Leaves are one of nature's most miraculous creations. They tie it all together. They rise from the ground, reach to the sky, and bring life to the Earth. Leaves beauty and delight, thus meriting our praise for their abundant gifts. Children and animals love frolicing in fresh piles of leaves.

Yet by the late 20th century human ingenuity, irritated by fallen leaves, created an industrial machine--the highly-polluting, gas-operated leaf blower--that disrupts leaves' natural cycle--and night-workers' sleeping cycle.

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Eric Miller on 12.30.09 @ 02:48 AM PST [link]  

Here's a key quote from a wonderful article by Kris de Kecker in Low Tech Magazine:

Creative minds have designed elevated bicycle roads inspired by the long gone CycleWay (but not nearly as sturdy if you ask me). Even more creative minds have designed elevated covered bicycle highways that protect bikers from rain, wind and pigeon poop. Some of these tunnels even have the potential to generate artificial tailwinds that would make you go twice as fast. They will be heated in winter and cooled in summer.

While all these ideas are substantially better than many other inventions that are being designed these days (carbon capture technology, algal fuel and nanotech batteries spring to mind) this is not the way to go.

The problem is not that there is a lack of good roads - enough of these exist to bike from here to Mars and beyond. The main problem is that these are occupied by automobiles that are not only dangerous but also very inefficient both in terms of energy use and floor space.

We don't need any new infrastructure, what we need is to clear the existing infrastructure of inefficient vehicles and replace them with efficient ones. In other words: give all streets, highways, cloverleaves and motorways exclusively to bicycles and all other human powered wheeled vehicles. Get rid of cars. Why make things so complicated if the solution is so simple?

Yes, I do want the motorway. It takes me more than an hour to pedal from my town to the city, because half of the time I am waiting in front of a traffic light watching cars passing me by.

While the entire article (rather ironically!) sprawls a bit, it's well worth reading, especially the latter half; see it at Cars: Out of the Way.

Richard Risemberg on 12.22.09 @ 06:30 AM PST [link]  

This is timely. It's been an ongoing email debate. Libertarians and conservatives seem to consistently "rail" against trains and trolleys, while supporting, or at least ignoring auto and highway subsidies. Watch this slide presentation. Click to watch webinar

Eric Miller on 12.16.09 @ 05:35 PM PST [link]  

This year the Menorah in Grand Army Plaza is far taller than the Christmas tree. It's shouldn't be a size issue--last year the tree towered above. What's bothersome may be the generator that runs for hours to shine floodlights on candles, creating significant noise and burning lots of fuel. Time for someone to light a symbolic candle of conservation.

Eric Miller on 12.16.09 @ 03:51 AM PST [link]  

Press Release: New Bike Share system for Copenhagen
From Green Idea Factory, LOTS Design, and Koucky & Partners

First prize in the international Design Competition awarded to the team of LOTS Design, Koucky & Partners and Green Idea Factory

LOTS Design (Gothenburg, Sweden), Koucky & Partners (Gothenburg, Sweden) and Green Idea Factory (Berlin, Germany) teamed up to design an innovative bicycle sharing system for the City of Copenhagen, Denmark. The team's entry, called OPENbike, was awarded a first price at the city's international design competition with 127 entries from five continents. The awards ceremony was held in Copenhagen on December 10.

The City of Copenhagen, Denmark, one of the world leading cycling cities, aims at establishing a new bike share system and initiated an open international design competition earlier this Fall.

OPENbike is user-focused and proposes a system that is easy to use, flexible and fully scalable. The design goal has been to create a system that seamlessly integrates with public transport and becomes a natural part of Copenhagen's existing bicycle culture. The system proposes a smart card system and positioning solutions integrated in each bicycle to create a fully floating bike share system. OPENbike does therefore not need special stands and bicycles can easily be repositioned to adapt the system to the city's changing needs.

"We are particularly happy the jury appreciated our intentions with this iconic bicycle design that relates to Copenhagen bicycle history and, at the same time, contributes to the new branding of Copenhagen," says Erik Nohlin, a specialist in bicycle design from LOTS Design in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Michael Koucky of Koucky & Partners, in Gothenburg, Sweden, adds, "We aimed to make this bike feel like an owned bike for a Copenhager or a commuter to the Danish capital. The bike is not meant to be on a pedestal, both literally and figuratively. It should be a natural part of the lives of local cyclists, and a great example for tourists."

"It is clear to me that leading cities are ready to embrace what is now the 4th Generation in bike sharing systems, " says Los Angeles-born Todd Edelman of Green Idea Factory, currently based in Berlin. "The attention and generosity shown by the City of Copenhagen in holding this competition hopefully indicates that cities are also starting to take a leadership role in implementing this important component of a seamless public transportation solution."

See cphbikeshare.com for information on the Design Competition and on the winning entries.

High resolution images for publication can be downloaded here.

*****

About our team:

LOTS is a design agency, specialised in translating brand values and business strategies into priorities and design expressions. LOTS is based in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Koucky & Partners AB is an environmental consultancy specialised in sustainable mobility and urban transport strategies. Koucky & Partners AB is based in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Green Idea Factory is a sustainability consultancy, focusing primarily on urban issues. Green Idea Factory is based in Berlin, Germany.

Richard Risemberg on 12.14.09 @ 06:51 AM PST [link]  

This is the text, free for reproduction under Creative Commons, of the joint editorial formulated by 56 major newspapers and addressed to the participating governments at the Copenhagen climate conference:

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C -- the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction -- would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided -- and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere -- three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down -- with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance -- and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

Presented with additional information on the Guardian, which apparently originated the project.

Richard Risemberg on 12.09.09 @ 03:00 PM PST [link]  

The Los Angeles Business Journal has published another editorial by New Colonist co-editor Rick Risemberg, covering the economics of bicycle infrastructure and its benefits to the local business community. It covers the efficiencies, both physical and financial, of the bicycle as an element of the local economy, point by point, and ends with a call to establish LA's first "bicycle Boulevard" on the Mid City's 4th Street, already heavily used by cyclists as a commuting route despite its terrible road surface.

Read more at the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Richard Risemberg on 12.09.09 @ 12:31 PM PST [link]  

The New York Times's Thomas Friedman, who in recent years has come around to both a passionate environmentalism and a reasonable mistrust of pure-market economies, made some interesting remarks in this morning's column regarding the interconnectiosn among oil use, oil pricing, US consumption, and the enabling of tyranny and terror abroad:

The reason there are so many frustrated and angry people in the Arab-Muslim world, lashing out first at their own governments and secondarily at us--and volunteering for "martyrdom"--is because of the context within which they live their lives. That was best summarized by the U.N.'s Arab Human Development reports as a context dominated by three deficits: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of education and a deficit of women's empowerment. The reason India, with the world's second-largest population of Muslims, has a thriving Muslim minority (albeit with grievances but with no prisoners in Guantánamo Bay) is because of the context of pluralism and democracy it has built at home.

...One of the main reasons the Arab-Muslim world has been so resistant to internally driven political reform is because vast oil reserves allow its regimes to become permanently ensconced in power, by just capturing the oil tap, and then using the money to fund vast security and intelligence networks that quash any popular movement. Look at Iran.

Hence, post-9/11 I advocated that our politicians find sufficient courage to hike gasoline taxes and seriously commit ourselves to developing alternatives to oil. Economists agree that this would ultimately bring down the global price, and slowly deprive these regimes of the sole funding source that allows them to maintain their authoritarian societies. People do not change when we tell them they should; they change when their context tells them they must.

That last line would also apply to Americans, the chief overconsumers of the world, who are in fact consuming the world itself voraciously.

Rationalized fuel taxes would go a long way towards diminishing the tyranny of the car on our society; fuel and highway subsidies have distorted not only the market for transportation mode share but the very physical shape of our cities and countrysides, as well as impoverishing our municipalities as they struggle to accommodate more and more cars and the space they devour.

Driving is every bit as highly subsidized as the most expensive forms of public transit, but unlike public transit, driving reduces property values and covers up land that would otherwise be producing jobs, various tax revenues, and healthy communities--all now scraped away to make room for cars.

No politician would survive it, but a brave few souls wiling to martyr their careers to the future of this country could perhaps pull off an increase in fuel taxes (and parking costs) to help rationalize transport and the shapes of cities in America.

Dare we hope?

Full text of Friedman's article: This I Believe

Richard Risemberg on 12.02.09 @ 05:54 AM PST [link]