House of Eratosthenes

Nobody ever reads this blog, but among the nobodies who do, this is old news. We’d talked about it here when Al Gore’s movie first came out. A lot of the same stuff you see in my rants nowadays…I think global warming is a bunch of nonsense, and when I’m out riding my bike, I get run off the road by tree-hugging hippies in SUV’s who think Bush should’ve signed the Kyoto treaty. The irony of it all.

The point was all the things we would be doing if we were really concerned about climate change — that we aren’t doing. The cows were an afterthought, but my little screed was chock full of numbers, properly sourced to a CNN article. From 2000. So you see, this is nothing new.

Cows — and other agricultural components as well, I should add — have more of a polluting effect than cars, machinery, and other techno-industrial hobgoblins. More of a greenhouse-gas effect.

I never would have imagined, back when I wrote that up, that we would have a world-wide rock concert phenomenon to alert people to how guilty they should be feeling about carbon emissions. I wonder how many people attended those concerts while ordering cheeseburgers for the whole family.

I wonder how many people attended those concerts while ordering cheeseburgers for the whole family.

And if they’d ordered tofu-rkey sandwiches they’d be passing methane and CO2 out their derraires, too!

So you ride your bike to work, too, eh?

My goal is 3 days a week. It’s for my general health, really, more than anything else. Get cardio. Live longer … and stronger. That’s the plan. But I admit that it does “feel” good to save on gas doing it.

Plus, even though I think AGW is a hugely overblown theory at best — I’m not a big fan of pollution in general. People think that those of us who aren’t going along with they hype “just don’t care about the Earth” is probably at least a marginal example of your Doctrine of Brittle Extremes. It’s nuts.

If I can save on gas, get/stay healthy, and put a few less noxious fumes in the air, great. And if the guy next door can’t, well that’s ok too.

Oddly, though, I’m helping keep the price of gas lower than it would be by lowering demand — allowing the SUV drivers access to cheaper gas and encouraging the sale of more of them. So am I really doing MORE “damage” to Mother Gaia by riding my bicycle?

Well that’s the kind of rationalization you hear from Liberals every day, so I guess mine’s just as valid 😉
- philmon | 07/10/2007 @ 13:03
I live a mile and a half away from work. I should be riding my bike much more often. Takes some organizational talent I’m not putting forward like I ought to. I’m pretty good about hitting the road on the weekends, though. Thirty, forty miles at a time.

Ditto your comment about Doctrine of Brittle Extremes. Lots of sensible people agree with you & me that GW==B.S., but we’re still environmentally conscious. You simply have to care about smog problems here. We’re in a valley that stretches from El Dorado Hills to somewhere around Dixon. Around early fall, about twilight, you can crest out on top of the hill between EDH and Folsom and look west, and see the heavier-than-air crap rolling around in the valley. It is freakin’ GROSS.

This is one of the subjects I think I’ve talked into the ground around here. You can kinda tell when you’re expected to ride a bicycle in a given community, regardless of what people say they respect, what they try to do, what they want to encourage others to do. Stop listening to what people say, and watch what they do…it’s a different story. Bicycles are definitely an afterthought around here. Places you would expect to have bike racks — don’t have ’em. The ones that do have them, have very few. I gotta believe they’d have more if there was a demand for them.

I don’t know for sure if the smog problem could be alleviated by changing this. And I’m not going to say our city officials have been ignoring things like this completely, because they’ve been aggressive in promoting the alternative transportation facilities, bike trails, light rail, etc. But if you actually do hop on a bike around here and try to get someplace of your choosing, rather than someone else’s…you will see some gaps. And culturally, I do gather the impression that anybody out-and-about, but not driving an actual car, is to be frowned-upon. I see it when I decide something a mile away, or just under, is “within walking distance” and decide to hoof it. It’s obvious what gets people’s respect: A nice, big, high-riding truck-like car. Everything else that moves, is just some kind of pariah.

This gets me pretty jaded after awhile. I mean, someone tell me again how concerned we are about carbon emissions. I’ll just point them to the nearest parking lot. All those gleaming juggernauts. This cannot be what “concern about climate change” looks like.
- mkfreeberg | 07/10/2007 @ 15:36

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

On Burping CowsTuesday, July 10th, 2007

On Burping Cows
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007