Personal and political: why cycling and recycling are insufficient

What can I do in response to climate change? As I talk to people about climate and ecology, I get asked this with great frequency, and this is not surprising. Previously, I've tried to put together a bit of a list of suggestions. Yet in replying to such a question, I often point out that "what can I do?" is a secondary question. More important than what I can do is what we can do.

Now of course there are indeed all kinds of things I can do to reduce my contributions to climate-altering emissions: buying less stuff, ditching the car, cutting flying, purchasing renewable energy, eating less meat and dairy and so on (note that recycling or changing lightbulbs, which are the usual answers people want to hear are way down this list, since they are relatively minor compared to some of the things here).

Personal footprint reductions are good, being: (a) simply the right thing to do in a world throwing away its habitable climate; (b) culture-shaping (normalising solar-installation, for instance); (c) economic communication to corporations (though this influence is plutocratic in effect, since it is one dollar one vote); (d) a talking point for persuasion (people ask questions); (e) an actual (albeit tiny) contribution to global emissions reduction; and (f) important for avoiding the all-too-easy charge of hypocrisy (this is one of the most common lazy defeater arguments people use to keep these issues at bay and it's powerful to be able to show how you're shifting your lifestyle).

But personal footprint reductions are secondary. On the timescales we have and with the structure of the problem locating particular power in massive fossil fuel interests to block progress (through corruption/regulative capture of the political authorities), it is critical that responsible action focus on cultural and political action. If we had a century in which to reduce emissions then personal lifestyle changes and a bottom-up cultural change would undoubtedly be the way to go. If we were not facing one of the richest and most powerful industries in history with a track record of shaping the political landscape to suit its agenda, then building a new and better alternative would be relatively straightforward.

Unfortunately, we don't have decades to start reducing emissions. A significant fraction of our emissions today will still be altering the climate in tens of thousands of years and we're already at the point where the observed changes (let alone those in the pipeline due to the temporal lag between emissions and warming) are becoming increasingly dangerous to human and natural systems. Two degrees warming is flirting with disaster; four degrees is a recipe for catastrophe. Our current trajectory is heading for four degrees or more. Every year we delay, the price tag of the necessary emissions reductions jumps by something like US$500 billion.

We're well past the stage where quietly changing a few lightbulbs is going to cut it.

This is one of the reasons why I am excited about the campaign to get individuals and institutions with a social conscience (churches, universities, city governments) to divest from fossil fuels. Divestment is not primarily an economic strategy, since my few dollars will always be dwarfed by the massive sums and inertia associated with business as usual. Divestment is a cultural and political strategy, changing the nature of what is normal and thinkable (i.e. culture) by putting fossil fuels into the same category as other "unthinkable" ways of making money (e.g. asbestos, tobacco, weapons, gambling, etc.), and in doing so, also changing the way that the political winds are blowing, repositioning the fossil fuel lobby to be as politically toxic (or more) than, say, the tobacco lobby. When politicians are embarrassed to be seen publicly with the fossil fuel lobby, we're winning; when they know they have to stop receiving all donations from them due to the political costs involved, then we've won.

At least round one.

Using your head: why pedestrians need helmets

Canadians take the lead in public safety regulation with a new mandatory pedestrian helmet law coming into effect tomorrow.

Worship of a pedestrian god: seven reasons to ditch the car

Perhaps the most memorable phrase in the quirky maritime novel The Life of Pi is when the eponymous narrator observes that Christians worship "a pedestrian god". Jesus, God amongst us, lived his entire life within the ambit of distances capable of perambulation, travelling at speeds commensurate with his gait, and never learned how to reverse park. Of course, with cars not being invented for another nineteen hundred years, it would be odd to draw a preference for pedestrianism from Jesus' example, yet he nonetheless demonstrates that a blessed and god-honouring human life can be lived on two feet (and perhaps the occasional donkey or boat). Humans are made from the dust (even the word human is etymologically related to humus, i.e. soil, a pun that also works in Hebrew), and part of humility (another related word) is to stay in touch with the ground. Perhaps if our habitual mode of transport makes us forget that we are bipedal, we may be tempted to arrogant flights of fancy concerning our fitting location.

We have become accustomed to the convenience and ease of traversing great distances with relatively little effort or cost in a tonne of steel moving with as much momentum as a speeding bullet (and capable of similar damage upon impact with a body of flesh). This hyper-mobility affects our perceptions of distance, our assumptions about location and our expectations of what is and ought to be possible. We generally deem it of little import that we live many days walk from our place of employment and feel no strangeness at the great distances travelled by the food on our plate prior to its final brief journey down our oesophagus.

Cars make us feel powerful; it is no accident that certain versions of masculinity in our culture have idolised these machines. Car ownership becomes status symbol, rite of passage and - in a contemporary landscape designed for drivers - right of passage, since there often is no other practical way to get between locations. This power to pick a destination and arrive at great speed is a powerful symbol of autonomy, of individual freedom. And so the odd thing about those who are so proud to declare that they stand on their own two feet is that these days they so rarely do so. Individualism has for the last few decades found perhaps its most powerful symbol in the private automobile (hidden from view are the myriad social relations embodied in our complex system of mechanised transport).

Like most of those around me, I got my license when I was sixteen, which means I've been a driver for longer than not. Yet I have never owned a car. Over the years, I've had various cars on loan for a couple of days or a couple of months (in one case, a couple of years). But since getting married, we have chosen to live in walkable urban areas with decent public transport. We currently live 193 steps from my workplace and within a couple of hundred metres of dozens of bus routes.

My adult life has almost exclusively been lived in an urban context. Outside of well-designed (which often means pre-20thC) urban spaces, the tyranny of the automobile is woven into the fabric of most suburban and rural life.

I am not saying that all cars are evil or that there is no place for advanced technology in travel. Nor is the combustion of fossil fuels in itself wrong. But with the level of car use in our society, we are like twenty-drink drunks about to pass out in the gutter trying to defend the goodness of alcohol. Wholesale rejection of useful technologies is not currently our temptation. And there is plenty of room for smarter and more responsible use of the technology we already have.

Since I promised in the title, let me conclude this slightly aimless reflective ramble with seven reasons to ditch your car (or at least consider using it less):

1. Doing so in many cases will save money. For instance, see this account of living without a car in Edinburgh, which has a great deal of resonance for us; it is one of the many reasons we love this city. Cars bring expenses at every point: purchase, petrol, insurance, registration, parking. Of course there are costs associated with other kinds of transport, but have you tried doing the sums? Both our apartments in Sydney had a secure parking space that we were able to rent out, which came in handy. If you are someone who begrudges the taxwoman her pound of flesh, then carlessness will also mean you can avoid a range of taxes, fees and tolls.

2. Leaving footprints cuts your carbon footprint. For many people, a car represents a significant slice of your carbon pie. Not just the petrol exploding in the engine and sending out its fumes, but the embodied emissions released during construction. The various metals and plastics and other materials that comprise a car take a lot of energy. For more efficient cars, this can be up to half the overall carbon emissions associated with the vehicle (and so, it is often better from a carbon perspective to run an old bomb into the ground rather than continually upgrading to slightly more efficient models).

3. Becoming less reliant on a car is good preparation for peak oil. Not driving saves a little petrol, delaying (very slightly) the peak and, more importantly, doing so is a good way of weaning yourself off relying on cheap petrol, which won't be around forever. Such behaviour also sends a message to politicians and policy makers that walkable public spaces and good public transport are desirable and desired. Poor town planning has a lot to answer for as we have invested trillions and trillions in infrastructure based on cheap petrol. But the good news is that it can also make a very significant contribution to a better world. Well-designed walkable urban spaces are safer, cleaner, more enjoyable and can foster stronger communities.

4. Walking is considerably healthier than sitting on your backside pumping the accelerator, even when you factor in the extra calories you burn during road rage. I discussed this at greater length back here in relation to this fascinating little book.

5. More drivers means more cars means less appealing footpaths and a greater perception of danger to pedestrians. Driving can thus become a self-perpetuating cycle where walking (or riding a bicycle) becomes less desirable the fewer pedestrians (or cyclists) there are. Choosing to break this cycle will make it that little bit easier for others.

6. Walking is wearing on the sole, but good for the soul. It slows us down a little, and makes us less ambitious about how much we try to get done. There is more opportunity to smell the roses, or sit on doorsteps, which is what our daughter currently loves doing while we're out walking. It is not that she is tired; she just likes to stop and take in the view. While walking, there is more chance of interacting with those who share your space, more opportunities to notice your environment (which can be dangerous if done too enthusiastically while driving).

7. If walking was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.

The cost of cars

"According to the World Health Organisation, road deaths in Africa could double between 2008 and 2030. Road traffic crashes already account for more deaths than from malaria, and by 2030 road death is expected to exceed AIDS as a cause of death world-wide. [...] Road traffic crashes are estimated to cost developing countries [US]$53 billion per year, which is more than they receive in development aid."

- Ian Roberts with Phil Edwards, The Energy Glut: Climate Change
and the Politics of Fatness (Zed: London, 2010), 107.

This is an interesting little book. Although it has relatively little to say about climate change, which is largely taken for granted in the discussion despite the title, it effectively explores the many other costs of our globally growing reliance on fossil fuel driven transport. The primary angle is public health, and apart from a series of eyebrow-raising statistics about traffic mortalities, the main thrust is drawing a strong and quite convincing social link between the obesity epidemic and automobile use.

In short (and with various caveats and nuances), the book argues that obesity is not a problem of the obese. We are not faced with a sudden widespread loss of dietary self-control. We are collectively getting fatter (even the thin people), as measured in global and national BMI statistics, and as a result, a rapidly rising percentage of the population now fall into the medical category of obese (BMI ≥ 30). This isn't because we're eating more (we're not: calorie intake is actually declining) but because we're less physically active. And at a broad scale the strongest statistical correlation with physical inactivity is automobile use. Our reliance on the cheap energy of fossil fuels is the root of both climate change and obesity (hence the book's subtitle).

And this is where traffic mortalities and injuries make this trend self-perpetuating. The more cars on the road, the more dangerous the road becomes to pedestrians and cyclists, and the greater incentive there is to participate in a transportation arms race by purchasing a vehicle for oneself. In a given society, after a certain point of automobile use is reached, traffic mortality figures start to decline. The author, whose background is in public health associated with motor vehicle accident trauma, argues that this has relatively little to do public safety campaigns and much more to do with the fact that pedestrians and cyclists, having lost the battle, largely quit the field (or road in this case). A road thus dominated by lumps of steel and iron each hurtling along with more kinetic energy than a speeding bullet becomes a barrier to cyclists and pedestrians, and a powerful motoring lobby* ensures that "accidents" are blamed on the individuals rather than the system as a whole (in a move parallel to the gun lobby: "cars don't kill people, bad drivers and erratic pedestrians do").
*The text notes that eight of the ten largest global corporations (based on the Fortune 500 in 2008) are either oil companies or car manufacturers. And the largest is a supermarket chain, which has its own links to both fossil fuel transport and cheap food energy.

Those excluded, of course, include all children, who are then conditioned into a sedentary lifestyle from a young age.

Ironically, obesity is actually a greater health threat than cycling on dangerous roads dominated by cars and trucks.

"The overall risk of death for adults who cycle to work on a regular basis is between 10 and 30 per cent lower than for those who drive to work (Woodcock et al., 2009). This survival benefit persists after controlling for a range of factors that might differ between cyclists and motorists. In other words, even taking into account road danger, the balance of health risks and benefits is strongly in favour of cycling. Cycling in traffic may be dangerous but not cycling is more dangerous. There are consistently fewer deaths than expected from heart attacks, strokes and cancer among cycle commuters. [...] There is also evidence that the injury risks for cyclists decrease as more people take up cycling. Per kilometre, cycling is safer when there are a lots of other cyclists around. It has been estimated that a doubling in the percentage of the population that cycle results in a 34 per cent reduction in the death rate per kilometre cycled (Jacobsen, 2003). By cycling, you will improve your own health and you will help to make cycling safer for others, encouraging more to join the growing movement."

- The Energy Glut, 108.

Cycling is revolutionary in more ways than one. Get on your bike.
Image by JKS.

On your bike: to lose weight you're better off walking

"The bicycle is the most energy-efficient mode of land transportation that exists.* Cycling burns about 35 kilocalories of food energy per mile [about 91 kJ/km], whereas walking the same distance burns three times as much. By comparison, car travel uses about 1,860 calories of fossil fuel energy per mile [about 4854 kJ/km]."

- Ian Roberts with Phil Edwards, The Energy Glut: Climate Change
and the Politics of Fatness (Zed: London, 2010), 103.

I really like the idea of cycling for all kinds of reasons. But I've never got back into it as an adult after some bad falls in younger days.
*A little web-searching suggested that ice skating may have a similar level of efficiency, though precise numbers depend on average speeds, body sizes and the quality of equipment in each case.

Friday video: Edinburgh on a bike

Don't worry, this blog isn't about to degenerate into a compendium of YouTube greatest hits, but I thought I'd post this one because I am in it at 1:35.

Yes, I am one of those tiny blurs in the background. I remember seeing the guy perform that move, noticing the camera and thinking, "I bet I'll see that on YouTube soon". Sure enough...

All filmed in Edinburgh: at least enjoy the scenery if you are bored and feel you can do better yourself.