Bicycles and Alternative Transportation

The bicycle is the most energy efficient form of transportation, using about 100 watts of energy to travel at 20 mph. It’s also healthier than being sedentary in an auto, and more convivial than being sealed in an air conditioned pod. 67% of U.S. petroleum consumption is for transportation, 60% of which is in private cars, and 79% of those trips are by single occupancy auto.

Bicycle transportation requires public expenditures to be viable. Safe and convenient bikeways must be fully interconnected, protected from motor vehicles, and linking neighborhoods with destination nodes. While about 8% of the population is brave enough to ride among 4000lb, 45 mph cars with only a helmet and light, about 71% consider it too dangerous even though they would like to ride. Only the city government has the authority to build safe and convenient bikeways. It unfortunately requires citizen advocacy to get them to do it. The operative decisions don’t happen by writing bicycle plans, but rather at city budget hearings.

In 2013, at the City of Lawrence budget hearings, Sustainability Action initiated the push to establish an annual budget line-item to fund bicycle lanes, tracks, and boulevards.  Several other advocacy groups joined in, and city funding has gone from $0 to $650,000 a year. Remaining efforts will focus on ensuring that bikeways are located where they conveniently serve identified needs, and are designed properly so they are safe and appealing.

The other promising means to reduce single-occupancy automobile use and emissions are electric vehicles (EVs) and mass transit, which aren’t typically the object of policy activism. EV popularity is more a matter of price than policy action, though Sustainability Action has advocated for neighborhood electric vehicles that are ideal for in-town use, but are banned in some jurisdictions for safety reasons because they “go too slow”.

Mass transit is a travel mode that is more dependent on a minimum population density than on public advocacy. However, citizen action can have bearing on social justice issues such as fare subsidies, route coverage, route frequency, and toxic diesel exhaust.

Sustainability Action Network is the Lawrence KS chapter of Food Not Lawns. Food Not Lawns shows people how to break their chemical dependency on turfgrass lawns, and how to grow food instead.

We conduct workshops to eradicate infestations of turfgrass and teach how to make lasagna raised-bed gardens of perennial polyculture plants. These are usually done as “crop mobs”, with friends and neighbors helping each other in rotation. We also do periodic front yard garden tours and informal plant exchanges.

As for public policy, a lawn eradication is a great context to discuss food policy, and if necessary, grapple with local codes and covenants that may restrict urban food growing. In addition, we work directly with other groups and government officials to identify barriers to local food and revise codes and policies as much as possible.

Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations

Energy Conservation and Renewables

The primary purpose of industrial societies is to make money for the oligarchs, while making products or services is only a means to that primary end.  The method employed is “throughput”, which means the cycle of “input-commodification-output”.  Each product sale turns a profit.  The faster the replacement rate, the more sales, the greater the profit, and the more raw materials extraction.  Modern advertising is the driver used to create buyer dissatisfaction with present reality so people will then crave what is being offered for sale.

Fossil fuels are the feedstock for this hyper consumption.  Coal is used to power iron smelting and generate the electricity that energizes other industrial processes, commercial activities, electronics and automation, and lighting.  Natural gas (methane) is used for space heating, synthetic fertilizer production, and increasingly, for electricity generation.  Petroleum is used for innumerable things: transport fuels, lubrication, pesticides and herbicides, pharmaceuticals, plastics, asphalt, building materials, furniture, carpet, paints, clothing, toys, packaging, and all the gew-gaws that clog the big box retail stores.

The faster this materials extraction cycle can be driven, the more ecological and cultural damage occurs.  Making any part of this process more energy efficient simply extends its reach, which is counterproductive.  That’s why corporate greenwashing always embraces energy efficiency, but never energy conservation, or for that matter, resource conservation.

Two strategies to stop climate disruption, species extinctions, and ecological degradation, are energy and resource conservation, and renewable energy.  We can’t continue the same level of resource extraction, and congratulate ourselves for being more efficient at wreaking havoc.  It is critical that we abandon our consumptive industrial lifestyle, not through austerity, but by frugality.  We can embrace a sharing community lifestyle that doesn’t replicate one of everything in every garage.  We can enjoy the beauty and durability of items crafted from renewable materials that recycle endlessly.  And we can live comfortably on a solar budget of 200 billion KW of sunlight reaching Earth each minute – ie. 2/3 KW per square meter each minute – all used to generate heat, electricity, and living biomass, including organically grown food.

This philosophy is part and parcel of all of the Sustainability Action Programs, whether bicycle transportation, Food Not Lawns, non-fossil energy agriculture, or reduction of diesel emissions.  At the same time, we also take steps towards tangible conservation of materials and energy.  We are working to restrict the use of single-use plastic shopping bags, with plans leading to restrictions on plastic water bottles.  The gains from such efforts would not only result in less petroleum extraction, but also less wildlife damage and less ocean plastic trash.