Normally when you see a school bus on the road you usually quitely remember the times of your youth spent riding in school buses.  Or at least I used to think these things.  Now that I bicycle everywhere that I used to drive to, when I see a school bus I start emergency planning.  You see the only drivers that have ever come close to endangering my life are public school bus drivers.  They consistently pass when it is dangerous to do so and have run me off the road a half dozen times already.  I've even had one driver try to tell me it was OK that she ran me off the road because  I was moving to slow (the fact that I was 100 yards from a red light didn't seem to matter). 

    Now this bothers me for several reasons.  First off this means that a public institution is creating my biggest daily safety concern.  And secondly, how the hell are school bus drivers getting their jobs without knowing how to deal with slower vehicles!  I mean you would think that a job as resoponsible as shuttling our children would require that they have an above average knowledge of the laws.

Anyway, I complained, and hopefully it's not just going to fall down an administrative black hole.

So, for about the next three weeks I'll be very busy finishing up a compressed Biology class, so the posts are going to be few and far between. But I do intend to add some more functionality to the site (which requires much less time than fact checking my posts). So for the most part I'm just going to post some links to news I'm following.

For instance...

China could be facing their own economic beast from the post peak oil world, but their government price controls hide but do not solve the higher energy prices. This is similar to what I explained earlier how the “Gas Tax Holiday” is form of corporate welfare that hides actual market prices. In China this is a similar reaction that keeps pump prices low with money taken from the governments tax budget. This leads to monetary devaluation and market inflation.

also...

    So, it's happening. Ever so slowly as people begin to realize that the rise in gas prices is the beginning of a climb in prices of everything, literally everything, that people buy. So I guess we've answered the opening question of this blog, “When does it hurt?” It hurts at about $4 a gallon, it hurts when general prices of all sorts of daily commodities jump %20 in just a few months, it hurts when the costs of basic foods jumps over 35% in less than half a year.

      Of course this is also too late to intervene without some serious ramifications. It's funny how even now with an emergency of global proportions at our doorstep, the press is just beginning to say, “Hey! There might be something to this whole peak oil thing after all.” I mean, there have been very smart and very respectable people talking about the future of energy and peak oil for a very long time. The whole Hubbert's peak theory, the basis of the peak oil theories, thing was brought up in the 1950's and first proven accurate in the early 70's, we should have done serious sou searching back then. Since that time the theory has been used to accurately predict production peaks of many different countries, again each time we should have looked deeply at where we were going at started planning a way to divert disaster.

    No, I'm not talking about people as “technical” property, or chattel slavery, as in ancient Rome, the old Confederate States or modern Chinese slave shops. I'm talking about your average Joe and Jane living in suburban America, Canada, Australia or Great Britain, etc, who's life, work and holdings are owned by parties other than themselves. What I'm talking about is similar to wage slavery, but without the pressure of poverty or starvation, it's like wage slavery but combined with massive levels of consumer debt. It is definitely indentured servitude, and much more like outright slavery or wholesale human ownership than any sort of real freedom. The scary thing about this condition is that it is openly encouraged by society, that people sell themselves to asset holders for what is little more than trinkets and shiny bits. That people's natural drive for status symbols and want for convenience is enough to warrant entry “by choice” into a condition of slavery.

    So this is a part of the environmental mechanisms connected to global desertification, oceanic acidification and global warming that the conventional media has done little to educate the public about. That is that there is a natural carbon cycle of which carbon dioxide and methane are a normal part of our ecosystem's normal cycles. And that there is the release of long sequestered carbon, from fossil fuels, that is not a normal part of our ecosystem's cycles.

    It starts with photosynthesis, when plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugar(food). This process mainly uses atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground water to produce sugar and as waste products it releases oxygen. When we as humans then consume plants for their sugars, our normal cellular respiration breaks down the sugar releasing the carbon as carbon dioxide, which we exhale back into the air. This is part of the normal carbon cycle, by normal I mean that the natural environment has a host of mechanisms to keep this balanced and moving through a cycle.

    As a secondary process to the normal carbon cycle, some of the carbon is utilized in cellular compounds that will decompose with the cell. A fair deal of this carbon will return to the atmosphere as well, via decomposition. But some small bit of it might be trapped underground, sequestered, and leave the cycle. Which is good, because this slow loss of carbon is offset by volcanic activity which occasionally releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane(among other compounds) into the atmosphere.

This is the way things should happen.

    I actually didn't cycle today as everything I had to get out and do was less than a mile away and the weather was perfect(70 degrees F and sunny). So instead I just walked, pushing my daughter in the Bob. And I noticed, far more new people, cycling than I've ever seen out before, which is great.

    But, most of the new people I saw cycling where using the sidewalks. This is something that is actually pretty dangerous, more so most of the time than riding on the road. You see sidewalks are designed specifically for pedestrians, who move at 1-2mph, even joggers typically don't break 6mph. Which is slow enough for pedestrians to be able to safely negotiate passing and emergency collision avoidance on a 3' wide path. But even a casual cyclist will travel 8-10mph, and a cyclist moving at a good cruise will achieve 12-20mph. At those speeds the sidewalk is dangerously narrow for a bicycle, there simply is not enough time or room to safely pass pedestrians and other cyclists.

    To be fair, there are a lot of roads in the suburban environment that are also fairly dangerous for cyclists where the sidewalk might be a better choice. But realistically to be safe on a sidewalk a cyclist needs to slow down to less than 6mph and be much more alert than you would be on a street. Did I mention sidewalk designers don't care about blind turns either?

    Popular culture appears to be slowly jumping on the green bandwagon, even as the necessity of personal sacrifice becomes unavoidably apparent. And I find myself in constant position of explaining the deeper implications to simple things. Such as, Just the other day I was talking with my youngest brother, who is seventeen years my junior.

    The topic was biodiesel, and he was quick to explain to me that I shouldn't be considering biodiesel because using it is causing starvation in other countries. But, it's not really US citizens using biodiesel that is causing food shortages in particular. It's market pressure from many different angles that is making food increasingly expensive that is causing food shortages in other countries.

    Buying a gallon of gasoline for $4.00 is doing just as much as buying a gallon of biodiesel made from corn in pushing up the cost of food in Egypt(for example). A willingness, or the force of social addiction, to pay such high prices for portable energy, has a ripple effect on the very foundations of the food market. Four dollar a gallon gas means the petroleum used for fertilizers that are the true power behind modern agriculture gets more expensive, so farmers have to raise the prices to cover their overhead. And what is worse is that there is a market ripple delay...

    So I haven't written much lately as I've become addicted to the journal of a touring bicyclist who is working his way around the globe. Now this might not strike most people as a very interesting kind of journal to read, but it is true modern adventure. Victor Weinreber has basically invested all of his money in his bike, his camping gear and an expense account to travel around the globe by bicycle. He starts off crossing the country once, just to warm up, and then he'll travel from San Francisco to San Francisco the very long way. It's an amazing running journal he's keeping up, a journey that is so alien to most modern living. And his running journal and photos on crazyguyonabike.com is one of the best I've read in a long time.

    I'm inspired, but I have a full time commitment with my family, so I'll enjoy his journey vicariously through his journal.

    So while I was trying to figure out how to do more to green my lifestyle, I stumbled upon the fact that my web host is Green! I chose them for their technical ability and user freedoms, it just gets better that they are green too!

Way to go Dreamhost!