Hi Folks-
In honor of Earth Day (and because I still retain my Badger Pride, in this case for Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson) I ask you a question: which is more likely, that we will all be swallowed up at the turn on of the LHC, or that we will adiabatically ruin our planet to satiate our increased demands for convenience and “higher quality of life”. The Energy problem/Global Warming/choose your own name for it is getting more and more attention these days, for good reason, and so it has been on my mind. At MIT, we have an Energy Initiative where the Institute as a whole has taken up the energy challenge, and people like Governor Patrick are giving talks to highlight its importance. In the Physics Department, we focus more on technological solutions, but I am not convinced this is the way to go. My brother, who has been working for Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation for the last 10 years or so (it has been at this business for 25 years!) tells me that in we currently have the technology to dramatically reduce our energy consumption (working with energy providers, building developers, and ordinary consumers) which is more expensive up front, but in the end saves money as well as energy. It is just a matter of getting people to change their habits-but that is really hard.
My main example of this is during my daily commute. My vehicle of choice is:
which I ride for 10 minutes mostly along a path to a subway (it’s called the “T” in Boston) which takes me to MIT. I ride all year long (thanks to my town of Arlington, which has decided to plow the bike path) except in really bad weather when I take a bus to the T. This has many advantages:
- With gas at $3.70/gallon and parking at $500/semester it’s better economically (My T pass costs $37/month, subsidized by MIT). By the way, in Switzerland gas was something like $5.20/gal last year, so it is still cheap in the US. Parenthetically, I am continually chagrined by our current leader’s commitment to reduce US dependence on foreign oil – not oil in general, that would be detrimental to the US oil industry, with which the current administration shares some pretty cozy past history, no? OK, I’ll step off the soap box.
- I get at least 20 minutes of exercise a day, whether I like it or not. I don’t have to set aside extra time for exercise, it is part of my daily routine, and 20 minutes a day, done regularly, goes a long way. And it is outside, fresh air, not cooped up in some health club (which again costs more money)
- It is faster! Well, if there were no traffic, it might be slightly faster by car, but when in Boston is there no traffic? Actually the fastest way to get from my house to MIT is bike all the way, but the bike back in traffic is no fun (too many cars, too much pollution, too many drivers venting their stress with their driving tactics and their horn) so I usually take the T instead.
- There is a certain satisfaction I get out of cruising through traffic like a hot knife through butter while everyone is stuck in gridlock.
I’ve been using my bike for commuting since college, except for a few stints here and there when I had to deal with the kids at the same time, and I have to say the driver’s attitudes are getting better. Whereas there was little respect for bikers back in the day, now for instance I cross one road on the path every morning (Lake St) and I’d say 90% of the time cars go out of their way to yield the right of way to me- kudos to Arlington!
Often I have ample opportunity to observe the car traffic flowing around me, so I play a little game. I try to see how high I can count consecutive cars with single occupants, until I see one with more than one occupant, upon which I reset the count to zero. I think the highest I’ve ever counted was around thirty, and it isn’t hard to get to 10 at all. Forget the bike, what if half of those ten people in their car all alone got into someone else’s car – what effect would that have on traffic accidents, length of commute, pollution, parking space, noise, energy consumption…at the cost of being able to come and go as one pleases (but not really, because they schedule around traffic, no?). So I think the real challenge is not necessarily getting the technology but changing the mind set – the arguments are convincing, if you can get people to listen. I have a dream about getting school kids walking to school or waiting for the bus to play this game, and report their maximum count, then chart it as a function of location and time to see which part of the US is the most carpool friendly, but that’s not my day job. Anyway, awareness is what Earth Day is all about, so thanks Governor Nelson
PS I know this isn’t about the LHC so much, but we physicists tend to think about all sorts of stuff…and for readers near Boston, get on your bike duringBay State Bike Week
Tags: environment
[...] Moonage Political Webdream wrote an interesting post today on Earth Day and DoomsdayHere’s a quick excerptThe Energy problem/Global Warming/choose your own name for it is getting more and more attention these days, for good reason, and so it has… [...]
Hi Steve,
To start with, the notion of anthropogenic global warming has some serious flaws, not the least of which is the fact that Warming seems to have reached a plateau, and is now dropping off, while human energy consumption and production of various so-called “green-house gases” has continued to increase. As I’ve long suspected, the cyclical nature of other factors, most notably our sun, are probably at work.
On the other hand, I see nothing wrong(and plenty right) about finding efficiencies in our usage of energy. You ride your bike, and that’s all well and good for you. What’s your commute distance? For a great many Americans, a bicycle isn’t remotely feasible, and no public transport exists, or if it does, is not any more feasible/practical. As an example, if I drive nowhere but to work and home, I will drive roughly 85 miles each day(down from a previous daily round trip of more than double that.) I live in Texas, and distances are large(relative to the Northeast.)
One thing I see that can actually help out is telecommuting. My wife does that 9/10 workdays. Since her round trip commute is 150 miles, you can imagine what the ability to merely log on has done for us on the total cost of transportation. Rather than driving a total of 1500 miles in two weeks, she drives 150.
Not every job is conducive to telecommuting, however. My job, while in a similar field, for instance, unfortunately requires me to have constant interactions with hardware that I have to be able to touch. Of course, there is no telecommuting for police, or fire, or other jobs requiring actual human presence.
That said, I imagine there are many thousands of government bureaucracy types who could easily telecommute. I imagine for most classes, not involving hands-on interactions, telecommuting (or distance learning) is an available option that is severely underutilized. I think if the nation were able to get beyond any stigma attached to telecommuting, then we could curb a lot of wasted energy usage. Imagine if everybody whose jobs didn’t require their physical presence every day ere to get on this particular bandwagon. I doubt so many people would be on the roads, and I think it would have a dramatic effect on emissions and consumption of energy.
Where my wife works, they are almost all information workers. They have a fair number of telecommuters, so one of the side benefits is that they use less actual space. Multiple workers share a single office, and since they’re all in the office on different days, they require less space and use less energy in heating, cooling, and lighting. That’s another available benefit of the telecommute strategy.
It’s simply one more way we can make a significant dent in the overall picture. Back to the notion of global warming, however, I think the LHC is more likely to cause the Earth to be destroyed than antropogenic global warming. The Earth is fairly durable relative to most tinkerings of mankind. Global warming is ultimately inevitable, and it won’t be anthropogenic sources that pushes it beyond recovery. It will be that shining orb about which we orbit that makes the Earth too hot, but that’s likely a billion years off, more or less.
There are only a few things mankind could do in the short term to make the planet uninhabitable, and driving cars isn’t one of them.
My daily commute is a 40-minute walk to Harvard Square, and then back home again in the evening. It has many of the same perks as bicycling; not having used a bike in about fifteen years, I’m afraid I’d be the guy who proved a certain adage wrong if I ever tried. . . .
I’ll leave aside the debate about Global Warming or not, since there are many others more qualified than I am actively involved in the debate, plus one can cast the question in terms of Energy Dependency anyway which is why the topic is so hot – Look at Mr. McCain’s top proposal right now, the gas tax vacation, for instance. Mark and I seem to agree on this at least, let’s find common ground.
Mark asks some questions, and makes some statements – To the T, my commute is 3 miles, to MIT it is about 7. I agree an 85 mile bike ride isn’t realistic, but would reply with two comments:
According to the census bureau, a bit more than 4/5 of US population lives in one of the 363 metropolitan areas. “A great many americans” is an interesting statement in this regard. I think most metropolitan areas have some form of public transportation, and though perhaps not convenient (“feasible”), that is a relative term – it isn’t feasible when it is so much more convenient to use one’s private transportation. Plus, there’s a cart and horse issue here – with people not using public transportation, there is no revenue to improve it, which is why it isn’t so reliable, which is why people don’t use it. Changing the mindset is hard!
When we moved to Boston a few years ago, we could have bought a house further away and used commuter rail (I have friends who do this currently, and my spouse did it when we lived 45 miles west of Chicago) or car, but we chose not to, partly because of the commute issue. It is true we happen to be “lucky” that we have a safe town with good public schools a reasonable distance from work, but in fact it probably wasn’t luck but rather hard work planning it years ago, and strong will on the part of the town to shoulder the high tax burden to make it workable.
I completely concur with Mark about the advantages of telecommuting, and in fact my wife telecommutes as well. Moreover, I do too – in about 40 minutes I have a meeting with one person at Brown University, and one at CERN, to review a paper, after which I have to attend another meeting at the experiment to get the latest on the commissioning, and then another with my US colleagues collaborating on the CMS Tracker project. I will do this all with Video Conferencing from my office. Sometimes the time zones make it a little tough, but it works pretty well.
In the end, some jobs will require cars, that I can understand. I just don’t think that works out to be 9 out of 10 people driving alone in their car, a fairly typical occurrence as far as I can tell.
And for Blake: Walking is excellent as well. I sometimes think people would take better care of their local environment if they got outside and looked at it more often. During next week’s bike week, there are some convoys you might be able to hook up with…strength in numbers if you want to give it a try!