Jim Kunstler is famous, or perhaps infamous is a better word, in the "peak oil" community for his prophecies of gloom and doom to be set upon the USA due to our profligacy and oil dependency.Kuntstler is a controversial figure, in part because he constantly predicts doom to beset us, and in part because of his rather loudmouth style that includes lots of swear words to make his point. While some

It's been a while since I posted to the Cycle 9 blog. The hiatus was in part due to a lot of grant writing that I had to do for my day job. There's this thing called the "stimulus" that congress passed, and they are trying to stimulate scientific research. And so government agencies like the National Institutes of Health are accepting grant proposals to spend the stimulus money. Well, since I

Yesterday a nice article about Morgan's vision for Cycle 9 was published in UNC's Faculty/Staff newsletter. It discussed some of the motivations behind why we got Cycle 9 going. The one thing that was perhaps a bit inaccurate was its focus on climate change as a reason that I founded Cycle 9. While I think that anthropogenic climate change is likely real and likely a problem that we as a

I haven't yet followed up on my third post about peak oil, the concept that initially led us to open Cycle 9.  In a nutshell, that concept is that after world oil production peaks, oil will become more scarce and thus much more costly, impacting the US and world economy in a myriad of ways.  If one reads sites like the oil drum, it is easy to get the notion that these impacts will be very

This post has been much delayed because of all the work at the shop and for my day job. But it is perhaps more important than ever, given that gas prices have been dropping.Gas prices dropping makes a lot of people think, phew, the crisis is over. Now things will go back to normal.Hardly.There are two issues here. As I mentioned before, we are not running out of oil. But what is happening, is

Peak oil is one of the main reasons Cycle 9 exists. How could peak oil create a bike shop, one might wonder? And for that matter, what is peak oil? Let’s start with what peak oil is not. Some media use hyperbole to make it sound like peak oil claims “we are running out of oil.” We are not running out of oil, there is still a lot of oil left. What peak oil claims is that we will run out of easy to

We love to hear about local folks who promote alternative transportation, particularly if it involves bicycles. We recently had a visitor in our Chapel Hill shop from High Point, NC, who is one of the most enthusiastic bicycle proponents we've met in a while. He has been working to organize a group of riders in High Point who use bikes as every day alternatives to cars. He's started a blog,

Recently I saw a discussion on another website about peak oil. Someone there was deriding the "environmentalists" who want us "to all use bikes". He was saying "that is not a realistic solution". Perhaps there is no single solution to our current mess of oil dependency. Perhaps, however, if we combine solutions, we will make a dent in this thing. I came up with the charts below to show what would