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What’s Peak Oil Got to Do With It? Go By Bike Episode 44

elise — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:17:48 +0000

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 gloom and doom mode. I found my way to take action on this issue, both personally and through starting Cycle 9. What about you? Is Peak Oil something that motivated you to ride more?

What are people in your areas doing about sustainability, climate change and energy use?

Here are some links to :

General information about Peak Oil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

and the Transition Town Movement

http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

-Elise

o By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Stop Drilling? or Stop Driving! – Go By Bike Episode 22

elise — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:36:27 +0000

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 to solve their transportation guilt. In today’s episode of Go By Bike, I talk about his connection.

For a more detailed discussion of this viewpoint, see this excellent article from Jason Henderson, Geography Professor at San Francisco State University .

Send your comments below!

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Why Electric Cars are NOT the Answer – Go By Bike Episode 14

elise — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:07:29 +0000

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

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Using our cars is bad for us! – Go By Bike Episode 3

elise — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:06:24 +0000

Give your kids a cleaner, brighter future

Welcome to Go By Bike! I started this series to talk about how to ride more and use your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike. Using your car less reduces your carbon footprint, saves energy, helps the environment, keeps you healthy, and makes your community a nicer place to live, so overall most people would agree it’s a good thing.

In today’s episode of Go By Bike, I discuss energy use, the environment, and one key thing we can do right now to be green and give our kids a better future…

What do you think? Can you replace some short car trips by bike? Send me your comments.

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Solar at Shakori Hills: does it make sense?

Morgan Giddings — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:20:00 +0000

We had the pleasure of making it out to the Shakori Hill Festival today to let the kids participate in various events such as the Paperhand Puppet Intervention, and to listen to a bit of good music.

The organizers had a booth there, asking for contributions towards a solar electic system that would power the event in the future. The card indicates that 10,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity are used to put on the event. I applaud their goal to get off the grid. But the sea of cars I saw in the parking lot left me wondering: how much energy was used in just getting people to/from the event, in comparison to the 10,000 kWh goal?

Here’s my attempt to figure it out. When we were there on Sunday, there were perhaps 700-900 cars around. We can estimate from that a total of about 5,000 cars were driven to/from the event during the course of the four days (that’s an average of 1,125 cars/day, or 2,250 people per day if it averaged 2 people per car, probably a low estimate). The location is 17 miles from Carrboro, 40 mi from Raleigh, 35 mi from Durham, and 10 mi from Pittsboro. So we’ll average all of those at 25 mi (each way), for an average round trip of 50 miles. The fleet average for the US automobiles as of 2003 was 25 miles per gallon, so on average, 2 gallons of gasoline were burned per car trip to/from the festival. If our estimate of 5,000 car trips is accurate (maybe an underestimate?), that’s 10,000 gallons of gasoline burned up (526 barrels of oil).

Now, hold onto your seats. Each gallon of gasoline contains about 37 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. So, we have 10,000 * 37 = 370,000 kWh of energy burnt up to get people to/from the festival in their cars/SUV’s/trucks/motor homes.

That is, 37 times more energy were used to transport people to/from Shakori Hills, than would be saved if the festival organizers reach their goal of going all solar.

Here’s another way to look at it. An efficient generator will extract about 7 kWh of energy out of a gallon of gas (no, they are not very efficient, they only recover a small part of the 37 kWh contained in a gallon). So, to generate the 10,000 kWh of energy that the festival needs to run, that is about 1,429 gallons of gas, if they were to use local generators. Compare that 1,429 to our estimate of 10,000 gallons burned up getting people to and from. I.e., even using inefficient gas generators, generating all that power to run the festival would only take 1/7th the power that is consumed to get all those people to/from the event. 1/7th. That is sobering. (and note: even if everyone drove a super efficient hybrid like the Prius out there, and averaged 50mpg, it would still consume more than 3x more energy to transport people there).

And this is why all the peak oil people are so concerned about our future. They realize how much energy we are just burning up driving around in our gasoline burning cars. But most people don’t think about that. Even very “green” people just don’t realize how much energy is contained in each and every gallon of gas put into their cars. And, while I applaud the goal of Biodiesel, I had a look at the Piedmont biofuels website to see how much they produce. They produce “thousands of gallons per day” – so, basically, if every person going to the festival used biodiesel instead of fossil fuel, there would be none left in this area for any other purpose (such as powering tractors that help grow our food).

I don’t want to come off as overly critical of these efforts. Every small bit helps. But if people think these are solutions to fossil fuel dependency, they are clearly not. They are drops-in-the-bucket.

Anyway, I think if the Shakori Hills organizers can get the solar panels, it will save energy and have a positive effect – not only by the direct power saved, but by the example set. At the same time, they could have a vastly greater effect on energy usage for the festival (and also local pollution/noise/danger created by the cars) by implementing a bus system to/from the event. Or getting people to go out there on their electric bikes