Green Options

By Lester R. Brown

Aside from the overriding need to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to stabilize climate, there are several other compelling reasons for countries everywhere to restructure their transport systems, including the need to prepare for falling oil production, to alleviate traffic congestion, and to reduce air pollution. The U.S. car-centered transportation model, with three cars for every four people, that much of the world aspires to will not likely be viable over the long term even for the United States, much less for everywhere else.

The shape of future transportation systems centers around the changing role of the automobile. This in turn is being influenced by the transition from a predominantly rural global society to a largely urban one. By 2020 close to 55 percent of us will be living in cities, where the role of cars is diminishing. In Europe, where this process is well along, car sales in almost every country have peaked and are falling.

With world oil output close to peaking, there will not be enough economically recoverable oil to support a world fleet expansion along U.S. lines or, indeed, to sustain the U.S. fleet. Oil shocks are now a major security risk. The United States, where 88 percent of the 133 million working people travels to work by car, is dangerously vulnerable.

By Lester R. Brown

Projections from the International Energy Agency show global energy demand growing by close to 30 percent by 2020, setting the stage for massive growth in the carbon dioxide emissions that are warming our planet. But dramatically ramping up energy efficiency would allow the world to not only avoid growth in energy demand but actually reduce global demand to below 2006 levels by 2020.

We can reduce the amount of energy we use by preventing the waste of heat and electricity in buildings and industrial processes and by switching to efficient lighting and appliances. We can also save an enormous amount of energy by restructuring the transportation sector. Many of the needed energy efficiency measures can be enacted relatively quickly and pay for themselves.

You’ve heard all the arguments about why you should ride your bike: It reduces auto traffic, shrinks your carbon footprint, decreases your transportation costs, and gives you killer calves. But there’s one niggling problem: theft. It seems no matter how many locks, cables, and snakes you use, at one point or another, you’re likely to return to your bike, to find one lone orphaned tire, the rest long gone.

Whether or not this has been your experience, it’s a perception that many people hold, and it’s a factor in holding back bike riding from being more widely used mode of transport. What to do? Enter the Bike Tree. These devices address several issues at once, but let me start with the primary: it stores your bikes high up in the air, for all the world to see, and thieves to be foiled, looking like, yes, a tree made of bikes.

How does it work? Simply.