian nutrition expert, aka The Veggie Queen) sent me a great link. It seems that Lynne McTaggart, journalist and author of top-selling books The Field and The Intention Experiment, has also blogged lately about the Gulf oil disaster and the importance of cutting our use of petroleum. In her post of July 2nd, she unveiled lyrics to a new song fashioned after Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."

McTaggart's version, called "50 Ways to Leave Crude Oil," includes this chorus:

"Just take the train back, Jack
Get rid of the van, Stan
You don't need a new toy, Roy
Or an SUV
Hop on the bus, Gus
Or ride your bike like the Dutch
Just turn off the key, Lee
And set us all free."

I love this! I'm not sure I could find a better lyrical representation of what Divorce Your Car! is all about, even down to specific sections of the book: "Just take the train back, Jack" – see pp. 167-169; "Hop on the bus, Gus" – see pp. 169-170; "Or ride your bike like the Dutch" -- see Chapter 12; "Just turn off the key, Lee, and set us all free" – the whole book, really, and especially Part 3.

"Hop on the bus, Gus -- Or ride your bike like the Dutch"

In her post, McTaggart also lists ways we can "leave" crude oil. She suggests, for instance, "Whenever you go to use your car, think first: do I really need to drive?" This is a great question, and another topic touched on in Divorce Your Car! It came up in Chapter 17, which suggests developing a transportation menu – a term I first heard from Phil Smith, at that time the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator in Missoula, Montana.

A transportation menu is essentially a list of all the ways you might get from point A to point B. A simple thing, but useful because we need reminders of how many petroleum-free or car-free ways we have to get around. Just making such a list can help us snap out of the "married-to-the-car" mindset, the idea that any time you take a trip it means getting into a car. Can you bike? Walk? Take transit? Share a ride? Access what you need by phone or Internet? Kayak to work like commuters in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and probably other locales? Maybe use inline skates? For long-distance travel, take Amtrak? These options can all go on the list.

"Just take the train back, Jack"

A transportation menu, then, helps remind us of all our non-car transportation choices, and it can be used in conjunction with the question above. Here's a version of how to do that (adapted from Divorce Your Car!, p. 225):

When it comes time to use your transportation menu, ask a few key questions:

Do I really need to take this trip? This question is made more necessary because driving can be a little too habitual. One man who wanted to break his driving habit decided to tape a note to himself on his driver's side door: "Do you really need to take this trip?" Dianne Patrick of Marquette, Michigan, has done something similar with her annual New Year's resolution to drive less. "Every day I get up and ask myself if I have to use the car, and if the answer is no, it stays in the garage," she says. If you ask: "Is this trip necessary?" and the answer is no, great! You don't have to go anywhere. If the answer is yes, move on to the next question.

How can I get where I want to go without using a car? Your transportation menu should give you a variety of ways to answer this question. Still, there might be times when you ask it and come up with no other way to get somewhere without driving alone in an internal combustion car. It happens, sometimes more often because our current system caters so much to cars and oil. Then ask:

What changes would allow me to take this trip without using a car? Some of these changes might be collective, in the realm of advocacy and policy changes. Better land use, safer and slower streets, more support for transit, carfree city centers, fewer subsidies for highways and oil: these can all help us win a collective divorce and move beyond the problems of auto/oil addiction. But you might also be able to respond to this question with individual changes – location and lifestyle changes that you can make on your own.

The book goes on to talk about moving to locations that support carfree living, as well as simplifying and slowing down to drive less and consume less oil. Add this to Lynne McTaggart's list, and you have many more than 50 ways to leave behind crude oil and our whole dysfunctional marriage to cars and oil. Seeing the number of writers and thinkers now chiming in on this theme gives me hope we are nearing a tipping point. These ideas may well be infusing the fields McTaggart writes about in her books, swelling our collective intent to truly change. My hope is that as more of us embrace the simple but beneficial ways of living better with less petroleum, they will gain power, leading us to recover from oil addiction and heal our way of life.

World Carfree Network: Moving Towards Carfree Cities

2010-07-05T18:33:00.001-04:00

This is the fifteenth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

I’m listed as an advisor to the World Carfree Network. It’s a group with a terrific mission: promoting carfree communities as a cornerstone of sustainable society, a goal that can do a terrific amount toward helping us recover from petroleum addiction and all its ill effects, including the Gulf oil disaster.

I have to admit I’ve been not-so-terrific as an advisor. Aside from a modicum of financial support and maybe a couple of occasions on which I did proffer actual advice, I have done very little in my advisory role. Fortunately, WCN has not needed my active assistance to persist, and for that I’m grateful.

An international network based in Europe, WCN serves as a carfree information clearinghouse. The group grew out of the organization Carbusters, and continues to publish the ground-breaking Carbusters magazine, a thoroughgoing collection of news and views about carfree issues, actions, events and communities around the world.

Every year or so, WCN also holds the seminal Towards Carfree Cities Conference. This year’s meeting, the Ninth (IX), just wrapped up in York, England. Titled “How Do We Get There?” the conference focused on various ways to bring carfree communities to life and included an actual carfree conversion of a commercial street for one evening. If you want to see how much fun carfree can be, check out this report on the street conversion and party that the Towards Carfree Cities Conference helped to organize.

WCN also coordinates World Carfree Day every September 22nd. Around the world on this day, communities host events to encourage people to get out of their cars. With World Carfree Day, WCN hopes to showcase how cities might look, feel and sound if they were carfree all the time. Turning more city spaces into carfree areas has great potential to help cut oil dependence and make cities better, healthier places.

The WCN website includes a slew of useful links and resources, including a Carfree Green Pages. It also archives information from past Towards Carfree Cities Conferences. Both Carbusters and WCN have pages on Facebook. For great advice about all things carfree, check them out!

Policy Pathways to Oil Freedom

2010-07-04T14:40:00.001-04:00

This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Happy Independence Day! As we celebrate freedom from one kind of tyranny, I'm focused on paths to freedom from another: from the tyranny of oil/auto dependence.

As I wrote in Divorce Your Car!, oil/auto dependence keeps us shackled in numerous ways. We spend huge amounts of money and time on cars and oil, and even sacrifice lives to the oil/auto system – in wars, in crashes, and in industrial catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion.

I'm far from the only one to point this out. Most recently, the book Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives, by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, does an excellent job of exploring and documenting the many ways we sacrifice ourselves to oil/auto tyranny.

I highly recommend the book, and for a sense of the wit and wisdom of its authors, check out the chat we did not long ago at the Firedoglake.com Book Salon.

The tyranny of oil has now cost us large swaths of the Gulf Coast ecosystem and an entire way of life. How do we shake off this kind of tyranny? Uncoupling from our cars has to be a huge part of that, since a big percentage of the oil we use fuels our driving. In the U.S., highway vehicles consume about 84% of the petroleum we use for transport and close to 60% of all petroleum we use for any purpose.

Government policy has played a major role in shackling us to oil; a shift in this policy can play a major role in freeing us. In previous posts, I've touched on approaches individuals can take to move toward oil independence. Today, I list a selection of government policies that can support greater freedom from oil and cars. Such as:

Stop all subsidies for oil companies. The same oil companies that make billions in profits each year still get tax breaks from the U.S. government. What's wrong with this picture? Ten years ago, an estimate of these subsidies that I cited in Divorce Your Car! quantified them at $2.5 billion per year. Now, reports the New York Times, these subsidies amount to $4 billion per year. While a 2007 attempt to end oil company tax breaks failed, there is again legislation in Congress that would cut handouts to the oil industry. Eliminating them would at least put these costs back in the marketplace, improving the competitiveness of cleaner fuels and non-motorized travel.

Use the revenue gained from ending oil subsidies to support walking, cycling and transit. We can go beyond ending oil subsidies and make up for some of the damage they've done. See the next few suggestions.

Invest more money in foot-friendly infrastructure. The website for Walkable Communities, Inc. has an excellent list of qualities that make communities walkable. Compact town centers, low traffic speeds, public spaces with interconnected walkways, and other measures that create more traditional, walkable neighborhoods all encourage people to travel on foot. In traditional neighborhoods in Chicago, for instance, residents walk for 37% of trips, compared to only 3% in suburbs. This adds to quality of life as it cuts oil dependence.

Fund more bicycle facilities. When the German city of Erlangen improved its bicycle facilities, bike trips rose from 10% to a whopping 30% of travel in 12 years. An interconnected system of bike routes, lanes and paths; secure, convenient, covered bike parking; bike racks and spaces on buses and trains; and safer roads can go a long way to support cycling and cut oil use.

Expand transit and intercity rail. We still suffer from a massive imbalance in the amount of funding that goes to roads (gargantuan) versus the amount going to urban transit and intercity passenger rail (paltry). This is a major contributor to our dependence on oil. Investing in transit has huge benefits even beyond cutting oil use, including job creation and promoting quality of life. For a taste of this, check out this morning's very good story about the Paris Metro from NPR. It captured how much this wonderful transit system enhances the city, and how much people love it. Give the story a listen or a read, and see if you agree: all urban areas should have such superb transit amenities.

Expand support of programs like Safe Routes to School. We all know parents who feel enslaved by chauffeuring their kids to and from school. When I wrote Divorce Your Car!, ¾ of all U.S. kids were driven to school, and in the U.K., parents shuttling students accounted for 1/5 of rush hour traffic. With a combination of education, engineering and enforcement, Safe Routes to School has addressed a primary reason parents feel compelled to drive their kids: safety. Since a few years ago, SRTS has received federal funding in the U.S., but the level of funding for walking and biking routes, walking school buses, bicycle trains, and other SRTS programs should be increased. SRTS cuts oil consumption and oil dependence, reduces weight gain in kids by allowing them safe exercise, improves air quality, aids community cohesiveness, and frees time up for parents all at once.

Support and spread laws like California’s AB32. This is the landmark California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which establishes limits to carbon emissions. Already, the law has accelerated the shift in California to cleaner, greener energy production and manufacturing, helping to reduce oil dependence. Yet now there's an insidious attempt to overturn AB32 through the California initiative process, funded and supported by – who else? – oil companies (including Tesoro, Valero Energy, Occidental Petroleum and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association). Using slick PR and spinning their proposal as "The California Jobs Initiative," these mostly Texas-based companies claim AB32 hurts job growth in California, but in fact, the opposite is true. For instance, data shows that since passage of AB32, California has attracted a dramatic increase in venture capital for clean technology companies, more than all other leading states combined. And for every $100 million in venture capital, 2,700 new jobs are created – at a rate faster than federal stimulus spending, and much more cost-effectively. If California voters are smart, they'll see through this cynical ploy and vote down the challenge to AB32. Meanwhile, more states would do well to adopt their own versions of the law.

Use feebates and rebates to encourage efficiency when cars are purchased. A system of high purchase taxes on big gas-guzzlers, paired with credits on fuel-efficient or cleaner-fuel vehicles, could be revenue-neutral – taxes on the guzzlers could be set to cover the cost of the credits. Over time, this would reduce oil consumption by highway vehicles. To keep the total miles we drive from rising to the point that they negate the efficiency gains, this policy has to be combined with others that support car-free travel.

Establish a carbon tax. Have I said this before? Even many business leaders agree that we need a consistent financial signal to move us off oil and toward cleaner energy. As we phase in such a tax, revenues can be used to support mass transit as well as bike and pedestrian facilities. In addition to raising state and national gas taxes, we can allow local and regional governments to levy gas and auto use taxes. In Montreal, such taxes supply significant revenue for the city's Agence Metropolitaine de Transport.

I could list more, but I hope what I've included here will demonstrate that we have a wealth of policy options to help free us from oil dependence, if we have the will to pursue them. I invite you to add your own suggestions in the comments section below. And may you find many ways to enjoy independence on this 4th of July holiday!

The Low-Petrol Diet: Because Petroleum Adds Pounds

2010-07-03T14:16:00.001-04:00

This is the thirteenth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, how about an Independence-from-Oil diet? You’ve heard of low-fat. You’ve heard of low-carb. This one’s low-petrol, and it’s scientifically proven to take off pounds!

That’s no joke. A study announced last week found that transit users weigh less, noting that regular walking to and from transit stops, even for short distances, is enough to keep pounds off. By using transit for a year or so, the study found, a typical five-foot-five rider will take off 6.45 pounds. In addition, using transit reduces the risk of becoming obese by 81 percent.

In announcing these results, study co-author Robert Stokes of Drexel University noted that "the prevalence of obesity ... has been strongly related to time spent in one's automobile."

These slender folks have obviously followed a low-petrol diet for some time.

Also last week, a study about the role of bicycling in controlling weight had researchers recommending more bike lanes. Even as little as five minutes a day of bicycling makes a measurable difference in helping women lose weight, this study found. To make this easier, lead author Anne Lusk of the Harvard School of Public Health recommended that "we need to provide the infrastructure or facilities so that more people could comfortably bicycle."

Already out for a few years is the finding that car-dependent suburban dwellers – big consumers of petroleum products – weigh six pounds more than residents of the most compact city centers. In a study that measured the health effects of sprawl, researchers found that every increase in the degree of sprawling development -- and by inference, the use of cars and gasoline -- added more to the average weight of residents. To reduce obesity, study authors recommended that communities be restructured to encourage more physical activity in routine daily life. The message here moves beyond “build it and they will come” to “build it and they’ll come lose weight.”

Madison, Wisconsin now limits car traffic on downtown's State Street to favor pedestrians, cyclists and transit - a policy that no doubt helps residents counteract consumption of beer and bratwurst.

These results call for better public investment in transit, cycling and walking facilities. But you don't have to wait for that to go on your own low-petrol diet.

A number of forward thinkers have come up with plans they call "climate diets." The one I like best suggests that we can cut greenhouse gas emissions and drop pounds at the same time by walking instead of driving for half an hour per day.

In a similar way, we can support recovery from the Gulf disaster and from oil dependence as we recover from our national weight problem. Instead of counting carbs or calories, we can count car miles, and keep those as low as possible.

Here are a couple of simple ways to pursue a low-petrol diet.

If you don’t mind doing the math, figure out how many miles per week you drive (if you have oil change records, use the odometer readings to determine how many miles between changes, then divide by the number of weeks). Then cut that by 5, 10 or 20 percent, depending on how low-petrol you want to go, and replace those car miles with walking, cycling, or taking transit.
It also works to list the car trips you take in a typical week, then select one or two of those to replace with walking, cycling or transit. In subsequent weeks, to up the number of pounds you take off, you can increase the number of trips you take without a car.

Either of these methods can be used in conjunction with the Circle Game, which I wrote about a few posts ago. Any way you approach this, the more driving you can replace with another, more active mode of travel, the higher your potential weight loss – and the closer we all get to independence from oil.

After a debacle like the Gulf disaster, it hardly seems we should need more motivation to reduce our oil use. For the unconvinced, however, the evidence makes this clear: petroleum adds pounds. Do we even need another reason to cut back?

Free Public Transit

2010-07-02T21:20:00.001-04:00

This is the twelfth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Among ideas for recovery -- from the Gulf spill, from oil addiction, from our economic doldrums – more investment in transit is near the top of the list. Now here’s another suggestion to layer in: make this free transit – with no fare charged at the point of use.

Before you scream “socialist idea!” and dismiss the concept out of hand, consider that every airport with a tram or people-mover already offers free transit. In other words, we already have circumstances in which free transit is considered widely appropriate and even taken for granted.

Prominent examples of free transit exist outside of airports, too. Portland, Oregon has a long-established “Fareless Square” in its downtown core which currently provides free rides on all rail services, including TriMet’s MAX Light Rail system and Portland Streetcars, within a designated “Free Rail Zone.” This aids air quality and provides people with easy transport in Portland’s downtown – which is also walkable and bike-friendly – as well as saving valuable downtown real estate for purposes other than parking.

A MAX Light Rail train near downtown Portland

In Belgium, the city of Hasselt operates a model free transit system. When the city decided to provide free transit instead of expanding its road system, transit ridership went up an incredible 800 percent, and continued to climb from there. In conjunction with more walking and bike paths, this reduced congestion, lessened traffic deaths, attracted business, and even saved enough money that the town could cut taxes.

Closely related to free transit is the idea of low-fare transit. For instance, the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District’s Downtown-Waterfront Shuttle, an open-air electric bus that serves Santa Barbara’s State Street and waterfront, costs only 25 cents. These shuttles run as frequently as every 10 minutes during the summer and help make Santa Barbara spectacularly easy to visit without a car. In Britain, according to a report by Bob Jeffery, low transit fares in the town of Sheffield actually reduced the level of car ownership; however, when the low fares increased, this trend reversed.

Transit is a public good akin to a street or sidewalk. It has a range of societal benefits, not only providing mobility in a more egalitarian manner than do private automobiles, but also reducing oil dependence and providing jobs. In fact, as I pointed out in Divorce Your Car! (p. 166), studies have shown that investment in transit creates more jobs, dollar for dollar, than building roads.

Transit, by the way, also helps people lose weight – seriously! -- and I hope to have more to say about that tomorrow.

The Gulf oil disaster ought to show us that getting off oil is critical enough not only to vastly increase investment in transit, but also to take a serious look at making it free. For more information about free transit, check the Free Public Transit website.

Recovery Ideas for "More Jobs, Less Oil" Instead of "No Ecology, No Economy"

2010-07-01T22:26:00.001-04:00

This is the eleventh in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

As of Wednesday, Reuters reported, President Obama formally asked federal department heads to craft a long-term economic and environmental recovery plan for the Gulf Coast. It’s about time for residents of the Gulf; a couple of news items I saw today quantified how much the BP oil disaster has set them back.

In one item, National Public Radio reported that the massive oil spill has decimated the Gulf’s tourist industry. Normally, lodging occupancy would be 98% over the July 4th holiday. This year, it’s dropped to 40%, even with big money-off deals being offered by some hotels.

Another report noted that BP had hired about 4,500 unemployed locals to aid in clean-up efforts as of early June. But that doesn’t come close to the 80,000 who have applied for compensation due to losing their livelihoods to the spill. Only about half of those claims have yet been paid.

The Gulf has probably been hit the hardest, but it’s not the only region in the country suffering from unemployment. I’m hoping that, as recovery plans and policies are developed for the Gulf and the nation, we will use strategies that address unemployment and oil addiction at the same time.

There are so many ways we might do this. Here are a few ideas:

How many derelict oil rigs in the Gulf are in commercially viable wind energy areas? Filmmaker and biodiesel advocate Josh Tickell – maker of the film Fuel – recently suggested to me that old oil platforms in the Gulf might work as sites for offshore wind turbines. If this is technologically feasible, it might be a source of employment for retrained oil rig workers, for instance – and it would be far cleaner than the oil drilling it would replace.
Also specifically for the Gulf -- right now there’s a gap in Amtrak’s system of train routes between New Orleans and Florida. Since Hurricane Katrina ripped up tracks used by the Sunset Limited, this route has not operated. Repair and reconstruction of tracks and stations along this route should be a priority and can serve as a source of employment in the Gulf, both short-term during construction and long-term, once the train and stations are again up and running.
Commentator and former Labor secretary Robert Reich recommended recently that “The President should order BP to establish a $5 billion clean-up fund, and immediately put America's army of unemployed young people to work saving the Gulf coast.” Reich estimated that hundreds of thousands might be needed to perform clean-up tasks, and tens of thousands more might be needed for restoration. “Call it the new Civilian Conservation Corps,” Reich wrote in a piece that appeared on Salon.com.
As an important shipping center, New Orleans might become a center for biodiesel manufacture and distribution – something that could, over time, replace the dirty cancer-causing concentration of refineries in the region.

Building bicycle facilities like these can provide jobs and reduce oil dependence; above, covered bicycle parking at a rail stop in Naperville, Illinois; below, a bicycle path in Madison, Wisconsin

Across the country, expanding transit can provide employment at a time when it’s desperately needed. At the same time, it can cut our reliance on oil. This might be funded by phasing in a carbon tax, as I wrote in a previous post. Expanding facilities for pedestrians and bicyclists can also be funded by such a tax, to further reduce oil dependence, and construction of those bike lanes and sidewalks can generate more jobs.
In June, Bill Gates and other corporate leaders formed the American Energy Innovation Council and released a report urging more federal funding for development of cleaner energy sources nationwide. The report urged that “Centers of Excellence” be established to foster this innovation. I differ with the Council on what it considers “cleaner energy” – they include nuclear fission and “advanced” use of fossil fuels, which I would phase out – but the Centers of Excellence idea seems basically sound. The report suggests these be built on the Energy Innovation Hubs now being established by the U.S. Department of Energy. (Perhaps one of these might end up on the Gulf Coast?)
One of the DOE’s Energy Innovation Hubs will address fuels from sunlight, a source advocated by Tony Seba in a recent opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Seba forecasts that the cost of solar electric power will drop by 80 to 90 percent over the next decade. “By 2020,” Seba writes, “unsubsidized solar power will be cheaper than subsidized coal, oil and nuclear.” In addition, he cites the falling cost of battery storage as a factor that will cut the cost of electric cars. Pair the electric car with solar recharging and, Seba concludes, “Goodbye oil spills.” If you’ve read Divorce Your Car! you know I don’t see electric cars as a panacea, but Seba’s scenario would be a positive change.

I would hope to see measures like these in the long-term economic and environmental recovery plan for the Gulf, as well as in a national recovery strategy. The whole Gulf oil disaster underscores the importance of a clean and healthy environment for a vibrant economy, and I hope we will see that reflected in the Obama administration’s policies. As I first heard from Paul Downton, a leader of Australia’s Ecocity movement, “No ecology, no economy; no planet, no profit.” Maybe this catastrophe will lead more of us to finally get that.

Gulf Recovery and the Oiled Wildlife Care Network

2010-06-30T20:12:00.001-04:00

This is the tenth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Today is the tenth day since my pledge to write 30 blog posts in 30 days in response to the Gulf oil disaster. I had only a loose plan when I embarked on these posts, but now see them addressing three main steps for recovery from the spill and from our oil addiction in general:

Cleaning up the spill and restoring the Gulf ecosystem, habitat and fisheries.
Expediting a shift by the energy industry in the Gulf – and everywhere – into cleaner sources.
Cutting demand for oil and so reducing the pressure for drilling in extreme areas such as deep waters of the ocean – the best and perhaps only good way to reduce the risk of this kind of catastrophe occurring again.

Today I want to write a bit about the first of these steps, the clean-up process. It’s a huge project, theoretically funded by BP and supervised by the federal government, and at this moment delayed by the presence of Hurricane Alex in the Gulf.

As I’ve scanned news of the Gulf clean-up, I’ve learned a bit about the key role being played by the Oiled Wildlife Care Network. The OWCN has partnered with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to help lead efforts to care for oil-affected wildlife in the Gulf. Based in California, the OWCN is recognized internationally as a leader in saving wildlife from the effects of oil spills. Information at the OWCN website tells me that offering the best care for oiled wildlife takes more than showing up at a spill and scrubbing down turtles and birds. In news coverage, we see the actual response efforts, but the OWCN must also train and drill personnel to ensure rapid deployment when disasters strike; research methods for wildlife care to improve medical therapies used during oiled wildlife rehab; and share information and resources about effects of oil on wildlife and their habitat.

This is critical work, and I paid even more attention when I saw that the OWCN is administered by the Wildlife Health Center at University of California at Davis – my alma mater. Under the umbrella of UCD’s world-class School of Veterinary Medicine, the Wildlife Health Center not only oversees the OWCN but also runs a range of other programs to support wildlife health and rescue.

When I began this series of posts, I promised to donate $2 per completed post to some sort of recovery effort. BP is paying for the actual Gulf cleanup, but the Wildlife Health Center does accept donations to help support preparation for spills and other programs. Until we’re off oil, we need well-prepared organizations to do this. So I’ve decided to give my $2 per post to the UCD Wildlife Health Center. If you’d like to join me with a pledge – anywhere from 10 cents per post on up – please email me or leave a comment below. Thanks!

Cutting Oil Use with the Circle Game

2010-06-29T16:30:00.001-04:00

This is the ninth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday I wrote about cleaning up our energy act -- the need for which is now made even more apparent by the Gulf oil disaster -- and of the importance of taking personal action to do so. If you’re looking for a simple way to get started, here’s a technique I like very much. It’s called the Circle Game, and it was created by Ellen Santasiero of Bend, Oregon.

Find your neighborhood on the map.
Place the point of a divider compass on the approximate location of your home.
Using the compass or a colored pen as shown above, draw a circle with a two-mile radius on the map.
Find places that you regularly visit and circle them or mark them with a highlighter. Include your workplace, bank, grocery store, library, schools, church, and other places you visit often.
Choose one of the places that falls within the circle and commit to walking, biking, or taking transit to it instead of driving every time you go.
Every week or so, commit to walking, biking, or taking transit to another location from within the circle. Continue adding locations until you routinely use alternatives to driving for getting to every location within a two-mile radius of your home or workplace.

You can go on to do this with places outside the two-mile radius, or you can replace those more distant businesses or services with alternatives closer to home. Try experimenting with expanding your circle, too, or using concentric circles to determine comfortable walking and biking distances for you. For example, if you decide to walk to all places within a mile, and bike to places within four miles, draw circles with those radii on your map and identify all the walkable and bikable destinations within them.

This technique can also be used when you move to aid in finding a new location based on proximity to services, work and school. Likewise, it can be used when looking for work to locate job sites closest to your home.

I frequently mentioned the Circle Game when on book tours for Divorce Your Car! and at one point it was even featured in a spot on Canadian TV. Many thanks again to Ellen Santasiero for coming up with this technique!

Cleaning Up Our Act

2010-06-28T19:12:00.001-04:00

This is the eighth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

In today’s news from the Gulf, oil has now washed up on a major Mississippi tourist beach near Biloxi, forcing evacuations; trackers expect Tropical Storm Alex to become a hurricane and affect the spread of oil, even without crossing the spill zone; and high seas from Alex have already delayed BP’s plans to attempt capturing more oil this week.

There’s more in-depth information on Alex and other potential hurricanes, including expected effects on the Gulf oil slick, at the excellent Weather Underground blog, or WunderBlog, written by Jeff Masters. A WunderBlog post from earlier today reported that winds and currents resulting from Alex will likely “push oil to the west and northwest onto portions of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts …. Oil will also move westward along the central Louisiana coast towards the Texas border.” In other words, there’s still a mess spreading out from the shattered Deepwater Horizon well, and there’s a long way to go to clean it up.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, a TV ad campaign from the Clean Economy Network is citing the Gulf catastrophe in urging Congressional action on energy legislation. “The Gulf oil disaster makes one thing really clear,” says spokesperson Tim Healy, an energy company CEO, in the ad. “It’s time for America to clean up our energy act.”

Will the Gulf disaster finally get Congress to move on energy and climate policy? Some people aren’t waiting to find out; the're going ahead with action to clean up their personal energy acts. I found one inspiring story in a comment following Jason Henderson’s essay "The Moral Imperative of the BP Oil Spill: Drive 20% Less,” which I first referenced on June 26th. The commenter’s family decided to cut their own energy use by 20% per year over three years, originally to address climate change. The comment notes: “After two years, we’ve succeeded in reducing our gasoline usage by 40% by 1) downsizing one car; 2) acquiring 2 electric bicycles to replace car driving for almost all short trips; 3) encouraging children to take public transit; and 4) forming carpools for other necessary kid schlepping.”

This is a wonderful example of what we can do as individuals and as households. Forty percent is a significant number. This story also reminds me of a book written years ago to encourage use of electric cars, Why Wait for Detroit? It’s an apt title, given that Detroit’s handling of electric car manufacture is summed up in the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car? When it comes to getting off oil, we might need a book with a similar title, maybe Don’t Wait for D.C. I’m glad to see more pressure on Congress for energy and climate legislation – we definitely need it – but I’m not counting on the federal government to act as quickly or extensively as necessary. We also need plenty of personal action to truly clean up our energy act.

If you’ve read Divorce Your Car! you know I believe that personal action can be a big source of societal change. I’m grateful to the commenter cited above for providing another good example of how much difference personal action can make.

Reflections on Hands Across the Sand

2010-06-27T12:48:00.001-04:00

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday a few of us here added our numbers to the international Hands Across the Sand event, saying “yes” to cleaner energy and “no” to offshore oil. We joined hands on the waterfront deck at Keweenaw Land Trust’s Marsin Nature Reteat and looked out across the Keweenaw Waterway that connects two parts of Lake Superior.

As we stood with hands joined, we talked of our concerns for the Gulf Coast, of how sad we feel to see what’s happened there, and of how disappointed many of us are with the lack of leadership we’ve observed in response to this catastrophe. We also talked about how each of us has the power to do something – we can write our legislators and tell them how we feel, at least. And some of us expressed hope that we might learn from this for the future.

Our impromptu Hands Across the Sand group joins hands by the Keweenaw Waterway

At the same time we did this, thousands of others in locations around the world joined together for the same reason. Most of these events took place on ocean beaches, but several in addition to our impromptu gathering took place around the Great Lakes.

If you’re not familiar with this region, it might surprise you to know that drilling for oil and gas takes place within the Great Lakes states; Michigan alone has issued permits for around 56,000 oil and gas wells. In the lakes themselves, new offshore oil drilling is banned, making the risk of a Gulf-style well blow-out low. However, Canadian law allows slant drills for oil as well as offshore gas wells in and under Lake Erie (the Gulf spill has prompted Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow to call for changes in this). Also, ships plying the lakes carry and use petroleum products. I had trouble finding good data on spills, but charts compiled in a 2006 report from the International Joint Commission suggest that in the Great Lakes each year, there might be anywhere from 100 to 500 reportable spills, and that on the U.S. side in any case, about 80% of these consist of oil or oil products.

I live near the shore of Lake Superior, where in 2003 a spill occurred in a shipping lane adjacent to our home. About two miles to the west of us, a resident was walking his dog along the beach when he noticed the dog’s legs had become covered in oil. Someone on a passing freighter had let a tank overflow and about 1,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil had spilled over the side into the lake.

That quantity is miniscule compared to what’s gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, but it was still enough for animals (at least the dog) to get oiled and for us to see tarballs up to about dime-size wash up on the beach. It was enough for the Coast Guard and local Office of Emergency Services to conduct an incident clean-up, and for us to be pretty nervous about what might happen to a beach that’s already suffered from past environmental abuses but is now set aside as a nature preserve.

I thought of that time as we stood on the deck overlooking the brilliant fresh blue of the Keweenaw Waterway, and hoped that the disastrous spill in the Gulf might finally motivate all of us in our society to change our ways. Such has been our thirst for oil that we’ve gone after it wherever we can find it, even when it threatens water. Yet water is vital for life; oil is not. Hands Across the Sand calls on us to recognize that and act accordingly.

Time for a Carbon Tax?

2010-06-26T18:53:00.001-04:00

This is the sixth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Does the Gulf spill mean it’s time for a carbon tax? I bring this issue up after reading Jason Henderson’s essay on Streetsblog San Francisco, “The Moral Imperative of the BP Oil Spill: Drive 20 Percent Less.” Henderson, a Louisiana native who now teaches at San Francisco State University, argues first that a moratorium on offshore oil drilling in the Gulf is imperative, and second, that we need to cut driving by 20 percent to offset the oil otherwise produced by idled Gulf rigs.

To support this reduction in driving, Henderson calls for a World-War-II-scale effort to encourage personal driving responsibility, increase federal transit funding, improve bicycle facilities, and encourage entrepreneurial jitney services to fill travel niches poorly served by bikes or transit -- all fine ideas.

One reader who commented on Henderson’s essay suggested that a carbon tax be part of the package, and I agree. Such a tax would be an appropriate way to fund the changes Henderson suggests. I’ve long supported some sort of carbon or increased fuel tax, and would like to see such a tax be phased in with increases over time.

Why do we need this? Because it will likely take far more than BP’s $20 billion to really make things right again in the Gulf. And because even though BP might have been criminally negligent, they’re out there drilling in the first place because there’s so much demand for oil. It’s appropriate, then, that we all contribute to Gulf recovery with some sort of tax on the oil that’s causing the problem. And it’s also appropriate for that tax to be used to change the conditions that led to the problem in the first place. In other words, that it be used to help get us all off oil.

A carbon tax could be used to improve transit and bicycle facilities and help cut driving by 20%

In addition to funding transit, bicycle facilities and perhaps incentives for the private-sector jitney services which Henderson recommends, revenues from a carbon tax could also:

Support job training to help oil workers from the Gulf, as well as workers from other hard-hit areas such as Detroit, shift into cleaner, greener jobs.
Support incentives for renewable energy development including biofuels, solar and wind.
Expand programs that reduce oil and auto dependence such as Safe Routes to Schools and others.

Of course, a carbon tax would also reduce demand for gasoline, encouraging people to drive less and more efficiently; encourage energy conservation overall, further reducing the demand for petroleum and fossil fuels; and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, something else we need to do if we hope to have a human-friendly atmosphere much past the 21st century.

The idea of any sort of new tax affecting gasoline – be it a carbon tax, a BTU tax, or whatever – is politically charged and a tough sell. One hopes, however, that this might change if we fully acknowledge the moral imperative of helping the hard-hit Gulf region both recover and transition away from oil, and if we understand that doing so will help us all.

Personal Action, Political Action, and the Power of the Pen

2010-06-25T21:22:00.001-04:00

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Let’s say you’re sickened and dismayed by the Gulf oil spill and want to do something about it. You’ve been watching images of oiled pelicans, of slicks killing marshland, of unemployed anglers and Gulf residents in shock and fury. You can’t believe the inability of both BP and the federal government to contain this spill after more than two months. Maybe you’re one of the many who tune in to the live feed of the Gulf spill each day. It’s devastating, and you wish you could do something, but you feel helpless.

I’m guessing many of us have felt these things – I know I have – and so as I write here, part of what I want to communicate, as well as remind myself, is this: We are not helpless. Maybe we can’t dive under the sea to plug the spewing Deepwater Horizon well, but there is much we can do to stem the demand for oil that is the ultimate cause of this disaster, to help those suffering as a result of this spill, and to advocate change.

Petroleum products are such a part of our lives that it’s hard sometimes to see how to stop using them (in fact, I first drafted this post with a petroleum product, a plastic pen filled with petroleum-based ink, and decided as I was writing that I must look for a source of pens made without petrochemicals; know of any?). As I hope I began to show in my posts of the last few days, though, there are ways to cut back, ways that can both help us withdraw from our oil addiction and, in the long run, help the people of the Gulf.

We can make a difference both with personal action and with political action. In the first few of my planned 30-posts-in-30-days I’ve touched on personal actions that can make a difference, and in future posts I’ll cover more. As far as political actions go, there seem to be a swelling number out there now which address the crisis in the Gulf. One I discovered yesterday is Hands Across the Sand, a show of support for cleaner energy instead of offshore drilling. Hands Across the Sand started in Florida and since the Gulf spill, has grown into an international movement. There’s a Hands Across the Sand event tomorrow, June 26th, at 12 noon; the website lists locations around the U.S. and the world. I’m inviting others to join me in supporting this where I live near Lake Superior.

For political action, I also believe in the power of the pen, the power of writing. I believe in it partly because, since writing Divorce Your Car!, I have had the honor of being approached by several people who've said, "Your book changed my life." But you don't have to write a whole book for writing to work this way. Even small bits of writing can do it. Just sending postcards to the Prez or to our Reps in Congress saying something like “Please help the Gulf economy shift to cleaner energy” will help that point of view get counted. It might not bring immediate action, but it can add up to a tipping point. Writing does make a difference, and it can make a difference with the Gulf oil spill as well as with getting us off oil.

Transporting Stuff in Bike Trailers

2010-06-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

Yesterday’s post on cargo bikes touched on some creative ways to haul feight without fossil fuel. Bike trailers provide yet another means of moving goods via human power. I like bike trailers for their versatility. They come in a variety of designs, you can take them on and off a bike as needed, and you can stow stuff in them just as you might toss things into the trunk of a car.

Bike trailers are astonishingly adaptable. I’ve known people who have hauled canoes on them for camping trips, as well as people who use them to carry their pets (and children!). A few landscape services use bike trailers to haul their tools to jobs, and some of the services that use cargo bikes also use trailers to expand their hauling capacity.

My own bike trailer (pictured above left) is pretty basic but serves nicely for things like grocery shopping, hauling books to the library, or doing several errands at a time. I generally use it if I have to carry more than will fit on my bike rack or in panniers. It’s not fancy but I’ve had it for years and it suits my needs. The collapsible feature means it’s not as sturdy as other trailers, but it’s darn easy to store.

The heavy-duty trailers built by Bikes at Work occupy the other end of the quality spectrum. If cargo bikes can be likened to pickup trucks, then Bikes at Work trailers can turn a standard bicycle into a semi. You can see where I got this idea from the photo below.

The two heavy-duty Bikes at Work trailers above are on a house-moving job

Each of the two Bikes at Work trailers above can haul a load up to 300 pounds. When the company was founded, its services included hauling recyclables in Ames, Iowa (last I heard, that service had split off into a separate organization). Bikes at Work also maintains an impressive Carfree Information section on its website, a great go-to source for anyone wanting to get off oil.

I’ll close today’s post with a mention of another bike trailer I own. This one goes with my Bike Friday folding bike, and it’s a suitcase trailer. The bike itself folds and disassembles to fit into the suitcase for easy transport on a train or bus (or plane, for those who fly with them). When the bike is re-assembled ( a process that takes just a few minutes, if you’re good at it) the suitcase hooks on to the bike’s rear hub and can carry your other luggage.

In Toronto on one of my car-free book tours with my Bike Friday New World Tourist folding bike and suitcase trailer

This Bike Friday suitcase trailer is plenty big for the two duffel bags I used when I set off on several car-free book tours after writing Divorce Your Car! This set-up enabled me to transition easily from train to bus to bike travel as I journeyed literally thousands of miles without using a car. My goal in doing this echoed the reason I wrote the book: to demonstrate how many great alternatives we have to petroleum-based car travel.

More tomorrow!

Consider the Cargo Bike

2010-06-23T19:50:00.000-04:00

This is the third in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first introduces the series.

More bad news today from the Gulf of Mexico as removal of a collection cap again allowed oil to gush unrestricted from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well. And so the graphic display of oil-dependence dangers continues. Recovering from oil addiction takes on further urgency if we acknowledge, as Alaska writer Charles Wohlforth points out, that total clean-up from large oil spills is just not possible. In a superb essay for Seed Magazine, Wohlforth notes that less than 10% of the crude spilled two decades ago by the Exxon Valdez was ever recovered. Even as we gape in horror at the current larger spill disaster in the Gulf, significant oil still remains along the shores of Prince William Sound.

Here’s the good news: our heavy dependence on dirty oil needn’t continue. With this post, I’d like to highlight another of the bounty of cleaner ways to move people and goods. Human power doesn’t get much press, so I was delighted yesterday to see Alan Durning’s fabulous piece on Sightline Daily about cargo bikes. If you want to be amazed by what can be carried on two (or three) non-motorized wheels, check out the terrific images of "human-powered pickup trucks” in this post. As he introduces these photos, Alan chimes in on the healing-from-dependence theme by writing: “Catching glimpses of a life cured of addiction can be a step toward recovery.”

The pix compiled by Alan and urban planner Alyse Nelson inspired me to set down a few of my own experiences with cargo bikes. I first learned about hauling by bike when the cycle delivery company Pedal Express formed in Berkeley, California in the early 1990s. Still in business, the service will deliver up to 500 pounds and uses a fleet of bikes that includes the one pictured below. The Pedal Express website also includes a scrapbook of PedX cargo bikes carrying some really big loads.

One of the cargo bikes used by Pedal Express in Berkeley

I have used Pedal Express on a few occasions to deliver birthday presents to folks living within their service area. I’ve done this from Michigan by purchasing presents by phone from Berkeley or Oakland stores, then arranging for Pedal Express to deliver.

These days, you can find delivery highlights on the Pedal Express Facebook page. My favorite highlight went up last November: “We are delivering an entire Thanksgiving dinner by bicycle today! Awesome.”

I got further experience with human-powered hauling when my household owned a cargo trike. Though it ultimately proved to be more than we needed, this beautiful recumbent trike was both fun and a good teaching tool as it garnered admiration from people who saw it. Custom-built by Lightfoot Cycles of Montana, this “ice trike” could navigate snow and ice as it carried cargo, an important feature for our long winters. Lightfoot, by the way, also makes cycles for people with disabilities and special needs, including hand-cycles.

"Ice trike" cargo bike built by Lightfoot Cycles

When I wrote Divorce Your Car! I mentioned BikeCartAge, a Victoria, BC, bicycle delivery service that used this slogan: “Is there anything we can’t deliver by bicycle? Not much!” It applies to cargo bikes overall, which you’ll see when you check out Alan Durning’s stellar photo compilation (did I mention you should take a look at his post?). I particularly like the “pub bike” built for Portland, Oregon's Hopworks by Metrofiets and designed to deliver beer and pizza, complete with bike-mounted kegs and a serving bar.

From a different and older source, I also liked the pair of cargo-bike services (not affiliated, as far as I know) that operated in Toronto several years back. As page 152 of Divorce Your Car! relates:

“One enterprising Canadian promotes safe sex in Toronto by selling condoms from a three-wheeled ‘Condom Cart;’ using a bike gives him a competitive advantage, writes the Community Bicycle Network, because ‘bikes are a good way to go where the action is.’ And should the condoms fail, ABC Diaper Service of Toronto provides a complete daily diaper delivery service by bicycle, offering diapers made with unbleached cotton and washing them with environmentally safe products.”

Note: I’m not sure whether these services still operate, but I’m checking. Stay tuned.

Obviously, cargo bikes alone won’t get us off oil. Rather, they offer this take-home message: cycling technology can do much more than most of us realize. If we take greater advantage of these capabilities as part of an integrated strategy, they can indeed aid our recovery from oil addiction. And I agree with Alan: simply glimpsing what’s possible can be a first step.

The more adventurous among us might go on from there to have our own cargo bikes, but even those who don’t can support their use by patronizing services which use them. If you know of more such services, please share links or contact info in the comment section below. Thanks!

Taking the Train

2010-06-22T17:20:00.000-04:00

This is the second in a series of blog posts about recovering from the Gulf oil spill and from oil dependency overall. The first gives an introduction to the series.

In the U.S., close to 70% of the petroleum we use fuels transportation. We consume about 20 million barrels per day; around 13 million of those go to moving us around.

Portland, Oregon's Union Station

Given this, and given that I authored a book called Divorce Your Car!, you might expect me to start a series on recovering from oil spills and addiction by advising, “Drive less.” Clearly, we have to drive less to recover from oil addiction and to relieve pressure on fragile ecosystems like the Gulf. Yet that admonition has never done much for me. Though “driving less” describes a primary path to oil-addiction recovery, it’s so non-specific that it doesn’t do much to help envision that path.

So instead of writing “drive less,” I prefer to focus on particulars that foster less car use, such as today’s suggestion: Take the train. I’m talking long-distance trains here, which are generally a very efficient means of moving both people and freight. They can do two important things when it comes to recovery from oil addiction: use less energy, and use cleaner energy.

On average, a train uses less energy to move people than any other enclosed mode of motor travel. U.S. DOE’s Transportation Energy Data Book offers the following 2007 figures for BTUs of energy used per passenger-mile:

Amtrak ..................................... 2,516
All rail ..................................... 2,586
Airplanes ................................... 3,103
Cars .......................................... 3,514
Light trucks ............................. 3,946
Buses ........................................ 4,315
Single-occupant cars .............. 5,517
Single-occupant light trucks ... 6,788

Because of differences in the nature of these travel modes, these figures aren’t precisely comparable, but it’s still safe to say you save energy by taking the train – especially compared to something like a single-occupant SUV (classed as a light truck).

Passengers from the Empire Builder stretch on the station platform in Whitefish, Montana as the train stops for a break. This route goes right through Glacier National Park.

U.S. trains don’t yet measure up to Europe’s or Japan’s or Canada’s, but despite that, the Amtrak system has much to offer. You can get as far as clear across the country in less time than it takes to drive, and relax or work along the way (Joe Biden recently described how he has worked on Amtrak commuter trains in this nice little essay). Some trains can also save you time compared to flying. In Divorce Your Car! I pointed out that certain Amtrak routes are cheaper and faster than short plane hops between major cities (see p. 168 for examples).

Some of Amtrak’s best runs service commuters. The Northeast routes, the Hiawatha between Milwaukee and Chicago, the Cascades between Oregon and Seattle, and California routes – the Capitol Corridor and Pacific Surfliner – are all popular and see high ridership.

If you’re on the way to the Gulf to help with wildlife recovery, or to cover news of the spill, you can take trains to New Orleans from points north, west, or northeast. Chicago to New Orleans is an overnight trip on the City of New Orleans; New York or DC to New Orleans is likewise overnight on the Crescent. Los Angeles to New Orleans takes two days, but that’s still less than driving.

Waiting for the Southwest Chief in the Los Angeles Union Station.

Amtrak is not without problems. Decades of tight budgets have limited equipment upgrades, so many train cars show wear and are subject to facilities breakdowns. I can say from experience that there’s nothing like toilet failures on a train to make a journey unpleasant. Delays have plagued some routes, because freight trains have priority on most tracks; recently, though, Amtrak’s on-time performance has gone way up. I’ve ridden several trains that have reached their destinations early.

Right now, trains run on a combination of electric power and diesel (some Amtrak locomotives are diesel-electric, some all-electric; as an aside, some locomotives used by Amtrak were made by GM, which suggests a way to bring more jobs to Michigan). This means that although most trains now run on fossil fuels, their power source can easily shift in two ways: one, by using biodiesel in place of petroleum diesel in locomotives, which has already been done in some spots.; and two, by shifting grid electrical power into cleaner energy sources such as solar.

Such changes, combined with rail travel’s efficiency, give trains great potential to cut our collective oil dependence. You can cut your own by checking out train service in your area, and riding the train.

This Amtrak locomotive is pulling the Coast Starlight into Salinas, California.

Paths to Recovery from Oil Spills and Addiction

2010-06-21T17:37:00.000-04:00

How can we heal from the devastating Gulf oil spill, and from our crippling dependence on fossil fuels? A pledge to count the ways ….

I’ve just returned from a six-week sojourn to California. I rode Amtrak there and back, visited family and friends, took a break from writing and blogging, and all through the trip, followed news of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster with the sort of horrified helplessness I’m sure many of us feel as we watch BP’s ruptured well spew petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico.

Nodding-donkey pumpjacks bring oil up from wells under California fields. Photo taken from a passing train. ©2010 by Katie Alvord

Eleven men went down in flames as this debacle began. Now more than two months into the spill, scores of birds and animals have died in oil, beaches in at least four states have been fouled, the entire Gulf seafood industry is at risk, and we still have another two months to go before the Deepwater Horizon’s geyser of toxic crude can be fully stopped.

The Gulf of Mexico and the human and non-human lives that depend on its ecosystem are casualties of our addiction to oil. This spill is nothing if not a wake-up call about the dangers of that addiction.

Ghost in the water: From shore, you can still see oil platforms like this one in the Santa Barbara Channel, where a 1969 oil spill was a major wake-up call about the dangers of offshore drilling. This was taken through a train window. ©2010 by Katie Alvord

It’s not just this worst-in-U.S.-history ecotastrophe that compels us to end oil dependence. As headlines astound us with the quantity of crude pouring into the Gulf, the gallons of petroleum products that consistently flush, leak, or spill into streams and seas also poison the planet. In her fine book Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay wrote of the spills that occur at all stages of our oil use, from drilling to driving, as she pointed out: “The whole system is a leaky vessel.” As of the 1990s, when Kay wrote this book, an estimated quarter-billion gallons of oil regularly escaped into the environment each year just in the U.S.

This routine spillage has only gone up, and it occurs around the globe. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Anene Ejikeme of Trinity University noted that petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta – which supplies significant oil to the U.S. -- has spilled the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez into Nigerian coastal waters every year for the last 50 years. As a result, Ejikeme writes, “Dead fish and oily water are part of daily life for Niger Delta residents.” She cites an Amnesty International report documenting that these Nigerians “have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water, and eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins.”

Is this the future for the Gulf Coast, and for the globe – a future we are now watching unfold before our eyes as we view live video of Deepwater Horizon’s dark and ongoing underseas gusher?

It doesn’t have to be. The good news: there is a tremendous amount we can do to turn away from fossil fuels, to recover from oil dependence and pursue paths to cleaner energy. Based on prior research and writing on this topic, I believe that we can all help to do this now, today, in our own lives, in ways large and small. We can all help in recovering from the Gulf spill and in recovering from our crippling addiction to oil.

Toward that end, I make this three-part pledge:

1) I pledge to write a blog post every day for the next thirty days about actions and policies that can move us down a path to cleaner energy, help us recover from the Gulf spill, and/or help us recover from oil addiction. I’m counting this post as the first of these thirty.

2) I pledge to pursue the personal oil-use-reducing actions I will write about, and describe my experiences in my posts.

3) I pledge to donate $2 per post to non-profits working on cleaner energy and spill recovery, and invite you to join me by pledging to donate anywhere from 10 cents on up per post I write over the next 30 days. In a future post, I’ll give details about how to do this.

Many of my posts will be here on this “Divorce Your Car!” blog – appropriately enough, since so much of the oil we use gets consumed by driving. Some posts might be on other blogs, but I’ll link to those here and make this site “pledge central.” Besides pledging to contribute, I invite you to read and comment on these posts, tell your friends, and reduce your own oil use by trying out the personal actions I’ll describe.

More soon!

Oil Spills: Disastrous - and Not the Only Reason for Change

2010-04-30T16:49:00.000-04:00

The oil spill now devastating the Gulf of Mexico reminds us yet again how urgently we need to reform our transportation system. The huge damage caused by extracting, refining and using oil might be our automotive love affair's biggest black eye, but as bad as it is, it's not even the only reason for change.

Last month I hosted a chat about some of these issues with the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives, the latest book to critique our automotive transportation system. I've excerpted portions of this conversation with Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez below. You can find the full chat at the Firedoglake.com Book Salon, a great spot for discussions of cutting-edge social and political literature.

Right now, Firedoglake is also calling for a cancellation of all offshore drilling plans. You can access a petition to send this message to President Obama when you visit the full chat about Carjacked.

In our conversation last month, we found plenty of ways that car culture costs us, without even getting into the whole messy topic of drilling for oil. We were joined by several visitors identified by their user names. The excerpts below are edited for clarity.

Katie Alvord: Welcome, Anne and Catherine. I’m delighted to be here to chat about your book. So — we’ve been Carjacked. What are the biggest costs of this to American families?

Catherine Lutz: American families lose out in terms of their finances, their health and safety, and their quality of life. The average family spends $14,000 a year on owning and operating the two cars typically owned, for one thing. A pretty amazing number. And traffic deaths are way down with the recent drop in driving, but they remain the leading killer of people between the ages of 3 and 34 in the US.

Katie: One of the things you write in your book is: “If every family in America that owns multiple cars owned one less, as a nation we could reduce household debt by $1.4 trillion.” That’s huge! Why so much?

Anne Lutz Fernandez: The number is so staggeringly large because so few people buy their cars with cash these days and thus we are carrying an incredibly heavy debt load to own the cars that we own. We’ve become payment shoppers who think about the monthly payment and don’t look at the overall automotive debt load, so our financing costs associated with car ownership are significant. And over recent years we’ve been spending more on each car, until the recession trading in earlier and earlier for each new model, and piling on options and accessories and looking for luxury and even the most humble models.

Catherine: The average amount people paid for a new car this year was over $28,000 with near 90% financed. We also spend an incredible amount of time in our cars. 18 1/2 hours a week is the average there, and some of the drivers we interviewed for our book had even higher numbers.

Katie: All the time in our cars probably is one reason people use them as mobile living rooms, dressing rooms, and more! You write of your own driving lives, “If this were a job, each of us would have been at it … for more than six years of our lives.” How aware do you think people are of the time they spend in and lavish on cars?

Anne: Katie, most adults we talked to were shocked by the national average. Some agreed to keep trip diaries for us and were surprised to see how much time they spend in their cars–for those of us in the suburbs, the time spent has crept up often without us noticing, unless we suddenly took on a new commute. But interestingly, the teens and young adults, particularly in suburban or exurban areas, were less surprised–they as a generation have spent so much time being driven here and there.

Katie: That’s so interesting. I think the trip diaries are a great idea. It probably helps people see something else you point out, that commuting is not the main thing contributing to our trips. Are people surprised by this?

Anne: Yes! In our interviews with drivers many felt helpless about how much driving they do and they often blamed it on their commutes. But the numbers tell a different story. While we may travel more miles for our commutes, we’re spending a lot of time stuck in traffic and taking more trips to run errands and go shopping than we are to get to work. So this means that much of the driving that we’re doing is discretionary. And we can cut back on it by trip chaining, walking in some cases to shop, by shopping on the Internet – and of course by shopping less. We were surprised to find out how effective radio advertising is in encouraging drivers to shop more than they intended when they hopped in the car.

Phoenix Woman: Another method: The bicycle. If at all possible, try to use a bike when shopping for anything less than five miles from where you live. It’s faster than walking, you can carry more (bike panniers and racks are lovely), and you have the same freedom of movement, with a good fraction of the speed (at least on city streets where cars are limited to 30 mph for safety reasons) of the automobile.

Anne: Yes, and for that reason and others in the past few years, bicycling has grown dramatically as a mode of everyday transportation, even among those who must drive to work.

dakine01: I guess I’m not a good car loving ‘Murican as I drive a ‘92 Ford Escort that even as it falls apart still gets roughly 30 MPH. Fortunately, I never let my car be my status symbol and statement of self worth.

Anne: We did talk to some like you who hold onto their cars for a good long time–and it is the route to wealth as we found when we talked to personal finance experts.

Katie: On traffic deaths, I know some play down the number of car deaths and injuries in this country, but Carjacked points out that certain other countries have much lower vehicle death rates than in the U.S. What accounts for this?

Catherine: 1.2 million people died in vehicle crashes around the world last year, according to the World Health Organization, so the story is bad all around, but some countries, Sweden, for example, have much lower rates achieved via a more regulated car industry and a concerted government campaign to lower deaths in other ways. One other solution is more public transit — a much safer mode of travel — and simply less time on the road.

Katie: I agree with you about transit as a safer means of travel that could really help cut the vehicle death rate, and you advocate a shift to using more of it. Your book says, “Now is the ripest moment in the history of the car system to retool the auto industry into a transit industry.” What if any signs have you seen that this might be happening?

Catherine: There was a great move to use public transit with the gas price spike of 2008, and many have continued riding. Billions in stimulus funds were also spent on mass transit, so the direction of change is positive.

bmaz: I am going to take a guess that Catherine and Anne are sisters and are NOT related to Bob Lutz.

Anne: No relation. If we were family, we obviously would have been cut out of the will by now!

Earth Hour Reflections

2010-03-28T16:08:00.001-04:00

To celebrate Earth Hour last night, we turned off the power to have a candlelit dinner. The flickering light from our six beeswax candles turned our ordinary little kitchen into a magical place for one hour (and a bit more, actually, because we liked it so well). Over food and by flame, we reflected on recent climate news.

Independent of fickle public opinion, the signs of a shifting climate continue to accumulate. In the lower atmosphere, January 2010 was the warmest January ever, and the Southern Hemisphere just had its hottest February ever. The decade just ended was the warmest on record (graphs here), and unless there’s a quick change in El Nino conditions, NASA projects this year could be the warmest in modern history. In the Arctic, where sea ice remains thin, the melting of permafrost now allows methane – a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 – to bubble up into the atmosphere. Recently a study found increased melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, especially along its northwest edge. Another new study suggests the ice in Greenland could destabilize once atmospheric CO2 climbs above 400 ppmv – a point we’re likely to reach in about five years. Antarctica, too, continues to lose ice. Sea level rise made news last week by abetting the disappearance of a once-disputed island in the Bay of Bengal between India and Bangladesh.

This global news is all consistent with the unusually short winter we’ve had where I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s normal here to have significant snow on the ground for six to eight months of the year. Snow often begins falling in October or November, and hangs around until April or May.

This year, though, winter started late and left early. Earnest snow didn’t come until December 2nd, after an unusually warm November. We had some bone-chilling cold snaps in January, but still, folks noticed an absence of the usual ice buildup along the Lake Superior shoreline, especially by February. By the time March hit, we were getting lengthy thaws, and by mid-month organizers of winter sports events got worried. The annual cross-country ski Great Bear Chase squeaked through with careful course grooming and a shortening of routes; at least one ice-fishing tournament was canceled for lack of ice.

As I write this, there are still isolated spots where people can ski (or so I hear); and though it was short, this year’s ice-fishing season was reportedly good. Still, as of the spring equinox, what we actually had was – spring. That season usually doesn’t start up here until late April or early May. This year, though, winter has essentially ended after only four months – about half of what’s considered normal for the area.

One season doesn’t make a trend, and it’s true our previous winter was unusually harsh and cold. The string of winters before that, though, were also warm enough to worry ski enthusiasts and winter-tourism businesses. These warmer, shorter winters seem to have become more common now than the longer, colder seasons for which this place is known. It’s a compelling backdrop for Earth Hour and for contemplating the ramifications of living in a warming world.

So far, it’s not a disaster for someone like me, but I don’t live on an eroding coastal bluff, like so many Alaskan Inuits whose villages have to relocate, or on a low coastal plain, like the Bangladeshis who are becoming climate refugees as ocean advances over land. I don’t have most of my savings tied up in a low-lying coastal home in Louisiana or Mississippi or North Carolina or Florida. I don’t belong to a species whose food and habitat is dwindling as temperatures climb. Even for someone like me, though, it is a more unpredictable world, and I feel wary.

Another thing I contemplated by Earth Hour’s candlelight is this: whether all this local and global climate news demonstrates the reality of a warming planet is almost moot when one looks at the myriad good reasons to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Consider the huge destruction caused by extracting coal and oil from the ground; the volume of toxics their transport and use adds to air and water; the social and political conflicts they engender worldwide. In contrast, less use of fossil fuels gives us magical candlelit dinners, the health and fresh air of a walk or bike ride, the companionship and community of sharing rides with neighbors.

Wrapped up in proposed solutions to climate change is a beautiful lifestyle, a richer lifestyle, one that recognizes we don’t need growth for prosperity, one where the whole year can consist of a series of Earth Hours. It’s the kind of lifestyle I discovered when I found that using less fossil fuel to get around made my life better, not worse, and that ultimately led me to write Divorce Your Car! It’s the gift we find hidden in more often turning off the power, a gift that can help us as we help others and make many things a little more magical.

Turn Out the Lights and Pedal Away

2010-03-27T14:32:00.000-04:00

I’m getting ready to turn off my lights and grid power at 8:30 p.m. tonight, along with millions of others around the globe taking part in Earth Hour 2010. I love the visual nature of Earth Hour, the imagery of this time-zone by time-zone lights-out around the planet, this global wave of shadow and light. If enough of us turn enough things off, we can create a downward blip in power use that will show decision-makers we’re ready to conserve on a big scale. We’re taking personal steps to cut fossil fuel consumption and we want our reps take political steps, too.

Another cool thing going on this weekend is a Pedal-Powered Blogathon, a fundraiser for the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri. The blogathon will use a pedal-powered laptop, hooked up to a "Pedal-A-Watt" bicycle-powered generator. I just found out about this a few hours ago, and love the whole concept.

If you, too, like the idea of pedal-powered appliances, check out a book called The Human-Powered Home by Tamara Dean. It’s put out by New Society Publishers, also the publisher of Divorce Your Car! and many other terrific sustainability books. Real books, too – the kind you can read tonight as you’re celebrating Earth Hour, by candlelight or maybe even by the light of the nearly-full moon.

Carjacked in our Asphalt Nation:

2010-03-19T13:13:00.000-04:00

Will We Divorce Our Cars at the End of the Road?

Every so often, it seems, we need a literary reminder of the issues troubling our automotive love affair, and there emerges a full-blown critique of car culture. I base this judgment on the periodic release, over the last few decades, of several books fitting this description.

Here are a few of late-20th century books that I’d put in the category of car culture critique (this is not by any means comprehensive, so please feel free to comment with your own favorite titles):

The Highway and the City by Lewis Mumford, 1963
The Insolent Chariots by John Keats, 1964
Road to Ruin by A.Q. Mowbray, 1969
Autokind vs. Mankind by Kenneth Schneider, 1971
Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson, 1985
The End of the Road by Wolfgang Zuckermann, 1991
For Love of the Automobile by Wolfgang Sachs, 1992
The Elephant in the Bedroom by Stanley Hart and Alvin Spivak, 1993
Asphalt Nation by Jane Holtz Kay, 1997

As of the 21st century, we have my own contribution to the literature, Divorce Your Car! which came out in May of 2000. And now we have another fine book, Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives, by Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez. I’ve been reading this book lately, and I find its stories and analysis very insightful.

I’m just about to finish Carjacked as I prepare to host a chat with the authors – that’s coming up tomorrow 3/20 from 5 to 7 p.m. Eastern time in the Book Salon of the Firedoglake.com website. We’ll be talking about Carjacked, and about questions like the one I raised in my title-composed-of-titles for this blog post. Please join us!

Cars, Recycling, and a Big Green Purse

2010-01-31T13:36:00.000-05:00

All the research that went into writing Divorce Your Car! still comes in handy for others, and that’s nice to see. One example comes from Diane MacEachern, who recently posted a piece called “Can You Recycle Your Car?” at her “Big Green Purse” blog.

Diane's book and website of the same name both advocate using the power of the purse to make green choices. Both her blog post and her book cite Divorce Your Car! in noting that one-third of the considerable pollution and waste generated by cars comes from manufacturing them. Disposal of cars creates additional waste, despite the fact that automotive recycling is big business.

Diane reports that manufacturers have lately nudged up the quantity of recycled materials in new cars; for instance, she writes, ten percent of a new Mini Cooper’s plastic comes from recycled stock. She advocates continuing the move toward more recycling with personal actions such as recycling motor oil, donating old cars to non-profits, and buying recycled products – an important step to ensure that recycling works, as we also reduce our driving, reduce our overall use of stuff, and reuse what we already have.

The post is both informative and a timely reminder that not all automotive pollution comes out of the tailpipe. Thanks, Diane!

Books Have a Life of Their Own

2009-12-09T10:08:00.000-05:00

This morning I saw that Divorce Your Car! ranked #2 on Borders Books Australia’s list of “Top 5 Pollution Control Books.” Great! I thought, although when I looked at other titles on this list, I noticed that almost all of them are technical texts about remediation. A little different from Divorce Your Car!, which quotes Monty Python and tells stories about early car enthusiasts touting the supposed health benefits of the horseless carriage. But that’s ok, because yes, the book does also discuss how to control pollution by driving less – in several chapters, as there are so many ways to do this.

Finding Divorce Your Car! on this list is yet one more example of how, once they’re launched and out in the marketplace, books can take on lives of their own. I’m frequently surprised by the places in which this book gets listed, classified, or otherwise mentioned. Somebody in Australia must be buying Divorce Your Car! for it to make this list of top pollution control texts, so whoever you are, thanks! And thanks to Borders Australia for adding this pleasant and amusing little surprise to my morning.

Save Gas, Save the Planet

2009-11-20T09:19:00.000-05:00

I write three blogs, and sometimes find unexpected synchronicities in bouncing between them. Just after I finished writing about the Mediterranean diet on one, I opened John Addison’s new book to review it here and found a beautiful passage explaining how a Mediterranean vacation -- in Italy -- led John and his wife Marcia to a life-changing realization: “The vacation was deeply relaxing, in part, because it was car free.”

Inspired, John and Marcia returned home and moved from suburbs to city, cutting their car use and ultimately going carbon neutral. Now John has written Save Gas, Save the Planet to urge others to take similar steps.

The book is a positive addition to the literature about greening transportation. A troika of tips sums up the solutions it covers: 1) ride clean; 2) ride together; and 3) ride less. In chapters that feature stories from folks both car-lite (he uses the spelling “car-light”) and car-free, he explores cleaner fuels, transit options, ridesharing, and self-propulsion by bike and on foot. The last few chapters focus on the bigger picture, covering issues such as climate change and the security ramifications of our oil addiction.

Each chapter ends with handy lists of specific actions that can 1) save gas, or 2) save the planet. Of course, many of them do both. It’s a nice feature that adds to the book’s utility as a how-to guide.

John draws on his expertise as editor of the Clean Fleet Report (tagline: “hybrid & electric cars smart charged with renewable energy”) in the book’s six detailed chapters about EVs, plug-in hybrids, biofuels, and other cleaner car options. Admittedly, all this ink on clean cars and clean tech is interesting and highly informative, but it does have a tendency to make me nervous. It’s not that we don’t need clean energy – we desperately need to wean ourselves from fossil fuels – but I fear too much focus on the technofix risks leaving people with the idea that EVs can solve the whole problem (see Chapter 14 of Divorce Your Car! for more on why they can’t). To his credit, though, John makes clear the need for renewable recharging when using EVs, and balances his approach with his chapters on shared transport and cutting the need for travel altogether.

One of my favorite chapters is titled “The Car-Free Option.” In addition to telling some good stories about folks living car-free, the chapter taught me some new acronyms. As John writes: “Enlightened communities are in the transition from car-oriented urban gas hogs (COUGH) to people-oriented development (POD).” If you know transport reform, you know it never seems to get done without a slew of acronyms.

I first learned about Save Gas, Save the Planet at last month’s conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), where I had the pleasure of meeting John (pictured at SEJ above). He now lives in San Francisco, where he and his wife enjoy walking, biking, and taking renewably-powered transit.

Car Divorce Goes Trendy

2009-10-24T13:10:00.000-04:00

Car-free living has officially reached trend status.

Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting and evocative story about the increase in people choosing to live without a car. Perhaps it’s a trend that’s been building. Nearly a decade ago, shortly after Divorce Your Car! first came out, I got a call from a Time magazine writer wanting to know about this same trend. Were more people, in fact, going car-free?

At the time, Critical Mass rides had become a phenomenon, and a surge of transportation reform groups had drawn attention to the need to cut car use. Still, it was hard to tell how many people might be choosing a car-free lifestyle, and ultimately, the magazine did not run an article.

For last week's piece, NYT reporter Micheline Maynard dug up several numbers that serve as proxies for the car-free trend. Her article notes that young people now wait longer to buy a first car. She also quotes Jesse Toprak of TrueCar, a company tracking car-buying trends; the data Toprak has seen suggests suburbanites are down-sizing from three cars to one or two per household. Maynard also cites Toyota’s finding that in at least 60 U.S. locations, more people have moved into city centers and gotten rid of their cars.

There might well have been a budding car-free trend ten years ago, but it hadn’t yet found its way into numbers like these. What’s changed between then and now? The NYT article mentions the recession as well as greater environmental awareness. Here’s what occurs to me:

We already spend thousands per year on cars, but as gas prices have gone up and economic prosperity down, more people have indeed realized that cutting back on driving and car ownership can save big chunks of money.
Growing awareness of climate change has sparked a new wave of environmental advocacy, and awareness of the problems caused by all our driving – enough to inspire more people to cut back.
A shift in U.S. transportation funding that started with ISTEA in the 1990s has had more time to give us better facilities for walkers, cyclists, and transit users.
Congestion continues to be a problem, as tracked by the Texas Transportation Institute, and who needs it? Especially now that we have a few more alternatives to driving. With the better facilities mentioned above, it’s now more convenient in more places to go car-free.
Movements like Smart Growth and various livable communities initiatives have also had more time to promote and help establish denser and more walkable, bikeable and transit-friendly cities and towns.
The cutting edge – what Maynard calls “a fledgling car-free movement emerging in big cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco that echoes a much broader campaign in Europe and Asia” -- has actually been around for awhile, and has had time to strengthen and gain more influence. New York City’s own Transportation Alternatives was founded in 1973. Next year, the World Carfree Network will host the ninth Towards Carfree Cities Conference since these conferences began in 1997.

How would you answer the question? What’s changed between 2000 and today that has fed the trend toward more car-free living? I welcome your comments.

... And More Oil on the Brain

2008-07-31T11:02:00.000-04:00

Here's another quote from Oil on the Brain (and keep in mind this excellent book from Lisa Margonelli came out a few years ago):

If we bought gasoline the way people buy widgets in Economics 101, we'd stop consuming gasoline when prices spike, reducing demand ... But that's not what's happening .... Drivers either can't cut back or they don't know how to...

Now that gas prices have hovered just over $4 a gallon for several weeks, we're seeing that just begin to change. Higher prices have, in fact, shocked some of us out of the mindset that taking any trip means driving a car. Car miles traveled have dropped. Transit and Amtrak ridership are up. I'm seeing a lot more bicycles most places I go.

Higher gas prices do create some economic hardship, but there's a big silver lining to those costs going up. They inspire us to seek the dozens of other ways there are to travel.

Oil on the Brain

2008-05-15T11:27:00.000-04:00

I just started reading Lisa Margonelli's book, Oil on the Brain. Margonelli's quest for deeper meaning in the oil economy begins at a San Francisco gas station in the summer of 2003. At the time, unleaded regular was $1.61.9 a gallon.

Barely five years later, gas prices have more than doubled. The average per-gallon cost has reached $3.73 in the U.S., and recently topped $4 in San Francisco. The good news is -- to the surprise of some -- American travel behavior is starting to change.

Two shifts demonstrating this have made news recently. First: More Americans now ride mass transit. From last year to this, ridership on regional rail lines is up 8% in southern California, 11% in Philadelphia, and 28% in the Miami area, USA Today reports. In Seattle, interest in vanpools has climbed by 17% over 2007.

Second: The New York Times reports that Americans bought more small, fuel-efficient cars in April 2008 than ever before. One in five cars sold that month were compact or sub-compact models, up from one in eight ten years ago. And for the first time, four-cylinder engines proved more popular than larger six-cylinder models.

When Leonard Doyle of The Independent interviewed me for a story about this, I told him I thought the trend toward smaller cars was great (even though four out of five vehicles sold in the U.S. are still medium to large). But, I added, what would really excite me is a shift to more walking and cycling. It would not surprise me if this were happening already, although I haven't seen statistics showing such a trend as yet.

Back to Lisa Margonelli's book: the gas station where she begins her story is not far from where I was born and is, I guesstimate, about two miles -- a brisk half-hour walk -- from the apartment where I spent the first few months of my life. Gas prices notwithstanding, that's a distance that most Americans, these days, would probably still drive. But more of us, now, would go in smaller cars, or take the bus.

It's a start.

Higher oil prices: good news or bad?

2008-03-09T16:07:00.000-04:00

As I write this, oil prices sit at just over $105 a barrel, in record territory even when adjusted for inflation. Gasoline futures are up, with prices at the pump expected to rise above the current national average, $3.18 a gallon. Later this year, they're also forecast to beat last May's record of $3.23 a gallon.

It's a definite hardship for cash-strapped workers who feel forced to commute by car, and has ripple effects on the economy as prices rise generally, reflecting higher transport costs. But does it have a more positive flip side?

With higher oil prices, U.S. gas consumption has trended lower for the past year, the Wall Street Journal reports, and for the past six weeks, it has steadily dropped. Ignore the economic doom and gloom for a moment and consider some of the positive side effects when gas consumption goes down:

• Air pollution drops, which means fewer asthma attacks, less hardening of the arteries, reduced lung damage in growing children, and lower cancer rates, just to name a few.

• Globe-warming CO2 emissions go down, which means -- probably -- a slower rate of increase in sea level, species range shifts and extinctions, natural disasters, insurance costs, and global average temperature itself.

• Tanker traffic diminishes, bringing a lower risk of oil spills. So does non-point source pollution into waterways.

• In the U.S., oil imports lessen, bringing greater energy independence (every little bit ought to help) and a better balance of payments for the ailing economy.

If lower gas consumption also means people are walking and/or bicycling more instead of driving, it's even better news. A little more exercise helps people whittle waistlines, mitigate chronic illness, and live longer, too.

Look past short-term analyses, and you can find further economic benefits. Higher oil prices can spur the development and competitiveness of renewables, helping us break the addiction to fossil fuels -- something we desperately need to do, both for environmental and foreign policy reasons.

If we can help the folks who find themselves in hardship situations due to rising gas costs -- providing better transit, ridesharing opportunities, walking and bicycling facilities, and telecommuting are just a few ways of doing this -- then rising oil and gas prices might be good news all around.

Climate Change Out My Window -- And Yours?

2007-05-30T13:47:00.000-04:00

Nearly ten years ago now, I signed a contract to write Divorce Your Car! Even then, as I researched that book, delving deeply into topics like worsening U.S. fuel efficiency, China’s burgeoning car boom, and of course, global warming, there were times I felt as if I were watching the climate change right outside my own window.

Partly that was because the major El Nino of ‘97-98 hit right in the midst of my research and writing. In that winter, this part of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula -- normally a place of snow eight months of the year -- became a place of thaw, bare ground in December, and early spring. Friends visiting from the west coast had often compared our spot near Lake Superior to the Arctic, given the stark expanse of white bergs and silver-blue ice that usually characterized winter on the big lake. But that year, winter was balmy. Snow sports enthusiasts grumbled, and people kept talking about “when winter gets back to normal.”

Now it turns out that, in the winter of ‘97-98, I probably really was watching the climate change. So were all of us. Climatologists rightly say that one season doesn’t make a trend, and that particular winter’s warmth -- while well out of the norm -- doesn’t prove a thing about climate change when taken in isolation. But in recent reading, I’ve learned there is a climatologist, Julia Cole at University of Arizona, who considers 1998 a “magic gate” -- defined in Tim Flannery’s book The Weather Makers as a kind of leap made by the climate, marking “the onset of remarkable phenomena.” That year also marked the beginning of a trend toward much lower lake levels in the Great Lakes, including Lake Superior.

These changes have happened more quickly than anyone had expected. Earlier this year, researchers at University of Minnesota, Duluth -- whose Large Lakes Observatory sits about 250 miles west of my house -- looked back over data from the last 25 years or so and found that not only have regional temperatures been warming faster than the global average, but surface waters in Lake Superior have warmed at twice that rate. Surprisingly fast, the researchers said. An article I wrote about this is online here.

So I guess Lake Superior is still like the Arctic: both places are now warming quickly. Since 1998, the Lake Superior basin has had more balmy low-snow winters. This past January our local Chamber of Commerce came close to applying for economic disaster area designation, because the businesses built around snow sports were suffering. That same month, a cross-country ski tournament held near here had to truck in snow to make racing trails. I no longer hear much talk about “when winter gets back to normal.” Now, everyone is wondering about the lake levels, which are near record lows and low enough to be costing real money for shippers, marinas, and municipal water systems. Are lake levels low due to drought conditions that will end soon, or is the drought part of a long-term shift to a dryer climate here -- a shift that could drop Superior’s level even further? Not everyone around here believes in “Al Gore’s global warming,” but there seems to be a sort of quiet waiting going on, a watching to see what’s going to happen next.

Lake Superior is the cleanest and most wild of all the Great Lakes. Its shoreline is less than a mile from our front door. We walk the wooded trails to that sandy, rocky shore several times a week. We see how the lake affects our weather and the way we feel. We don’t yet know exactly what the rapid temperature rise means for our lives, and the lives of all the many occupants of this forested waterfront -- from black bears to tiny mice, ancient cedars to delicate ferns.

What I do know is that the rapid change means there are more reasons than ever for all of us to change our relationship with driving. The carbon dioxide coming out of our tailpipes, and from all of our fossil-fuel burning, appears to be changing the climate faster than we’ve expected even with our sophisticated models, perhaps faster than we will be able to handle it. How much worse it gets depends in part on our actions, and one action we can control more than many of us believe is how much we drive. There are so many ways to cut back on driving that I wrote 120 pages about them! See more about this.

Here’s one way of reducing your driving, based on an idea from Ellen Santasiero of Bend, Oregon. Get out a map, draw a circle around your house with a radius of one-half mile, then commit to walking or cycling any time you take a trip within that circle. Every week, expand the circle by another half-mile until you feel you’ve reached your limit. If you do this, you’ll not only cut greenhouse gas emissions, you’ll also live longer -- lots of research supports this link between more walking or cycling and longer life.

I’m guessing there’s a natural area near you that may already be showing evidence of our changing climate. Maybe this is happening in some of your favorite places. Do you know of climate-related shifts already occurring in places near you? Let me know with a post to this blog.