SRM, for its clever and entirely unanticipated inclusion of a solar panel on its power meter crankset. They say it significantly extends battery life of the power measuring unit.
I really have no use for a power meter, much less one that costs $3000, but I just love this. As my friend said the other day “this green stuff- it’s happening!”
Wish I had a picture. It looks really cool.Updated with picture. Nice.
Toward the end of last year I read a “green prediction” for 2007 that said consumer analysis of products is going to become more integrated and fine-grained. It won’t be enough to know that something is merely organic, but also whether “organic” merely means replacing synthetic pesticides with biological ones or whether it also incorporates crop rotation, crop varieties, environmental appropriateness of the crop to the climate/ecosystem, etc. In addition, the article said that consumers will starting asking not only about organic, but will consider as well how far the food traveled from farm to store, the working conditions of the people who produced it, etc.
I’ve watched this idea since then. Particularly I have kept tabs on a product near and dear to my heart- blends of coffee being sold. Generally, one can buy organic coffee or coffee certified as Fair Trade, but not both. I don’t know if I’ve just been paying more attention lately, but I’ve started seeing organic *and* Fair Trade blends cropping up. I’m curious to see how far the trend will go.
The other big piece of the puzzle is the resources (read oil) required to get coffee off the plant and into the store. I’m waiting from someone to come up with a metric that takes into account alternative energy sources used in production, distance traveled and carbon balancing/offsetting steps. Maybe something like the LEED certification process where producers get points for meeting certain criteria.
What I am most curious about is how all these factors will balance out. How much integration do consumers want and how much will they pay for? Fun stuff to keep an eye on.
A college professor of mine was a documentary film fanatic and turned me on to Frank Capra, the director of many films from the 1920s through the ’60s. Unknown to me until recently, he directed a series of educational science films for schools during the 1950s. A clip from The Unchained Goddess is available on Youtube.
The second YouTube gem I discovered recently does a brilliant job addressing the SEP (Someone Else’s Problem) factor. Check it out.
On the heels of my most recent post, I found this article about Prince Charles canceling his annual ski trip to Klosters, Switzerland. The article says that he has “long taken initiatives to protect the environment”, but has been criticized for travelling by plane, presumably due to the carbon output from his plane. In order to reduce the number of plane trips he makes, the article says, he has canceled his 25-year tradition of spending time skiing in Switzerland. A cynic might look to Swiss snow condition reports and decide that this was an easy call given the low snowpack, but the statement is still thought-provoking.
I am reasonably certain that my carbon footprint is smaller than Prince Charles’s. In particular, I am confident that (i) the total number of hours I spend in airplanes annually is well below his, (ii) that the number of other occupants on the planes I fly is significantly higher, and (iii) that the number of times I fly by private plane is equal to the number of trips he spends on commercial aircraft – zero.
On the other hand, my actions probably influence fewer people as well, and Charles’s decision and announcement has added to my guilt load about skiing. Yet another data point in the seemingly inescapable conclusion that skiing is an unsustainable practice, at least as I practice it. [sigh]
Update: as if I needed more convincing- I just found this comparison of global surface temperatures in each of January and December 2006, compared with the average of the same periods between 1951-1980. Areas showing a difference of 8 degrees Celsius are marked in dark red- and they make up a lot of the map. Scary.
I just saw a press release saying that the Saunier-Duval professional cycling team will plant a tree in Mali for every kilometer raced by the team in 2007. The goal is to race 1,000,000 team miles over the course of the season, with time in breakaways counting double.
I wonder what the actual dollar value of the action is. How much does it cost to plant a tree in Mali? It might be under $1, though it is hard to imagine it being much less. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion the per-tree value is $1 and the total distance is 1,000,000 season kilometers. I am guessing that the team costs $8M to run annually, so the tree planting would represent around 12% of the team budget. That is a lot! Good for Saunier-Duval.
On the other hand, the more I learn about the carbon-neutral movement, the more I think that every team should follow Clif Bar’s lead in buying carbon credits to offset emissions as a result of team travel and racing. Even better, it should be a requirement of Pro Tour teams and strongly encouraged as far down the line as possible.
