Features

About a week ago I had the fortune to attend some of the Cascadia Green Building Council’s (CGBC) 2010 Living Future unConference for Deep-Green Professionals in Seattle, WA. This was the annual conference’s fourth year, and it was once again jam-packed with inspiring and intelligent discussions about the future of green building and development.

This year’s theme was “Building Hope: Revaluing Community.” Joel Sisolak, Washington State Director of CGBC, specified what kind of hope the conference was trying to stimulate in his opening remarks. He said it was an active hope, one that calls us to push through the grief and believe that we can do better, and said this was in contrast to the “we believe that if you wish for something it will come true” type of wishful thinking. Understanding problems, finding solutions and committing to action were the name of the game at Living Future. To that end green building professionals spent three-days sharing ideas, presenting Living Building Challenge projects, their lessons learned, and new technologies, and getting fired up from some passionate keynote speeches.

While I was not able to be attend all of the presentations and educational sessions, I did get to a few, and I thought some highlights would be worth sharing with you. Additionally, former Worldchanging Editor Julia Levitt and guest writer/Worldchanging reader Gia Mugford attended the conference and have contributed their impressions. Here is our collection of thoughts from the 2010 Living Future unConference (organized chronologically for ease of review):

Wednesday, May 5
James Howard Kunstler the Opening Keynote Speaker

Thursday, May 6
Bill Reed on Regenerative Design from the morning session "Integrating the Whole System - The Practice of Living Systems or Regenerative Design"

Friday, May 7
Energy Code Overhaul from the morning session "Outcome-Based Energy Codes as a Foundation for Policy and Market Transformation in Building Energy Performance"
Designing Regenerative Food Systems from the afternoon session of the same name
Pecha Kucha the closing party and 20/20 presentation

If you were at this year’s conference and saw or heard something not covered here, please chime in in the comments section below! It’d be great to hear from you about other innovative and inspiring ideas at the conference. (I'm especially curious about what was discussed at these two sessions: Thursday's The Role of the Green Building Movement in Ending Homelessness and Friday's How Established Neighborhoods and Existing Buildings Can Save Our Planet: Imagining a development-related Embodied Energy and GHG Emissions Transfer Program.)

For other reviews of this year’s conference I recommend the following blogs:

• Katie Zemtseff for the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce Green Building Blog: Katie live blogged from the event. She had two good posts, which taken together, provide a good contrast between Kunstler’s Wednesday keynote and Friday’s Keynote Speaker, John Francis of Planetwalk.

• Charles at Sustainable Industries wrote two blog posts: “Living Future Dispatch 1 – On James Howard Kunstler;” and “Living Future Dispatch 2 – On Chemicals and Imagery,” which discusses Jason McLennan’s Thursday morning Keynote. McLennan is CEO of CGBC and the International Living Building Institute (ILBI).

• Nathalie Weinstein covered the conference for Oregon’s Daily Journal of Commerce and wrote two blog posts covering Jason McLennan’s talk on Thursday and the Jasper High School kids’ 15 Minutes of Brilliance presentation. She also wrote up a Q&A with Jason McLennan about his thoughts on green building.

• Alexandra Steele posted a reflection piece on the conference at eco-maven entitled "The Future Isn’t Here Yet …. Living Future 2010 insights!" She reflects on all four keynote speakers, and one of Thursday afternoon's educational sessions: Food for Thought: A Conversation On the Urban Agriculture Movement.

If you have Twitter, you can check out the Twitter feed from the conference by searching for the tag: #LF10. There were a lot of great quotes and one-liners shared throughout the conference.

Head’s up: Next year’s Living Future unConference will be on April 27-29, 2011. The theme is: “Our Children’s Cities: Visualizing a Restorative Civilization.”

Image of Omega Center for Sustainable Living courtesy of Flickr photographer milfodd under the Creative Commons License. The Omega Center is a Living Building Challenge project in New York, and was one of the case studies presented in the educational session: Our Next Water Revolution: Reaching toward Regenerative Design at the Community Scale.

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Features at 9:00 AM)

The future that my parents' generation warned us about forty years ago looks an awful lot like our present. The ice caps are melting, deserts are spreading, the planet is thick with people, most of the world's primeval forests are gone, the seas are in crisis, and pollution, famine and natural disasters kill millions of people a year. Compared to the world we might have had, had the progress of the early 1970s continued steadily through the following four decades, we live on a half-ruined planet.

That half-ruined planet, though, is our home. People old enough to remember the first Earth Day can well grieve for that other, healthier Earth we might have had if only older generations had made different choices. Kids born today won't have that luxury. This world is the only one they'll ever know: they'll have to make the best of it; life goes on.

1970 is the same distance in time away from us now as 2050: that's how close the future is. The 2050s, we know, will be a watershed era: the decade when, if we're smart, human population will have peaked, a bright green model of sustainable prosperity will be widespread and human damage to the climate and biosphere will have begun to be repaired. In an amount of time about equal to that from the first Earth Day, we have to remake the world. We'll know whether we've done well enough by 2050. If we fail, the resulting descent towards greater and greater catastrophe, will likely cause immeasurable human suffering and the end of civilization; it could include perhaps a general extinction of most life on Earth. The final outcome will almost certainly be ripped from our control at some stage. (It would be far better to tackle the planetary crisis while we have a chance at controlling the outcome).

Even if we do reach a safe plateau towards the middle of the century, with a stable human population, a new model of prosperity and a planet-wide effort to halt and reverse ecological destruction, much will still have been lost. Unfortunately, even a "win" may look like a ruined planet to the eyes of those used to the one we have now. Climate commitment means that no matter what we do, more climate change is a given (even if we avoid triggering any massive climate tipping points). Living on a planet of children (the median age in the least developed countries is only 19, for instance) and in a world where billions are struggling to rise out of poverty, means that even if reinvention happens fast and models spread quickly, entire forests, fisheries, rivers, mountains of topsoil, and myriad creatures will be devoured by human needs in the meantime. In the best case realistic scenario, we're going to do a huge amount of damage to the planet even as we transform ourselves into a global society that provides prosperity with essentially no impacts.

Some older environmentalists (most prominently, James Lovelock) have suggested that the fact that no future now awaits us in which our planet is not greatly depleted means the game's over. Lovelock in particular seems to enjoy saying it's too late to do anything to save humanity, but he's not alone among his generation. These “it’s too late” doomers look ahead and see a world full of deserts and empty oceans, dying forests and dead coral reefs, and they say, "we tried to warn you..." and walk away.

The problem is, the children of 2050 will look at that future world, with all its problems, and see home: and they'll look at the choices they have in front of them, and see the future. And since the choices we make in the next forty years will decide what choices our descendants are left with -- a thriving society engaged in centuries of restoration and planetary repair, or a gradual desperate retreat towards the poles -- giving up now because we don't like the choice set we face is pathetic cowardice.

In fact, it's worse: the writing off of the future (especially on the part of those who bear the responsibility of cultural authority) actually directly supports the work of those who are destroying the future; those that are stripping every last shred of profit from the planet's biosphere while they still can. The idea that there is no future is a club used to beat people into submission and acquiescent participation in the unthinkable.

The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I'm more and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we're on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.

That void in our future vision, I believe, is not accidental. In the 40 years since the first Earth Day, a whole set of industries has grown large attacking scientists and conservationists; falsely complexifying issues; spinning the news of environmental crimes; launching astroturf front groups; endowing think tanks; bribing politicians; obfuscating the need for systemic change by pushing funding towards NGOs that advocate the most limited of personal actions; and by promoting (in the most direct financial sense) cultural work that promotes cynicism and a disdain (if not a hatred) for idealists, from talk radio to teabagging. In a twist on the old axiom that tyrants don't care if they are hated so long as their subjects don't love each other, these industries don't care if the future they're offering us looks dark, so long as no other futures we can imagine look brighter. Despairing consumers still buy, and they cause less trouble for the investing class. "We have an economy," as Paul Hawken says, "where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P." Keeping the future dark hides the crime.

There is a vicious political fight for the future happening right now. Having realized that they're steadily losing the war to convince people there are no problems, those profiting from the status quo have now turned to fear, uncertainty and doubt. They’re trying to convince the public that it is both too expensive to make changes that probably won't work and too soon for drastic measures (I personally think that the political use to which geoengineering is being put is very much a part of this effort, but that's a story to take up again another time). The dark, unknowable future has been turned into a weapon against action in the present.

The irony is, we already have the ability to solve or at least address the planet's most pressing problems. We don't have every solution we'll need, not yet. We do, though, have the technological capabilities, the design genius, the scientific ingenuity, the entrepreneurial zeal, the policy acumen, the community-building skill, and the educational and cultural wisdom. It is not that we are not capable of sustainable prosperity. We have never had more or better ability to build a better world. What we seem to lack is a belief that we can actually use those powers to change anything, and we lack that belief precisely because the future has been ripped out of our cultural debate.

That's why if we care about the planet, the most important thing we can do is start showing how good a future we still can have. That's why, right now, optimism is a political act, and a radical one at that.

I think, what we need today, is mass movement planetary futurism. I don't mean futurism in the cheesy sense -- the what-color-is-your-rocket-car sense -- I mean futurism in the best sense: of people who understand that the future is not an alien world or a land-of-make-believe, it's where we are right now, with a brief passage of time. Utah Phillips used to like to say that the past didn't go anywhere. Well, the future's already here. We're making it, as we speak, and we make it better when we consider what the effects of our actions might be over a longer range of time.

Human beings make the future every day. Making the future -- setting in motion future events -- might almost be considered part of the definition of humanity. The problem is that today, when powerful men sit down and make decisions, they generally make those decisions as if the future didn't exist, as if the consequences of their actions were beyond anticipation, as if they bore no responsibility for foresight. The future's not welcome in the room.

We need millions of people ready to put the future back in the room. We need millions of people ready to demand that their governments, their companies, their communities and their cultural institutions confront the reality of the futures they make every day.

In 2010, any institution which is not looking forty years ahead and at least considering the long-term impacts of its work is probably engaged in actions that wouldn't bear the full light of day. We need to sunlight them. We need to hold them up against absolute standards, hard numbers and firm time lines (I prefer carbon-neutrality by 2030, myself, but again, that's an argument for another time). We need to demand forty-year goals and bold immediate commitments. We need to be the voices for the children of 2050 who otherwise currently have no rights in our halls of power. 2050 is right around the corner: we need to fight for it in every discussion of practical action, in every institution on the planet.

And we need to be ready to envision the alternatives, and explore them with people struggling to make better decisions here in the present. Because the reality is that change is not only in the interests of future generations, it's in our own interest. Almost all the things we need to do to safeguard the best possible set of choices for the children of 2050 are things we'd want to do for other reasons, anyway:

*build better cities, so people can live in vibrant walkable communities and green homes, served by ecological infrastructure and a mix of transportation choices;

*foster a culture of bright green innovation, helping to generate meaningful work for the billions who will need it, by spreading new approaches like adaptive reuse, product-service systems and so on;

*develop new technologies and material and new clean energy industries;

*redesign our products and manufacturing to remove the toxic chemicals that are poisoning us and recover materials to eliminate waste;

*preserve farmland and forests, securing working sustainable foodsheds and needed ecosystem services;

*protect and restore wild places and biological hotspots on land and in the sea, helping prepare them for climate adaptation as best we can, saving as much biodiversity as possible, and reconnecting us with the beauty of the planet.

Even if climate change magically ceased to be a problem tomorrow, these are all things we'd want to do for other reasons anyway; places that do them will become far more economically robust and systemically rugged than those that don't.

There will be opposition. We will meet people filled with anger and fueled by misinformation. Many of the men (and they are still mostly men) making these decisions are good people. A few are evil sociopaths, actively obscuring the future to hide their own knowing crimes, but most are people you'd find decent dinner company, people you'd welcome into your family. Some are among the most principled and conscientious people you'll find anywhere. But many look only backwards.

Many, I believe, are secretly terrified of what they'd see if they looked ahead. The people most deeply traumatized of all in our society may be the older men who've devoted their entire lives, in grinding hard work and out of love for the people around them, to building companies and communities and systems they thought represented a pinnacle of human endeavor and free enterprise, but which instead -- they would now find, if they could bring themselves to admit the possibility -- have become components of what is quite possibly the most destructive way of life ever made by human beings. To have done right and well your whole life and yet find yourself ethically indicted in the end, to have your accomplishments turn to ash, to arrive late expecting security and respect, and find neither: I don't think those of us who are younger can fully understand what a soul-wrenching experience that must be.

As the air goes out of the most destructive parts of our economy -- as the oil runs out, as the sprawl financing dries up, as the world runs out of big trees to cut and big fish to catch -- economic fear gets added to the mix as well. How will they survive? Even when they see a glimmer of a bright green economy, it looks full of jobs demanding different skills than the ones they've spent a lifetime honing. I think a lot of them refuse to see a bright green future -- attack even the possibility of its existence, yell at those who even suggest its necessity -- because they see no place for themselves in it, and hear a ringing condemnation of the legacies they're preparing to leave woven into every fiber of the innovations we need.

I honestly have no idea how to reach out to these good people. We know, though, that they are the ones often at the table when the future is made, and though we will eventually prevail since time and numbers are on our side, spending another couple decades butting heads with these guys will at best slow our progress. Merely defeating them politically also wastes a huge creative resource: their talent and experience. Many of the people most angrily denying the future are those who understand how the systems we now need to retrofit, redesign, replace and adapt actually work -- because they built them -- and, if convinced that this new work needs to be done, they have oceans of insight and institutional knowledge to bring to bear on the problem. No one knows how to hack a system better than the person who's been in charge of protecting it from change...if only we can win them over to the side of change.

Whether or not we can bring around the oldest generation, the fundamental need is clear: we need, now, to put the future back in the room.

(Image credits, top image: (left to right): Flickr/Si Jobling, Flickr/flydime and Flickr/James Cridland. All shared under the Creative Commons license. Image editing: Amanda Reed)

Image of gas mask smelling flowers from the first Earth Day from National Geographic Blog; Credit: AP Photo, 1970.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 11:04 AM)

by Alan Durning

01 - Juice Hawgs: Electric bikes aren't the answer to our prayers. We are.

Mmmm. An electric bike. Zipping through the city. Surging up hills without gasping for breath. Riding in business dress and arriving fresh and dry. Healthy, moderate exercise. No traffic jams. Free parking. Huge load-hauling potential. Near-free fueling. Zero emissions. Breeze in your face. Appealing!

So why haven’t e-bikes caught on (yet)? Especially in the Pacific Northwest, which is brimming with well-heeled tech enthusiasts? What’s stopping electric bikes from devouring automotive market share the way DVDs killed VHS? At least in good weather? Why aren’t they as commonplace on our boulevards as motorcycles or scooters or muscle-powered bikes or even motorized wheel chairs? Will they be soon?

Might electric bikes even be the vanguard of the electrification of all vehicles, rushing us through the long-awaited transition off oil and into a no-carbon future? Might this market-driven, job-creating electric vehicle revolution provide a detour around the bitter and intractable-seeming politics of climate laws? If we all push hard for electrification through the market, might we simply bypass the bickering morass of the US Senate, with its undemocratic procedures and filibuster rules?

I’m going to answer these questions. I swear. And, in the end, I’m going to conclude that the technical promise of electric bikes (and other electric vehicles) is not a short cut to a low-carbon, high-jobs future. Instead, it’s the other way around: good public policy is a short cut to electric vehicles. In other words, if you’re enthusiastic about e-bikes (and e-cars), you should work even harder for strong, fair climate policy; complete, compact communities; and best-in-the-world facilities for pedestrians and cyclists.

But that comes later. I need to start at the beginning, by which I mean the ultimate impetus for electric bicycles: the demand. Brynnen Ford, pictured above, illustrates. Brynnen uses her Madsen “as a minivan alternative.” She drives carpool with it, hauling kids to and from elementary school over the steep hills of Seattle’s central area. Before she electrified her cargo bike with an eZee motor and battery from cycle9.com, the hills were too much. “I tried doing it last year without the electric assist and while sometimes I could do it, other times I would opt for the car . . . so I wouldn't die of exhaustion from carrying the kids up the hills. Now, I almost never opt for the car.”

For Matt Leber, of Bellevue, Washington, a painful knee sparked his demand. An electric Giant Twist from Electric Bikes Northwest (pictured below) let his knee recuperate without injury. It also lets him commute 8 miles to his work as a bus driver without needing a shower. (And unlike Brynnen's Madsen, it fits on the bus.)

For many others, as personal transportation author Katie Alvord says, “advancing age gives that electric option ongoing appeal -- especially on windy days!” Many e-bike marketers, inventors, and enthusiasts are betting on baby boomers, with their active lifestyles, pro-fitness attitudes, and relative affluence, to push e-bikes into the mainstream in North America.

Of course, where two-wheeled electric vehicles are concerned, we’ve been through cycles of high hopes before, as Ms. Alvord pointed out in E Magazine . Auto industry icon Lee Iacocca became an evangelist for electric bikes in 1999, but his company sold disappointingly few "E Bikes." Just so, in 2002, Dean Kamen’s much-hyped two-wheeled electric Segway entered the market amid grandiose predictions of an imminent transportation revolution. John Doerr, arguably the dean of venture capitalists, predicted Segway would reach $1 billion in annual sales faster than any company ever. Instead, it took Segway until 2009 to sell its first 50,000, roughly what it hoped to sell in its first year alone. More recently, Segway has been working on a seated model with General Motors (pictured at right). Still, beyond the aging of the population, at least three reasons suggest electric bikes may soon break out of their novelty niche in the Pacific Northwest and the rest of North America, helping us rise to challenges as great as climate change, oil addiction, and recession. I detail these trends next in part two.

02 - Charging Up: Three trends favor e-bikes.

Technology, overseas markets, and political trends all bring good portents for e-bikes.

Trend 1. Technical innovation keeps improving electric bikes. The latest Giant, with lithium ion batteries, reportedly has a real-life battery range of 50 miles, doubling what previous models achieved. Sanyo has introduced a European style city bike (pictured below left) with impressive power-system integration. Trek, a leading American bike maker has entered the e-bike market with designs that may prove appealing to muscle-powered cyclists because of their high-performance feel (pictured below right).

Meanwhile, garage inventors keep coming up with intriguing innovations like the StokeMonkey (which I've described previously); Electric Mountain Drive from Oregon’s Ecospeed; and this VoltWagon electrified trailer that hitches to a regular bike and hauls cargo effortlessly.

Luckily for e-bike makers, advanced battery research is in its heyday, thanks to billions of dollars of investment from public and private institutions around the world. The hunt is on for better batteries not only because they’re essential to electrifying transportation and getting the world off of oil but also because they’re needed to harness intermittent, renewable power sources such as the sun and the wind. As battery improvements emerge, electric bikes stand to gain quickly.

. . .

Trend 2. Electric bikes are spreading like wildfire in China and are catching on in parts of Europe as well. As David Goodman recently wrote in the New York Times:

In China, an estimated 120 million electric bicycles now hum along the roads, up from a few thousand in the 1990s. They are replacing traditional bikes and motorcycles at a rapid clip and, in many cases, allowing people to put off the switch to cars. . . . From virtually nothing a decade ago, electric bikes have become an $11 billion global industry.

In the Netherlands, a third of the money spent on bicycles last year went to electric-powered models. Industry experts predict similar growth elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, France and Italy, as rising interest in cycling coincides with an aging population. India had virtually no sales until two years ago, but its nascent market is fast expanding and could eclipse Europe’s in the next year.

China reportedly had 56,000 electric bikes in 1998. Getting to 120 million in 12 years’ time is a phenomenal change, even in a country as populous as China, and e-bikes don’t appear to be slowing: USA Today reports that sales in China are expected to reach a staggering 22 million in 2010 alone, bringing the number of e-bike owners in the country to one tenth of the population. It’s an impressive example of electrifying the transportation sector. It’s also good news for e-bike prices: mass production on that scale has brought production costs down, and just as Chinese-made motor cycles have spread quickly in Asia and Africa, e-bikes are now radiating from China as well.

. . .

Trend 3. Political trends are encouraging for electric bikes as well. Despite disappointment at Copenhagen and slow progress on a climate bill in Washington, DC, climate change, oil addiction, and the chance to transition to a job-generating clean-energy economy remain potent political issues across much of the industrial world, prominently including the Pacific Northwest.

To seize the opportunity for a clean-energy revolution and move beyond carbon, we need to get completely off coal and oil quickly. Efficiency, compact communities, and transportation alternatives are our best friends in these tasks. But even with great success on all these strategies, we will still need some way to propel our trains, buses, trucks, and cars. The main no-carbon candidates are biofuels and electricity. We’ll need some of each, but electricity has tremendous advantages. It can come from many different carbon-free sources, can travel easily by wire, and can integrate the transportation sector with the rest of the electric grid in ways that make each stronger and more economical.

An impressive array of political and industry leaders have recognized and embraced the pivotal role the electrification of transportation can play in advancing a clean-energy economy. That’s why, for example, the 2009 US federal stimulus included a bevy of investments in research on advanced batteries and electric vehicles.

Electrifying bikes is a perfect first step in pursuit of vehicle electrification, because battery-assisted two wheelers are an easier engineering challenge than are electric cars. Frank Jamerson of Electric Bike World Report told USA Today, "The electric bike is the first wave of the electrification of the personal transportation industry."

Vehicle electrification is an energy storage problem, not a propulsion problem. Electric motors are much more efficient than fossil-fueled engines, but storing electricity is dramatically harder than is storing liquid fuels. For example, you can fill the tank of a gasoline-powered car in five minutes then drive on that fuel for several hours at highway speeds. Conversely, you need to recharge the Tesla Roadster, a $100,000 all-electric sports car, for roughly an hour for each hour of highway driving. (It takes 3.5 hours to charge fully. Its range is 244 miles, which it could cover in 3.5 hours at 70 mph. A Chevy Volt, which takes longer to recharge, has an electric-only range of 40 miles, after which it runs on a separate gasoline engine.)

Simple physics favor e-bikes over e-cars. Bicycles, even ones loaded with batteries, weigh less than their riders. Electric cars, in contrast, weigh many multiples as much as their drivers. Consequently, most of e-bikes’ battery charge can be spent moving the mass of the rider, but most of electric cars’ charge must be spent moving the bulk of the car itself. What’s more, part of e-bikes’ energy comes from leg muscles, again reducing the required battery power. In auto parlance, e-bikes have human-electric hybrid drives.

For these reasons, electric bikes are in the cat bird seat of electrified transportation at a time when many forces are aligned to speed electrification.

. . .

This alignment of interests (trend 3) coincides with rapid technical progress (trend 1) and huge economies of scale coming from China (trend 2). Together, surely these trends will push electric bikes into the mainstream of personal transportation, at least in good weather, in urban parts of the bike- and tech-loving Northwest.

Many observers think so. Many marketers think so. Big-box retailer Best Buy is confident enough that it has introduced e-bikes and other small electric vehicles to a Portland outlet in 2009 and is rolling them into more Northwest stores in 2010.

Maybe electric bikes are on the verge of breaking through in the Pacific Northwest, spreading contagiously as they have in China. But maybe they are not. Maybe the barriers to electric bikes are different in North America than in China or Europe. Whether or not you should buy one doesn’t depend on this question. But our public policies with regard to electric bikes, and perhaps with regard to other electric vehicles, depend on what’s blocking e-bikes in North America. If it's just a matter of pushing them to a market tipping point, public subsidies can help — the subject of the next section.

03 - Flipping the Switch?: To subsidize or not.

As I've argued, electric bikes could be forerunners for electrifying the whole transportation sector. They’re sweeping into urban areas in China by the tens of millions. New technologies are improving e-bike performance. And powerful institutions are aligning to speed battery innovations.

Many observers now believe e-bikes will grow rapidly in North America, including in the Pacific Northwest. Colorado-based market analysts Pike Research, for example, predict that US sales will quadruple from 250,000 e-bikes in 2010 to more than 1 million in 2016, as shown in the chart below. (Asia is left off the chart, because it's on a different scale. Some 98 percent of e-bike sales worldwide have been in China.)

To speed this process, one common approach—evident in the bevy of tax credits available for purchasers of hybrid and electric cars—would be to subsidize e-bike sales. That’s what Santa Cruz, California, did early in the 2000s decade. Coupons from local authorities helped sell as many as 1,000 e-bikes there, making it briefly the e-bike capital of North America. Similarly, rebates from Swiss localities have boosted e-bike sales in Switzerland. Some 16,000 sold there in the first half of 2009, according to one report.

The implicit assumption behind underwriting new products with public funds is that once they are adequately established in the marketplace, they will spread contagiously without continued public support. The public investment is justified by the subsequent flipping of a market, in which cleaner, greener products push out dirtier products and yield large benefits for society.

This assumption may be reasonable for green products that are new and unfamiliar, such as ground-source heat pumps and green roofs, or that are not produced on a large enough scale to bring down manufacturing costs. But electric bikes are neither new nor unfamiliar: half a million have sold in the United States over the years. And they’re a variation on the ubiquitous bicycle, which is found in a majority of homes. What’s more, we should have already benefited from the economies of scale, insofar as they’re rolling out of Chinese factories at a pace of 20 million a year, far in excess of the scale of US auto manufacturing before the recession. Furthermore, the notion that there is a tipping point for sales of e-bikes is speculative at best. In fact, a look at electric bikes’ progress in North America and abroad leads to the conclusion that they confront a formidable set of barriers to growth — barriers that public sales rebates are unlikely to overcome — these barriers are described in more detail in the following section.

04 - Circuit Breakers: Four barriers to e-bikes in the Northwest.

Here are four obstacles that are keeping electric bikes from taking hold in the Pacific Northwest in the way they have in China.

1. Immature technology.

As BikeHugger’s master blogger (and e-biker) DL Byron points out, electric bikes may be past the garage-tinkerer phase of development, but they’re still complicated, imperfect devices, plagued with breakdowns and performance issues. Battery care, for example, is still challenging, though it’s vastly simpler than it used to be.

. . .

2. Bike Culture.

In Asian and northern Europe cycling cities, bicycles are ubiquitous utilitarian objects like appliances. In the Pacific Northwest, as throughout North America, cycling is uncommon as anything but a form of recreation and exercise. Among sport cyclists, a major purpose of cycling is to get a good workout, and electric bikes destroy the workout. So sports cycling is no friend of the electric bike.

Meanwhile, the small share of northwesterners who cycle for urban transportation are such a visible minority that they have developed a bike culture, which defines itself against automotive culture. Among other things, urban bike culture revels in muscle power. Case in point: among urban cyclists, the coolest bike on the streets these days is the fixie—a one-gear minimalist cycle like the one pictured above. Riding one is cool in part because fixies are hard work. Another case in point: the flourishing Portland bike-only house-moving scene (portrayed in the video below from StreetFilms), which may be the pinnacle of bike culture: it proves muscle power can replace a moving van.

Among transportation cyclists, as among recreational cyclists, being human powered—not electric or gas-powered—is a point of pride. As Loren Mooney, editor-in-chief of Bicycling magazine, told the New York Times about the electric bike, “to the core cyclist, it’s cheating.”

As I’ve learned over four car-less years, in the individualism of North American culture, our vehicles come to define our identities—something auto marketers understand well. What we drive, or ride, is a tribe marker, and we all know the meanings: Hummer, Prius, Mustang, Volvo. (Among cyclists, too: Bianchi, Campie, Gary Fisher, homemade fixie.)

Consequently, for North Americans, buying an electric bike is not simply a choice of cost, convenience, and functionality. For better or worse, it’s also a statement of who you are. E-bikes are a product for a somewhat different market than regular bikes. But their spread isn’t helped at all by the fact that existing bike culture among both sport and transport cyclists is antithetical to e-bikes. This barrier is substantial, because bike culture affects not only individual attitudes but also access to and support for e-bikes.

. . .

3. Closed distribution channels.

Throughout North America, as VoltWagon entrepreneur Max Dunn noted in a recent paper, “The bike industry consists of two relatively independent segments: the low end sold through mass merchants and the high end sold through specialty bicycle retailers.” Mass merchants such as big-box retailers and sporting goods stores account for 75 percent of bicycle sales, but most of the bikes they sell are used rarely. Many are toys for children. Most bikes that get regular use are sold through bike shops.

Unfortunately, neither mass retailers nor bike shops work at present for distributing e-bikes. Mass merchants reach noncyclists including the affluent baby boomers at the heart of the potential e-bike market, but they lack the expertise and maintenance facilities to support a growing e-bike trend. Bike shops, on the other hand, are dominated by the prevailing bike culture to which e-bikes do not make sense. Their regular customers do not want electric bikes any more than the members of athletic clubs want electric-assisted weight-lifting machines. Almost no bike shops sell e-bikes.

Market analysts at Pike Research describe distribution challenges as among the biggest barriers to e-bikes: “Many manufacturers are trying to find a combination of independent dealers, mass retailers, and online sales that will effectively deliver the vehicles and after-sales service to customers.”

The shortage of e-bike retailers is exacerbated by an even more severe shortage of e-bike repair shops. It’s hard to find a bike repair shop that knows how to fix an e-bike. And electric bikes are finicky and need regular maintenance (see #1 above). Brynnen Ford, the carpool-riding e-biker from section one pictured here, put it this way: “I'm not a bike mechanic and my mechanic is kind of learning as he goes with the electric piece, so I'm never sure if it's really getting the right care.”

At present, the best e-bike sales-and-service in Cascadia comes from one specialized e-bike store in Seattle, two in Portland, and two others in Vancouver, BC. One promising sign is that about one quarter of Trek’s independent dealers, which are typically the leading bike shops in each city, will stock Trek’s new Ride+ line of e-bikes. As these shops master servicing e-bikes, the maintenance shortfall may diminish.

. . .

4. Safety.

Electric bikes promise to make cycling a better option for many people, including those whose weight, health, fitness, clothing needs, or hauling demands make regular bikes impractical. But they do nothing to lower the principal barrier to cycling: the perception that cycling in city streets is unsafe. (It’s actually much safer than most people think. In fact, not pedaling is the larger menace.) Fear of street riding is also the biggest barrier to electrified cycling. If you don’t feel safe on a pedal-powered bicycle at 10 miles an hour, you will probably feel even less safe on an electric bicycle at 15 miles an hour. As Jonathan Maus of BikePortland, Oregon’s definitive cycling blog, wrote in January, “Our current lack of a connected, separated, and comfortable bike network makes many people afraid to even try biking — and simply giving them motors won’t change their minds.”

In North America, the future of electric bikes depends on finding a market that wants their particular combination of lightness, gentle power, and modest range. To date, they have found adherents whose needs they closely match, such as Brynnen Ford and her carpool or Matt Leber and his injured knee. They have yet to find a larger market, I believe, because they are neither fish nor fowl. They make bad bicycles, because they remain imperfect in execution while they’re also heavy and hard to pedal without the power turned on. They also make bad motorcycles. Imagine a manufacturer introducing a motorcycle with a top speed of 20 miles per hour and a one-quart fuel tank that takes several hours to refuel every 25 miles. Not many sales would ensue.

But electric bikes do hold great promise. They could open cycling to huge numbers of additional people, to hillier places, and to heavier loads. Besides, even if their potential market is only one urban trip in twenty, that would still outstrip regular bikes’ current share. And getting to that point would mark an encouraging advance against climate change, oil addiction, and lack of exercise. It would also help strengthen local economies by replacing imported oil with local electricity—plus skilled jobs in electric bike maintenance.

Besides, if electric bikes are proliferating in China, these obstacles must be surmountable, right? They are. China’s lessons are worth understanding, and I’ll cover them next. I'll even reveal why this is a parable. Promise!

05 - The Body Electric: The lessons of China’s e-bike explosion.

In section two, I described the extraordinary growth of electric bikes in China, which grew from novelty items in 1998 to almost one e-bike per ten people today. What caused this growth? What can we learn from China about overcoming the Northwest’s four barriers to e-bikes?

The economic context of e-bikes is radically different in China than in the Northwest. In China, most buyers of electric bikes are stepping up in vehicular speed and comfort from heavy, low-performance bicycles. They are opting for electric bikes not in place of cars but in place of bicycles, motorcycles, or scooters. In the North America, e-bike buyers are stepping down in vehicular speed and comfort from the automobile. (Actually, they’re mostly buying an additional vehicle, to use in place of their car some off the time.)

Chi-Jen Yang, a policy analyst at Duke University, has examined Chinese experience with electric bikes in detail. He argues that their proliferation over the last decade has been “a policy accident.” Overrun with noisy, dangerous, fast, polluting motorcycles, more than 90 major Chinese cities have cracked down by banning or limiting new licenses for motorcycles. But they haven’t regulated electric bikes—even electric bikes (like many in China) that are essentially motor scooters with decorative pedals. So motorcycle demand, burgeoning with China's economic miracle of the last decade, has switched to electric bikes.

Mr. Yang’s research suggests that technological advances and market forces had little to do with China’s e-bike miracle, which helps explain why electric bikes are still outmatched by other technology in North America as well. He strengthens his case by demonstrating that across the Formosa Straits, Taiwan launched massive national subsidies for electric bikes and electric scooters in 1998, intending to trim urban motorcycle pollution and speed as Chinese cities were doing. Taiwan spent tens of millions of dollars making electric two wheelers cost competitive with gasoline-powered ones, but it abandoned the program four years later as futile. Not only were consumers reluctant to buy electric vehicles, many retailers refused to sell them. Mr. Yang quotes one scooter retailer as saying, “for every ten consumers who purchased an electric scooter, ten of them would come back to complain.” Unlike China, Taiwan did not ban or restrict motorcycles, and no amount of subsidy could flip the market toward electric vehicles.

A decade has passed since Taiwan’s failure, and electric-bike (and scooter) technology has improved, but Mr. Yang’s point remains:

Subsidies resulting in comparable price and superior environmental performance may be insufficient to make electric vehicles a commercial success, while limiting the fossil fueled alternatives could be highly effective in forcing the market penetration of electric vehicles. These market dynamics may also apply to the wider electric vehicle market.

Electric bikes, as the forerunners of electric cars and trucks, have tremendous potential, but they’re unlikely to win more than a toe-hold in a marketplace long dominated by petroleum-powered vehicles. Unless public policy makes petroleum-powered vehicles far less attractive, as China did for motorcycles. Petroleum is just too phenomenally effective and (still) cheap. Electric bikes will inch upward in market share in the Northwest, becoming less like novelties and more like regular bikes in their prevalence. But they will not sweep through the population as they have in China, unless we act through public policy to make their fossil-fueled competitors less competitive and cycling in general much more attractive. Specifically, we can

* Enact climate policies that put a price on carbon through a carbon tax or a fair cap and trade system.

* Make dramatic progress in threading a complete network of continuous, separate, named, signed, and lighted bikeways through our communities, so that cyclists (pedal and electric) are shielded from auto traffic, as shown in this photo from Copenhagen. Progress such as that envisioned in Portland’s bold new bike plan.

* Grow our cities up rather than out, constructing compact communities where walking, cycling, and transit are better alternatives than driving for many trips. Density is as important a determinant of cycling as infrastructure.

Electric bikes are promising. They deserve our respect. Their champions, manufacturers, and retailers deserve our encouragement. But the biggest favor we can do for them is not to subsidize them but to change the price of fossil fuels, the layout of our streets, and the design of our cities—creating the kinds of places in which cars become less necessary and bikes become more normal.

The hope that electric vehicles, perhaps led by electric bikes, will displace petroleum-fueled vehicles rapidly, simply by out-competing conventional vehicles on cost and performance is wishful. On the 40-year timeline we have to effect a near phaseout of carbon emissions, it is dangerous thinking—magical thinking. The only way the electrification of transportation will work is if we do what China did: write laws that make the alternatives—fossil fuels, in this case—accountable for their ecological consequences.

That’s not a welcome observation, I realize. We’ve met with setbacks and disappointments on the path to strong climate policy in the past year, first in the Oregon and Washington legislatures, then in Copenhagen at international climate negotiations, and more recently in Washington, DC. There’s something appealing right now about the notion of sidestepping politics entirely and instead inventing our way to an economy beyond carbon. I do not believe that’s possible.

I do not believe it because, over 25 years of studying issues like these, I’ve observed again and again the same patterns evident in this Parable of the Electric Bike. Clean technology has enormous potential, but it rarely sweeps a market unless laws make prices tell the ecological truth or otherwise constrain unsustainable practices. Carrots alone don’t usually work—even lots and lots of carrots; we also need sticks. Voluntary, market-based strategies rarely suffice, though they do demonstrate what’s possible and create momentum for changing the rules. Technology cannot solve problems created by bad public policy, but good public policy can unleash the potential of technology, leading to better solutions than we previously imagined.

So, go ahead and buy an electric bike—or an electric car—if you like. Surge up hills. Haul bigger loads. Replace some more car trips in your own life. Sing the body electric. I might do the same.

But let’s not get distracted from the real work before us, which is to change the rules by which we get and sell fossil energy, and by which we build our streets, neighborhoods, and cities.

Electric vehicles aren’t the answer to our prayers. We are.

Editor's note: This essay is a distillation of Alan Durning's excellent five-part series, The Parable of the Electric Bike.

Photo of charging electric bicycles courtesy of Flickr photographer Imnop88a under the Creative Commons license. Photos of Brynnen Ford and Matt Leber's Giant Twist courtesy of Brynnen and Matt. Segway PUMA photo courtesy of Flickr photographer saebaryo under the Creative Commons license. Photo of fixie bike rider courtesy of Flickr photographer Looking Glass under the Creative Commons license. Photo of Brynnen Ford courtesy of Brynnen and photographer Heidi Neff.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 1:46 PM)

There was a time when people thought the Internet would isolate us from one another, that we'd all end up spread out across the landscape in suburban enclaves, too absorbed with television and the Net to want to meet any actual people. A funny thing happened on the way to that asocial future, though: we discovered that the most important thing about the Net is that it connects people, and that connected people tend to want to meet, socialize and work together. Rather than separating us, the Net has made us more social than ever, both online and in the "real" world. In fact, the more connected we are online, the more time we're likely to spend hanging out offline with friends, family and neighbors.

As technology has suffused our cities -- think not only iPhones and GoogleMaps, but community ratings of restaurants and shops, real-time traffic reports, smart electrical grids, even hyper-local news sites -- it has magnified the feedback loop between online connection and in-person conversation: we're learning that public space and cyberspace are symbionts; technology and physical community fuel each other. The trend is only accellerating. Technology has gotten smaller, spread out and become ubiquitous in urban space. We’re surrounded constantly by data points, sensors, and layered information about everything from transit delays to weather reports to the bar where our friends are having happy hour.

As cities become smarter, urban living becomes much more efficient, and in many ways more pleasurable. With the street being a platform for technology, it becomes much easier to know where the things we want are and who has them and how they’re using them. We’re used to thinking of convenience in a 20th century way, where you get in your car and you drive around until you find the thing you want, and convenience is defined by the easiest drive with the least traffic, by the object that you buy and take home so you never have to worry about where it is (driving to the store to buy a home gym). Convenience in a smarter city is defined differently: knowing where the stuff you want is at all times so you don’t actually need to own it or make long trips to get to it. Just as search engines like Google have allowed us to find what we want, instead of having to click through the Net hoping to find something without knowing where it is, ubiquitous technology makes the city increasingly "searchable."

And, as Dan Hill notes in his seminal essay The Street as Platform, we're only just beginning to realize how smart our cities can get:

“Facilitated by networks of sensors, the data emerging from the new nervous system appears limitless: near-imperceptible variations in air quality and water quality, innumerable patterns in public and private traffic, results of restaurant inspections, voting patterns in public referenda, triggers of motion sensors, the output of heating ventilation and air conditioning systems, patterns of water usage, levels of waste recycled, genres of books returned at local libraries, location of bicycles in the city’s bike-sharing network, fluctuations in retail stock controls systems, engine data from cars and aeroplanes, collective listening habits of music fans, presence of mobile phones in vehicles enabling floating car data, digital photos and videos locked to spatial co-ordinates, live feeds from CCTV cameras, quantities of solar power generated and used by networks of lamp-posts, structural engineering data from the building information models of newly constructed architecture, complex groupings of friends perceptible in social software multiplied by location-based services, and so on. Myriad flows of data move in and around the built fabric. As many or most objects in the city become potential nodes in a wider network, enabled through the natural interoperability of systems influenced by the Internet and its open-source philosophies and standards-based protocols, this shimmering informational field provides a view of the entire city.”

As cities get smarter, we're likely to find more and more ways of improving the function of our cities, almost without effort, simply by eliminating wasteful practices:

“The invisible becomes visible, as the impact of people on their urban environment can be understood in real-time. Citizens turn off taps earlier, watching their water use patterns improve immediately. Buildings can share resources across differing peaks in their energy and resource loading. Road systems can funnel traffic via speed limits and traffic signals in order to route around congestion. Citizens take public transport rather than private where possible, as the real-time road pricing makes the true cost of private car usage quite evident. The presence of mates in a bar nearby alerts others to their proximity, irrespective of traditional spatial boundaries. Citizens can not only explore proposed designs for their environment, but now have a shared platform for proposing their own. They can plug in their own data sources, effectively hacking the model by augmenting or processing the feeds they’re concerned with.”

All this will change the way it feels to live in dense communities. Most of us only feel comfortable walking a certain distance from our homes -- what urbanists call our "walkshed." If we're restricted to only looking for things (and meeting people) in person, those walksheds can feel constricting and insufficient, even in really vibrant compact neighborhoods. But as we gain insight into the places around us and connection to the people nearby, our walksheds can unfold with possibilities. Sure, it gets easier to catch the right bus, reserve a carshare vehicle or borrow a powerdrill from the tool library, but that's just the beginning. That church we always ignored, we find, hosts a book swap; the small corner store sells spices we've had a hard time finding; though it's not advertised, parents with young children are invited to matinee shows at the local movie theater, and no one will hush you when your baby cries; people meet to practice their French every Wednesday at that cafe. Our cities are bursting with opportunities we miss simply because they're invisible from the street. Walkshed technologies make visible the invisible neighborhoods we stroll through every day.

Of course, this new future will be full of perils as well as promise, with new threats to privacy from nosy or creepy people, concerns about corporate abuse of information gathered about us (if they can gather information about our whereabouts from the Web, will insurance companies attempt to raise our insurance rates if we spend more time than average in bars, or visit fast food stands too frequently) and the reliability of the information we're depending on (take, for instance, the Google walking map above, which instructed me to walk across England by way of the island of Guernsey, though it did helpfully remind me to use caution, as the route might be lacking sidewalks). It might even be that we miss the randomness and serendipity of moving through blind spaces, of not knowing what we'll find. On the other hand, it may be that our cities become ever more interesting as their workings are made accessible to us.

Image of crosswalk courtesy of Flickr photographer Cougar-Studio under the Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:43 PM)

There was a time when people thought the Internet would isolate us from one another, that we'd all end up spread out across the landscape in suburban enclaves, too absorbed with television and the Net to want to meet any actual people. A funny thing happened on the way to that asocial future, though: we discovered that the most important thing about the Net is that it connects people, and that connected people tend to want to meet, socialize and work together. Rather than separating us, the Net has made us more social than ever, both online and in the "real" world. In fact, the more connected we are online, the more time we're likely to spend hanging out offline with friends, family and neighbors.

As technology has suffused our cities -- think not only iPhones and GoogleMaps, but community ratings of restaurants and shops, real-time traffic reports, smart electrical grids, even hyper-local news sites -- it has magnified the feedback loop between online connection and in-person conversation: we're learning that public space and cyberspace are symbionts; technology and physical community fuel each other. The trend is only accellerating. Technology has gotten smaller, spread out and become ubiquitous in urban space. We’re surrounded constantly by data points, sensors, and layered information about everything from transit delays to weather reports to the bar where our friends are having happy hour.

As cities become smarter, urban living becomes much more efficient, and in many ways more pleasurable. With the street being a platform for technology, it becomes much easier to know where the things we want are and who has them and how they’re using them. We’re used to thinking of convenience in a 20th century way, where you get in your car and you drive around until you find the thing you want, and convenience is defined by the easiest drive with the least traffic, by the object that you buy and take home so you never have to worry about where it is (driving to the store to buy a home gym). Convenience in a smarter city is defined differently: knowing where the stuff you want is at all times so you don’t actually need to own it or make long trips to get to it. Just as search engines like Google have allowed us to find what we want, instead of having to click through the Net hoping to find something without knowing where it is, ubiquitous technology makes the city increasingly "searchable."

And, as Dan Hill notes in his seminal essay The Street as Platform, we're only just beginning to realize how smart our cities can get:

“Facilitated by networks of sensors, the data emerging from the new nervous system appears limitless: near-imperceptible variations in air quality and water quality, innumerable patterns in public and private traffic, results of restaurant inspections, voting patterns in public referenda, triggers of motion sensors, the output of heating ventilation and air conditioning systems, patterns of water usage, levels of waste recycled, genres of books returned at local libraries, location of bicycles in the city’s bike-sharing network, fluctuations in retail stock controls systems, engine data from cars and aeroplanes, collective listening habits of music fans, presence of mobile phones in vehicles enabling floating car data, digital photos and videos locked to spatial co-ordinates, live feeds from CCTV cameras, quantities of solar power generated and used by networks of lamp-posts, structural engineering data from the building information models of newly constructed architecture, complex groupings of friends perceptible in social software multiplied by location-based services, and so on. Myriad flows of data move in and around the built fabric. As many or most objects in the city become potential nodes in a wider network, enabled through the natural interoperability of systems influenced by the Internet and its open-source philosophies and standards-based protocols, this shimmering informational field provides a view of the entire city.”

As cities get smarter, we're likely to find more and more ways of improving the function of our cities, almost without effort, simply by eliminating wasteful practices:

“The invisible becomes visible, as the impact of people on their urban environment can be understood in real-time. Citizens turn off taps earlier, watching their water use patterns improve immediately. Buildings can share resources across differing peaks in their energy and resource loading. Road systems can funnel traffic via speed limits and traffic signals in order to route around congestion. Citizens take public transport rather than private where possible, as the real-time road pricing makes the true cost of private car usage quite evident. The presence of mates in a bar nearby alerts others to their proximity, irrespective of traditional spatial boundaries. Citizens can not only explore proposed designs for their environment, but now have a shared platform for proposing their own. They can plug in their own data sources, effectively hacking the model by augmenting or processing the feeds they’re concerned with.”

All this will change the way it feels to live in dense communities. Most of us only feel comfortable walking a certain distance from our homes -- what urbanists call our "walkshed." If we're restricted to only looking for things (and meeting people) in person, those walksheds can feel constricting and insufficient, even in really vibrant compact neighborhoods. But as we gain insight into the places around us and connection to the people nearby, our walksheds can unfold with possibilities. Sure, it gets easier to catch the right bus, reserve a carshare vehicle or borrow a powerdrill from the tool library, but that's just the beginning. That church we always ignored, we find, hosts a book swap; the small corner store sells spices we've had a hard time finding; though it's not advertised, parents with young children are invited to matinee shows at the local movie theater, and no one will hush you when your baby cries; people meet to practice their French every Wednesday at that cafe. Our cities are bursting with opportunities we miss simply because they're invisible from the street. Walkshed technologies make visible the invisible neighborhoods we stroll through every day.

Of course, this new future will be full of perils as well as promise, with new threats to privacy from nosy or creepy people, concerns about corporate abuse of information gathered about us (if they can gather information about our whereabouts from the Web, will insurance companies attempt to raise our insurance rates if we spend more time than average in bars, or visit fast food stands too frequently) and the reliability of the information we're depending on (take, for instance, the Google walking map above, which instructed me to walk across England by way of the island of Guernsey, though it did helpfully remind me to use caution, as the route might be lacking sidewalks). It might even be that we miss the randomness and serendipity of moving through blind spaces, of not knowing what we'll find. On the other hand, it may be that our cities become ever more interesting as their workings are made accessible to us.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 3:43 PM)