Red Light Green Light RoShamBo, 5/19/08: Peak Oil and Losing That Ugly 3,000 Pounds

[The following, written by Synthesis weekly columnist Julia Murphy, appeared in the Synthesis Weekly on Monday, May 19th, 2008. Julia can be reached at ninjatreehugger@gmail.com]

Peak Oil Losing That Ugly 3,000 Pounds

The brilliant and sexy Robert Murphy was the one who originally pointed out to me the correlation between summer vacation season and spikes in gas prices. Now, for true we’ve been tracking some crazy gas price increases ever since…well, about the same time the phrase “peak oil” entered the popular lexicon. Some of us have been hearing that phrase for a little longer, but it’s probably safe to say that at least five out of every 10 people have heard of it; the concept that consumption has outstripped supply and it’s just a matter of time before that fact becomes unavoidably apparent.

For the other five, from Wikipedia:

“Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.”

Yes, my friends, the age of finity will make many scenarios possible, even likely. Civilian air travel? Not sure how that’ll pan out. To postpone the inevitable, here is an online remedy titled “Six Stupidly Simple Steps to Save Billions of Gallons of Gas”

1. Lose weight. (900 million gallons).

2. Synchronized (intelligent) traffic lights (1,000 million gallons)

3. More expensive gas (450 million gallons)

4. Drive slower (600 million gallons just for semis)

5. More people per car (1,500 million gallons)

6. Increase fuel efficiency to 35 MPG (55,000 million gallons by 2015)

So freakin’ simple! I’m going to save the losing weight one for last, though, cause bikes get (doing the math from the caloric — which is heat — value of a gallon of gas) an astounding 1,035 miles to the gallon. Or, what, about 57 miles for 2,000 calories.
So it occurred to me that as we head into the summer vacation season that the thing to do would be to lose that ugly 3000-plus pounds (i.e., your car) and trip the light fantastic, vacaying on yer bike.

More after the jump:

I called a couple of bike stores where helpful friendlies pointed me in various directions, hitting paydirt when the cat at Chico Bike and Board referred me to Cyclesport. When I called over there, a guy named Mike told me that what I was referring to as “carless vacations” was actually better known as “bike touring,” and people had been doing it for the last 100 years. He said that 20 years ago it was actually a lot more popular, and that some friends of his (who he had ridden with) wrote a book called Bicycling Beyond City Limits (by Michael Foley).
As I gleefully asked moronic questions and Mike graciously answered them (at one point I offered that one should probably ride with people of a like skill level, at which point Mike fell silent, wondering how many times I’d been dropped on my head as an infant) it came to light that Mike was the guy who had advised Mark and Lucia prior to their epic ride to Eugene, an astoundingly hardcore feat.
One of the mellower rides he mentioned was “a lap around Lassen.” Another nice ride, according to Mike, is Chico to Black Butte. Talking to Mike, it becomes clear that it’s actually damn simple — get your bike tuned up and frickin’ ride it. Far.
Camping, he says, “requires the same amount of gear for 10 days that it does for one,” so give yourself plenty of time if you’re not a jock (say, 40 miles a day for taters) and just…get to it. That there Mike is a good and patient dude, and would probably answer any moronic questions you asked of him.
Don’t forget Wheeled Migration (bike to SLO). Registration closes June 1st.

Peep wheeledmigration.org

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