My Musings on Cyclability, Sustainability, and their Crossroads

As you may know if you've found your way to this blog, this season I am endeavoring to participate in ClimateRide, a 250 mile advocacy ride for bikeability and sustainability, and fundraising effort to support nonprofits that are doing the heavy lifting to get us there.

My intent with this blog is both to keep my contributors (thanks guys!) up to date about my fundraising and bike training progress, but also to use it as a platform to talk about Cyclability, Sustainability, and their Crossroads.  I'll be sharing short insights (some my own, many from other's) on biking and climate change, and many topics in between such as health, clean air, safety, traffic that are at the crossroads of building a sustainable future.  I imagine I'll garnering much of the content from my many friends and colleagues that also passionate about these things and often share their discoveries and thoughts with me.

Without further adieu, I'll get started on my first blog topic:  last night's State of the Union Address. If you didn't see it, here's the upshot.  Obama said:  We're on our way to energy independence, we're keeping with an all-of-the-above energy development approach, solar is part of the solution, and Climate Change really, really is real.  Don't take my somewhat sarcastic tone the way;  I was actually relatively happy with the speech on this front.  Most satisfying: the President chose to speak about energy and climate change almost first thing.  It was the second topic, sandwiched between jobs and jobs--in the realm of State of the Union addresses, that's pretty good.  And while not quite as a good a line as the one about workplace policies for women that belong in episode of Mad Men (http://www.uproxx.com/tv/2014/01/president-obama-mad-men-state-of-the-union-address/), he punched right to poignancy with this line on climate change:

 "When our children's children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did."

President Obama's approach, which emphasizes developing solar as a growth industry, making use of natural gas, and capping harmful emissions from the biggest pollution sources is, in my opinion, practical.  But my thought after hearing the speech was that, even if all of the initiatives Obama laid out in the speech got done in the next year (unlikely) it WOULDN'T BE NEARLY ENOUGH.  And it reminded my why doing this ride--and advocating for aggressive local and state policies, new approaches to infrastructure and changing our transportation culture are more a part of the solution than ever.

This week so far--
Biked: 33 miles  Raised: $165

By(ike) the way, if you haven't seen this brilliant YouTube expose on the stupidity of certain bike policies (namely giving tickets for not riding in the bike lane), you're missing out! http://youtu.be/W0Ui21AmA3M