What is Peak Oil and what can we do about it? I had the opportunity recently to listen to a talk and discussion about peak oil and climate change here in our local town . The talk was interesting and a good presentation of the topic, but also interesting was the reactions of people in the crowd. Here’s what happened: It’s a serious issue that we shouldn’t take lightly, but it’s also easy to feel overwhelmed and get into

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Environmentalists need to examine if their words and actions go together As the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the gulf continues to wreak environmental havoc, I’m sure the reaction from many environmentalists will be loud calls to stop drilling and curtail offshore oil drilling. This may be something we should do, but I wonder how many of these same environmentalists will continue to drive their cars every day, mindlessly burning up oil while they wait for electric or alternative vehicles

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Will electric cars solve our oil dependency problems? There’s a lot of hope and hype about electric cars, with just about every car company jumping on the promised future of these vehicles with a design of their own. But electric cars just don’t solve one fundamental problem of transportation by car. What problem is this? Watch to find out. What do you think about electric cars? Give me your comments below. -Elise Go By Bike is a daily video

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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 of what Kunstler says may hit some

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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 work at a

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Today I just got back from a nice bike trip with my daughter, to the Triad Electric Vehicles Association meeting, in Burlington, NC. I was invited to their monthly meeting to give a presentation about Lithium batteries and battery management systems, since some of the members are starting to contemplate moving away from lead acid batteries. In fact, two of the members have recently commissioned us to build custom packs for their EV’s. We rode over there on

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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 negative.  Like to the

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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,

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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

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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, Revolution Cycling , that is doing a great job

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