Here’s a series I’m calling ‘Jackass Moves’ that I hope stops at #1, but knowing me it won’t. Still not entirely sure what I was doing when it happened, was just aimlessly working on the bike when my finger got stuck between brake rotor and spoke…or something. Hard to tell in this iphone uberzoomed blurry photo but split the nail right in the middle. That smarts. Fortunately it’s a minor injury as this is far and away my most used finger in the quiver!
The fix: Cut a piece of coffee filter and used some of the lady friend’s nail polish/glue type stuff on top of it to create a ghettofab ‘fiberglass’ job to reinforce the split in the nail. McGuyver type stuff.
It’s follow Friday, this one is for my peeps, tweeps and just random internet lecherous creeps out there
“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.“
This one is a few days overdue, but I was busy so never got around to doing it well. Instead just this quick chickenscratch version of a photochop. Yeah yeah, I could have taken the 10 extra minutes to do some layer masking and whatnot, but I didn’t, you still get the picture.
This kid is talented, buuuutt….
Cadel is riding STRONG this year and his team is looking good as well. Am I the only one (my guess is yes…) that sees the below similarity though everytime they interview him?
Yes, the blog has taken a decidedly nerd heavy urban hippy twist this week. Whatever, it’s a scarlet letter I’m willing to wear, and I still don’t have any chickens roaming my backyard so I wouldn’t call myself a balls deep citizen of Portlandia yet (though, in a strange comical twist of fate, a girl who finds the sets for Portlandia was at my 4th of July BBQ and wants to use our house and the neighbors for a shoot…seriously).
Anyways, this is one of those articles that raise my hackles for two reasons. First, the skepticism meter gets fully pegged when I see the names attached to the various studies – Economics for Equity and the Environment Network, World Resources Institute and the Environmental Law Institute are names that don’t exactly say ‘I don’t have a horse in this race’. Upon initial sniff it feels like reading research about cigarettes being good for you coming out of something like the Phillip Morris Center for Healthful Living. The second reason it raises my hackles is that if their research IS accurate (source bias be damned!) than we are getting hosed. Somewhere in a cube right now there is an elected official weighing a bike infrastructure proposal vs. expanding the motorized vehicle infrastructure, and if the social cost isn’t being properly attributed in their model their decision is going to be MASSIVELY flawed. Read yesterday’s article. Read the below (and granted, the truth on valuation is likely somewhere inbetween). Put two and two together, extrapolate across time and come to your own conclusions. Or, just continue going about your life, only to bitch reactively in a vacuum long after decisions have been made.
Economists Find Flaws in Federal Estimate of Climate Damage
A report concludes that each ton of CO2 emitted inflicts almost 45 times more “social cost” than the federal government estimates
Uncle Sam’s estimate of the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide is fundamentally flawed and “grossly understates” the potential impacts of climate change, according to an analysis released July 12 by a group of economists.
The study found the true cost of those emissions to be far beyond the $21 per ton derived by the federal government.
The figure, commonly known as the “social cost of carbon,” is used by federal agencies when weighing the costs and benefits of emissions-cutting regulations, such as air conditioner efficiency standards and greenhouse gas emissions limits for light trucks.
A truer value, according the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network, an umbrella organization of economists who advocate for environmental protection, could be as high as $900 per ton—equivalent to adding $9 to each gallon of gas. Viewed another way, with the U.S. emitting the equivalent of close to 6 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the higher figure suggests that avoiding those emissions could save the nation $5.3 trillion annually, one-third of the nation’s economic output.
A second, separate report released July 12 buttressed the argument, finding that the government routinely underestimates the benefits of avoiding climate change when conducting cost-benefit analysis on regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This second report, published jointly by the World Resources
Institute, an environmental think tank, and the Environmental Law
Institute, found that government models on climate impacts often
contain “dramatic simplifications and assumptions”—such as when
calculating the social cost of carbon—that underplay the benefits society gains by curbing emissions.
Together, the two reports suggest policy makers are looking at a distorted picture as they assess the economic impacts of climate regulations.
The issue has gained urgency as efforts to create a cap-and-trade system or impose a carbon tax have stalled in Congress and federal rules—via the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—become the primary vehicle for reducing emissions.
“Based on what we know today, the government’s current range of social costs is very likely a serious underestimation of what we think those costs will be,” said Kristen Sheeran, executive director of the E3 Network.
“It does not reflect the urgency of the climate crisis,” she added. “It could lead to a degree of inaction on climate change that frankly is not supported by either the economics or the science at this point.”
A lower social cost of carbon—particularly when combined with an underestimate of the benefits of reducing emissions—makes justifying expensive emissions-cutting regulations much harder, advocates say.
But how to value the cost of climate change has proven to be a contentious issue.
Computer models attempting to assess the economic impacts of climate change are, in many cases, streamlined affairs that can only look at impacts broadly – at a scale of hundreds of miles, instead of, say, at a particular watershed, township, or even state.
Economists at the E3 Network, an umbrella group of about 200 economists, contend many potentially costly impacts are missed: Sweltering inland temperatures are averaged with cooler coastal weather. Or an intense, deadly rainstorm never shows up in a monthly average rainfall tally.
That leads to considerable uncertainty about the severity of the damages. For example, a global model used in part by the federal government to derive the $21-per-ton price finds that a 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius) temperature rise will cost 1.8 percent of the world GDP. But University of California, Berkeley, economist Michael Hanemann, conducting a detailed review of that estimate as it applies just to the United States, found it should be four times as large.
The point, say E3 economists, is that when the latest science on cost of climate extremes, the pace of global change, and how to account for those damages in the future are incorporated into the federal government’s mathematics, the picture changes dramatically.
“Now that we know how much we could end up paying to endure the impacts of climate change, investing in reducing our emissions is clearly the prudent option,” Frank Ackerman , an economist with the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the report’s two authors, said in a statement. “It’s the difference between servicing your car, or waiting for it to break down on the highway.”
Officials at the EPA were unavailable for comment Tuesday evening. Michael Greenstone, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor who led the federal effort to price the cost of climate impacts, was similarly unavailable.
In an interview earlier this year, however, Greenstone said the federal panel charged with pricing impacts did consider several studies that pegged the social cost of carbon closer to $3,000 per ton of carbon dioxide. But those higher values were based on unlikely assumptions, Greenstone said. When the panel held those assumptions and variables constant, the picture changed dramatically, and the federal estimate fell within the mid-range of the published literature, he said.
The federal panel published its $21-per-ton figure in February 2010 with a promise to reassess its work within two years. Sheeran noted 18 months have passed, with no evidence the estimate is being revised.
“It does not appear to be a priority within the administration,” she said.
You can view the original article here and do some source checking yourself. Like in most things the truth is likely in the middle.
Came across this article today. Nancy makes the agrument (backed with facts, something my arguments have sorely lacked) I’ve had on an ongoing basis since 2004ish, originally with a local city’s planning office and more recently with a good friend who is now doing some work for them. The jist of my position has been that cityABC is uniquely positioned to reinvent itself to become the city of the future that people WANT to live in. Besides the obvious quality of life/proximity to the outdoors that the PNW provides they’ve got multiple four year universities within their city limits, but thus far they lose most of these students to far more appealing cities to the north and south. When originally looking to reinvent themself they took the “LET’S BUILD A BUNCH OF ‘LUXURY’ CONDOS! GRANITE COUNTERTOPS, YESSSS!!” path, incented with property tax credits. What they quickly discovered was what anybody not suffering from cranial rectal insertion disorder intuitively knew, among the more obvious being:
1) If you want the ‘urban living’ lifestyle you want the typical infrastructure that comes with it – i.e. you want a walkable lifestyle. You don’t want to have to drive to a grocery store because there isn’t one located downtown in the urban core, and
2) Condos priced near or at the same price as the more established cities to the north/south that offer the typical urban accoutrements are destined for failure
In a *shocking* turn of events that has repeated itself nationwide these condos didn’t sell well, the artificially propped up nationwide real estate market went tits up, the condos reverted to apartments and/or fire sale auctions (note: can’t wait to see special assessments these HOAs will be facing when their ‘luxuriously built properties’ turn out to be considerably less than advertised, but I digress…), life goes on.
Anyways, I’m blabbing, let’s get back to Nancy’s article, cut and posted below. We all drink the Kool-Aid already, so like Black Canseco said on Twitter today “Hope all you heated “Dear Netflix” mofos get this mad at your Congress reps” it’s up to you to put the pressure on.
More Americans are biking or walking to work these days, in part because public-sector investment is improving the infrastructure they need to get there safely. Further public investments in bike paths and bike lanes are likely to offer a big social payoff.
Federal spending on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure has more than doubled since 2006 but amounted to less than $4 a person in 2010.
This chart, a snippet of a larger infographic by Kory Northrop, a graduate student at the University of Oregon, that illustrates differences across states and highlights the top 10 major American cities for bike commuting, draws on data from the American Community Survey for 2009.
Portland, Ore., tops the list, with 5.8 percent of workers riding to their jobs on a regular basis. Snowy Minneapolis comes in second, at 3.9 percent, and Seattle third, at 3 percent. San Francisco, despite its hills, is nearly tied with Seattle. Smaller cities are not included in this ranking, but some, like Boulder, Colo., and Eugene, Ore., have higher bike-commuting rates than Portland.
At last count, New York City was still below 1 percent, but that may be changing, with the recent large expansion of bike paths there.
According to Bicycling magazine, all the above-mentioned cities rank among the top 10 in terms of bike infrastructure.
Some people regard bike paths as invasions of sacred car space. In March, John Cassidy of The New Yorker ranted online against their expansion in Manhattan. He was immediately reproved by scores of his readers, as well as by a commentary in The Economist, “The World Is His Parking Spot,” that applied basic social cost-benefit analysis.
Here is the economic logic behind increased efforts to promote bicycle use:
Cars enjoy huge direct subsidies in the form of road construction and public parking spaces, as well as indirect subsidies to the oil industry that provides their fuel. These subsidies far exceed the tax revenue generated by car use (as this excellent discussion of the technical issues at stake in these calculations makes clear.)
Yet cars impose major social costs: their use contributes to global warming, traffic congestion, accident fatalities and sedentary lifestyles.
Bicycle use is good for both people and the planet. In a country afflicted by obesity and inactivity, people who get moving become healthier. Riding a bike to work or to do errands is far cheaper than joining a gym. Cutting back on gas consumption improves air quality, reduces dependence on imported oil and saves money.
Increased bicycle use is practical and feasible, especially if it can be combined with effective public transportation for long-distance needs. As John Pucher of Rutgers University (dubbed Professor Bicycle by some of his fans) explains, about 40 percent of all automobile trips in metropolitan areas are less than two miles – a distance easily biked.
International comparisons in use rates, as well as differences among cities in the United States, demonstrate the impact of public policy. Professor Pucher points out that the bike share of local trips ranges from 1 percent in the United States to 18 percent in Denmark to 27 percent in the Netherlands.
As a recent New York Times article explains, many European cities explicitly aim to discourage automobile use. Good public transportation systems help people get into downtown areas that would be less congested and thus more inviting. Bike-sharing programs are expanding in cities all over the world, including Latin America.
For bicyclists, increased numbers often lead to increased safety. As bike paths on roads attract larger numbers of cyclists, the chance of car-related accidents declines, promoting further use. Safety appears to be a major factor for women in particular.
As more people ride to work, cultural norms shift — bike commuting begins to seem less quirky. Businesses begin to recognize the benefits of providing facilities for showering and changing clothes (cheaper per person than car-parking spots).
These changes, in turn, can promote more biking. Build it and they will come: increased supply can increase demand.
Major improvements in bike infrastructure wouldn’t just make it easier to get to work. They would also create work, a high priority in our high-unemployment economy.
Construction of bike paths offers more job creation per infrastructure dollar than investment in roads. (For more details, see this recent study by my University of Massachusetts colleague Heidi Garrett-Peltier, who analyzed 58 projects in 11 cities, using an input-output model to measure employment impact).
Hats (and helmets) off to the bicycle activists and policy makers who work to promote bicycle paths and lanes. They are spinning us all in a good direction.
Been seeing a lot of chatter around these jeans today. Not my thing because, well, they are skinny jeans and thus make me look like a marshmallow with two toothpicks stuck in the bottom (psssst, yo Levis, make these in a 514 with the 36 inseam and you’ve got a customer for life), but check out the features they are throwing in for SEVENTY EIGHT BUCKS. Check their press release for the full frontal marketing verb attack, but the highlights are in the image below.
My splitboard touring pants use that Schoeller Nanosphere technology and it’s insane the way the water beads off, and no matter how many trees I’ve bushwhacked through nothing has stuck to it – they honestly look new. Combine that with stretch, reflective AND antimicrobial and it seems you’ve got a well thought out pair of jeans with *GASP* value, something you don’t often see in cycling. You can almost get three pairs of the Levis for the price of ONE pair of the Rapha jeans, and two pairs for the price of Outlier’s (kind of) jeans with money left over for a few beers. Note that I’ve never tried any of the above (but yo, Levis, Rapha, Outlier if you send me a pair I’ll rock ‘em and report ‘em) so it could be that one of them is worth the money, but worth is subjective.
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