Which is why solving the climate crisis might require aluminum bike panniers…
Most of the time I’m writing about vested interest as the key obstacle to making the energy transition. And it is—without the endless campaign of delay, denial, and disinformation from Big Oil and its friends, we’d have started making big changes long ago. But there’s another force at work alongside Interest, and that’s Inertia, defined as the force that has kept you from, say, ever cleaning the coil on the bottom of your fridge, even though doing so would cut your electric usage considerably.
We’re going to have to summon the will to make some changes. Many are fairly easy: installing air source heat pumps, for instance, could not just help defeat Vladimir Putin, but they could heat your home more pleasantly, efficiently, and affordably—you cna tell the appliance is having its day in the sun when Wired features it in its digital pages
“Heat pumps are a few years behind electric vehicles but really deserve similar attention and could deliver very sizable reductions in emissions if we deployed them much more rapidly,” says Jan Rosenow, director of European programs at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an NGO dedicated to the transition to clean energy.
Other changes require shifts in how we actually behave. But not impossible ones. Take, for instance, e-bikes: if you were looking for a perfect transportation mode in a climate-conscious era, this might be it, since it delivers mobility at a fraction of the environmental cost even of an electric car. E-bikes are outselling electric cars in America; in Europe, they’re so popular that they may soon be outselling all cars.
But to make this work at scale and at speed, which is what the climate crisis requires, you need more than the bike itself, elegant as it is. It helps immensely to also have safe bikepaths. (Listen to Doug Gordon’s War on Cars podcast; follow Peter Flax’s twitter account). And office buildings with showers. And even safe panniers—that’s why I was interested when Brian Hoffman wrote me with a description of his new product, the Velocker. They’re sturdy, i.e. heavy, which was always a problem with bike bikes, but not so much when you’ve got that electric assist motor to get you up a hill. You can carry kids in them (well, on them, in clever seats with handles) and then convert them easily to hauling groceries. And they come with a lockable top that you can run a chain through—which is to say, if we’re going to be doing a lot of biking we’re going to need to be real about the fact that people steal stuff sometimes, even from good folks who virtuously ride bikes.
Transitions unleash creativity—new ways of doing things. Yes, new ways of doing things require us to change our daily habits a little. So anything that makes that easier is appreciated. Friction is the enemy. Well, Exxon is the enemy. But friction is an accomplice.
+Emily Atkin, writing in GQ, does a bang-up job of explaining what difference a few tenths of a degree will end up making.
+From the good folks at NDN Collective, a detailed report on the risks posed by the operation of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The 2016 showdown at Standing Rock, an epic moment in the history of both environmental campaigning and indigenous solidarity, continues to reverberate.f
empowerment & inner transformation... 
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