We're gonna need a bigger snowglobe
Nov. 6th, 2006 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ciroccojI love what passes for "news." Wow! Global warming is real! Like, it's actually affecting people right now!! It's even helping to fuel real wars!! Golly!! Who knew??!!
::sigh:: Well, um, you may not have known, but a crapload of Inuit and Pacific Islanders and penguins and polar bears could've talked your ear off about real and tangible damage for quite a while now. Roads buckling from permafrost melt, polar bears wandering into towns because the ice they hunt on is gone, islands sinking...
Yeah, yeah, I know, who cares.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes me take comfort in my own atheism. Or my fall-back position, that God kinda got the ball rolling down here and then stepped back. Because the thought of a Deity who deliberately designs global problems whereby the folks who suffer the most are the ones who are doing the least to contribute to the problem, the ones with the least ability to handle crisis, and the ones with the least power to change sweet f***-all... well it doesn't fill me with reverent awe, that's for sure.
Africans are already facing climate change
As delegates gather Monday in Kenya for a United Nations conference to set new targets to reduce fossil-fuel emissions after 2012, climate change is a present reality for many Africans.
In Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Chad, people are already seeing the repercussions - including war. The conflict between herders and farmers in Sudan's Darfur region, where farm and grazing lands are being lost to desert, may be a harbinger of the future conflicts.
"You have climate change and reduced rainfall and shrinking areas of arable land; and then you add population growth and you have the elements of an explosion," says Francis Kornegay, a senior analyst at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg.
On Sunday, a new UN report predicted that by 2080, global warming could lead to a 5 percent fall in the production of food crops, such as sorghum in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Zambia; maize in Ghana; millet in Sudan; and groundnuts in Gambia.
Between 25 percent and 40 percent of Africa's natural habitats could be lost by 2085, according to the report produced by the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It also said that rising sea levels could destroy an estimated 30 percent of Africa's coastal infrastructure. Coastal settlements in the Gulf of Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, and Egypt could be flooded,
Ironically, Africa produces the smallest amount of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change.
While it's risky to reduce any conflict to a single cause, a growing number of aid workers, government officials, and experts agree that climate change could certainly stretch the tense relations in many regions to the breaking point. Whenever there is less land available, and less water to make that land productive, then competition for that land can turn violent.
"[Climate] changes make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely," said British Home Secretary John Reid last March. "The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign."
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol - aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions - expires in six years. Many countries, notably the US, have opted out of the Kyoto accord, which called for higher gas taxes and more regulation to reduce the global consumption of fossil fuels by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Many scientists say the use of fossil fuels has raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn has begun to raise global temperatures.
Some world leaders, such as President Bush, argue that uncertainty over the cause of global warming does not justify the economic costs of switching from fossil fuels to alternatives, such as solar power or fuel cells. But European leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, call for drastic measures, such as a 60 percent reduction in carbon emission by 2050.
But climate change is already hurting people here in Africa, according to a report issued last month by a coalition of British aid groups. The number of food emergencies encountered each year in Africa have tripled since the mid-1980s, the report says. This year alone, more than 25 million Africans faced a food crisis.
Even though temperatures in Africa have only warmed by an average of 0.5 degree C. over the past 100 years, desert lands are advancing into once arable rain-fed areas, and wetter equatorial parts of Africa are getting wetter, often leading to devastating floods.
According to another British report released last week, by former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern, current weather trends suggest that greenhouse gases will boost overall temperatures by 2-3 degrees C. over the next 40 years.
In the West, conflicts such as the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region are often chalked up to ethnic or religious differences. But equally important is the competition for land, as water sources dry up.
"The fighting in Chad, and the fighting in Darfur are the same," says one North African diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The problem is resources, especially water. On one side you have herders. On the other side you have farmers. And with the spread of weapons in the region, it becomes very dangerous and hard to control."
Indeed, in Niger, the government halted its planned expulsion late last month of nearly 150,000 refugees from neighboring Chad. The refugees, many of them Arab cattle herders, had fled fighting in Chad, but their encroachment on the farmlands and water resources in Niger has increased tensions and led to sporadic fighting with natives.
Jason Stearns, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Nairobi, says that the competition for basic resources are behind many African conflicts.
"In Burundi, climate change, together with population growth and shrinking arable land is tightly linked to conflicts," says Mr. Stearns. He says that Burundi will have to work hard to meet the expectations of a population that has doubled since the early 1970s and where there are 400,000 refugees expected to return home after years of civil war.
But as bad as things are in Burundi, Stearns says, "it's even more true in the Horn of Africa, in Kenya, Somalia, as well as Ethiopia and Sudan."
Claudia Ringler, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, says Africa is more vulnerable to climate change because so much of it's agricultural lands rely on rainfall, rather than irrigation.
"All these lobbies say it's bad to build all these dams, but all the dams have been built in Europe, in the US, in Australia, not in Africa," says Ms. Ringler. She has a long list of things that would enable African farmers to better feed their people, including access to paved roads, better weather reports, higher yielding varieties that can survive in times of drought. But above all, Africa needs access to water.
"Water is the most variable input in a changing climate situation," she says. "Strangely enough, on a per capita basis, water availability is not that bad in Africa. In Ethiopia and Somalia, the water's there, but it's not getting to where it needs to be."
The Stern Report
The Stern Report, issued by the British government last week, calls for drastic cuts in carbon emissions.
The former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern warns that:
Mr. Stern's recommendations included:
While there is growing consensus among scientists that global climate change is occurring, there is still sharp disagreement on what to do about it.
Bjorn Lomborg, an economics professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Group, says that spending 1 percent of GDP or $450 billion each year to cut carbon emissions, as the Stern Report suggests, is likely to cause more harm than good .
"This is a 100 year problem, so you don't try to solve it in five years," says Dr. Lomborg. Instead, he calls for the world's rich nations to spend a fraction of that amount - $75 billion - on developing clean drinking water, combating the spread of AIDS and malaria, and providing universal basic education, and creating affordable energy alternatives, such as wind, solar, or fuel cells.
Noting economic studies that eliminating malaria alone would boost the global GDP by nearly 1 percent, Lomborg argues that the world should spend money where it knows it can do some good. A healthier, more prosperous population will be better able to solve its problems, than an unhealthy and overtaxed one.
"Look, Kyoto makes prices higher so that people will consume less energy, but 99 percent of the money will go into getting current energy sources, and only 1 percent of the money will go into finding alternative clean energy," says Lomborg. "Do we want to have 1 percent for research and development, or 100 percent?"
***
Feeling rather cynical about the whole thing right now, actually. And rather embarrassed, as a Canadian, because, well, Canada raises Kyoto eyebrows by killing EU summit
Brief excerpt:
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ruffled some European feathers by putting off a bilateral summit with the European Union that was just weeks away.
Critics at home said the Conservative prime minister was simply trying to avoid European pressure to respect Ottawa's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, which Harper says Canada will not be able to meet.
...
Harper's office denied the decision had anything to do with Kyoto and everything to do with his desire, as the head of a minority government, to spend as much time in Ottawa as possible.
"He's committed to governing the country," Harper spokeswoman Carolyn Stewart-Olsen said. "It's all about the day-to-day aspects of governing the country."
Yeah, OK. Thank god at least they didn't add on their tired old crap about "besides, who even knows whether or not global warming is a serious problem, the jury's still out on that one let's just ignore that in the rest of the world it's seen as a consensus and it's only good ol' North America, the biggest polluter, that keeps saying there's still a debate on this", because that's almost as embarrassing as the cigarette companies that are still swearing there's no definitive proof that smoking causes cancer.
You know what? Right now, I'm thinking Harper's bare butt would trigger my hurl reflex less than this.
Ew. Maybe not.
***
OK, enough gloom 'n' doom, here's something I found the other day and I am such an unbelievable world politics/economics/science/trivia nerd nerd, I started scrolling, thinking I'd see maybe 10 or so maps... and ended up going through all 212 of 'em.
And then? I showed it to Chris, and ended up going through them all again.
The World As You've Never Seen It Before
It's really cool, though. Seeing differences in population, economic output/input, life expectancy, toys, rails, tourism, etc. And some of it's pretty funny. Like, Canada mostly shows up as a dark line along the top of the States, but then suddenly it springs into view for such maps as meat exports, coal and gas exports, and net tourism loss. And Japan, whoa, that's a fun country to watch shrink and expand from map to map. South Africa's this pendulous blob. Who makes toys and who buys them is also really interesting.
... OK, maybe you had to be there to really get it.
::sigh:: Well, um, you may not have known, but a crapload of Inuit and Pacific Islanders and penguins and polar bears could've talked your ear off about real and tangible damage for quite a while now. Roads buckling from permafrost melt, polar bears wandering into towns because the ice they hunt on is gone, islands sinking...
Yeah, yeah, I know, who cares.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes me take comfort in my own atheism. Or my fall-back position, that God kinda got the ball rolling down here and then stepped back. Because the thought of a Deity who deliberately designs global problems whereby the folks who suffer the most are the ones who are doing the least to contribute to the problem, the ones with the least ability to handle crisis, and the ones with the least power to change sweet f***-all... well it doesn't fill me with reverent awe, that's for sure.
Africans are already facing climate change
As delegates gather Monday in Kenya for a United Nations conference to set new targets to reduce fossil-fuel emissions after 2012, climate change is a present reality for many Africans.
In Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Chad, people are already seeing the repercussions - including war. The conflict between herders and farmers in Sudan's Darfur region, where farm and grazing lands are being lost to desert, may be a harbinger of the future conflicts.
"You have climate change and reduced rainfall and shrinking areas of arable land; and then you add population growth and you have the elements of an explosion," says Francis Kornegay, a senior analyst at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg.
On Sunday, a new UN report predicted that by 2080, global warming could lead to a 5 percent fall in the production of food crops, such as sorghum in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Zambia; maize in Ghana; millet in Sudan; and groundnuts in Gambia.
Between 25 percent and 40 percent of Africa's natural habitats could be lost by 2085, according to the report produced by the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It also said that rising sea levels could destroy an estimated 30 percent of Africa's coastal infrastructure. Coastal settlements in the Gulf of Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, and Egypt could be flooded,
Ironically, Africa produces the smallest amount of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change.
While it's risky to reduce any conflict to a single cause, a growing number of aid workers, government officials, and experts agree that climate change could certainly stretch the tense relations in many regions to the breaking point. Whenever there is less land available, and less water to make that land productive, then competition for that land can turn violent.
"[Climate] changes make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely," said British Home Secretary John Reid last March. "The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign."
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol - aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions - expires in six years. Many countries, notably the US, have opted out of the Kyoto accord, which called for higher gas taxes and more regulation to reduce the global consumption of fossil fuels by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Many scientists say the use of fossil fuels has raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn has begun to raise global temperatures.
Some world leaders, such as President Bush, argue that uncertainty over the cause of global warming does not justify the economic costs of switching from fossil fuels to alternatives, such as solar power or fuel cells. But European leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, call for drastic measures, such as a 60 percent reduction in carbon emission by 2050.
But climate change is already hurting people here in Africa, according to a report issued last month by a coalition of British aid groups. The number of food emergencies encountered each year in Africa have tripled since the mid-1980s, the report says. This year alone, more than 25 million Africans faced a food crisis.
Even though temperatures in Africa have only warmed by an average of 0.5 degree C. over the past 100 years, desert lands are advancing into once arable rain-fed areas, and wetter equatorial parts of Africa are getting wetter, often leading to devastating floods.
According to another British report released last week, by former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern, current weather trends suggest that greenhouse gases will boost overall temperatures by 2-3 degrees C. over the next 40 years.
In the West, conflicts such as the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region are often chalked up to ethnic or religious differences. But equally important is the competition for land, as water sources dry up.
"The fighting in Chad, and the fighting in Darfur are the same," says one North African diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The problem is resources, especially water. On one side you have herders. On the other side you have farmers. And with the spread of weapons in the region, it becomes very dangerous and hard to control."
Indeed, in Niger, the government halted its planned expulsion late last month of nearly 150,000 refugees from neighboring Chad. The refugees, many of them Arab cattle herders, had fled fighting in Chad, but their encroachment on the farmlands and water resources in Niger has increased tensions and led to sporadic fighting with natives.
Jason Stearns, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Nairobi, says that the competition for basic resources are behind many African conflicts.
"In Burundi, climate change, together with population growth and shrinking arable land is tightly linked to conflicts," says Mr. Stearns. He says that Burundi will have to work hard to meet the expectations of a population that has doubled since the early 1970s and where there are 400,000 refugees expected to return home after years of civil war.
But as bad as things are in Burundi, Stearns says, "it's even more true in the Horn of Africa, in Kenya, Somalia, as well as Ethiopia and Sudan."
Claudia Ringler, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, says Africa is more vulnerable to climate change because so much of it's agricultural lands rely on rainfall, rather than irrigation.
"All these lobbies say it's bad to build all these dams, but all the dams have been built in Europe, in the US, in Australia, not in Africa," says Ms. Ringler. She has a long list of things that would enable African farmers to better feed their people, including access to paved roads, better weather reports, higher yielding varieties that can survive in times of drought. But above all, Africa needs access to water.
"Water is the most variable input in a changing climate situation," she says. "Strangely enough, on a per capita basis, water availability is not that bad in Africa. In Ethiopia and Somalia, the water's there, but it's not getting to where it needs to be."
The Stern Report
The Stern Report, issued by the British government last week, calls for drastic cuts in carbon emissions.
The former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern warns that:
- The world's overall temperatures could rise 5 degrees C (9 degrees F.), causing sudden glacial melt, severe flooding of low-lying areas, and displacement of some 200 million people.
- Warming of 4 degrees C or more is likely to seriously affect global food production.
- Warming of 2 degrees C could leave 15 to 40 percent of the Earth's species facing extinction.
- Global economic consumption per person will drop between 5 and 20 percent. But reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would only cost 1 percent of global gross domestic product by 2050.
- By 2050, markets for low-carbon technologies could be worth at least $500 billion.
- Deforestation is responsible for more emissions than the transport sector.
Mr. Stern's recommendations included:
- Carbon pricing, through taxation, emissions trading or regulation, will show people the full social costs of their actions.
- Funding for energy research and development should at least double; support low-carbon technologies should be increased five fold.
- International funding should go into researching new crop varieties that will be more resilient to drought and flood.
- Large-scale international pilot programs to curb deforestation should be started now.
While there is growing consensus among scientists that global climate change is occurring, there is still sharp disagreement on what to do about it.
Bjorn Lomborg, an economics professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Group, says that spending 1 percent of GDP or $450 billion each year to cut carbon emissions, as the Stern Report suggests, is likely to cause more harm than good .
"This is a 100 year problem, so you don't try to solve it in five years," says Dr. Lomborg. Instead, he calls for the world's rich nations to spend a fraction of that amount - $75 billion - on developing clean drinking water, combating the spread of AIDS and malaria, and providing universal basic education, and creating affordable energy alternatives, such as wind, solar, or fuel cells.
Noting economic studies that eliminating malaria alone would boost the global GDP by nearly 1 percent, Lomborg argues that the world should spend money where it knows it can do some good. A healthier, more prosperous population will be better able to solve its problems, than an unhealthy and overtaxed one.
"Look, Kyoto makes prices higher so that people will consume less energy, but 99 percent of the money will go into getting current energy sources, and only 1 percent of the money will go into finding alternative clean energy," says Lomborg. "Do we want to have 1 percent for research and development, or 100 percent?"
Feeling rather cynical about the whole thing right now, actually. And rather embarrassed, as a Canadian, because, well, Canada raises Kyoto eyebrows by killing EU summit
Brief excerpt:
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ruffled some European feathers by putting off a bilateral summit with the European Union that was just weeks away.
Critics at home said the Conservative prime minister was simply trying to avoid European pressure to respect Ottawa's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, which Harper says Canada will not be able to meet.
...
Harper's office denied the decision had anything to do with Kyoto and everything to do with his desire, as the head of a minority government, to spend as much time in Ottawa as possible.
"He's committed to governing the country," Harper spokeswoman Carolyn Stewart-Olsen said. "It's all about the day-to-day aspects of governing the country."
Yeah, OK. Thank god at least they didn't add on their tired old crap about "besides, who even knows whether or not global warming is a serious problem, the jury's still out on that one let's just ignore that in the rest of the world it's seen as a consensus and it's only good ol' North America, the biggest polluter, that keeps saying there's still a debate on this", because that's almost as embarrassing as the cigarette companies that are still swearing there's no definitive proof that smoking causes cancer.
You know what? Right now, I'm thinking Harper's bare butt would trigger my hurl reflex less than this.
Ew. Maybe not.
OK, enough gloom 'n' doom, here's something I found the other day and I am such an unbelievable world politics/economics/science/trivia nerd nerd, I started scrolling, thinking I'd see maybe 10 or so maps... and ended up going through all 212 of 'em.
And then? I showed it to Chris, and ended up going through them all again.
The World As You've Never Seen It Before
It's really cool, though. Seeing differences in population, economic output/input, life expectancy, toys, rails, tourism, etc. And some of it's pretty funny. Like, Canada mostly shows up as a dark line along the top of the States, but then suddenly it springs into view for such maps as meat exports, coal and gas exports, and net tourism loss. And Japan, whoa, that's a fun country to watch shrink and expand from map to map. South Africa's this pendulous blob. Who makes toys and who buys them is also really interesting.
... OK, maybe you had to be there to really get it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-11-07 01:26 pm (UTC)But the government's denial isn't helping that's for sure. :(
no subject
Date: 2006-11-07 02:29 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing. I may use something of it as graphic in a speech that I have to give. I'm doing it on Ecological Footprints and why we need to have a smaller one and what we can do.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-07 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-08 03:39 am (UTC)Yeah, same here. Some things are so easy to change, but then other things... well, trying to bike everywhere with kids may be the healthy, cost-effective and environmental thing to do, but then you get to the grocery store parking lot and watch seven people with one bag of groceries each skip into seven huge SUVs, and recognize half of them as your neighbours who all live two blocks away... and you just start to feel kinda futile.
But the government's denial isn't helping that's for sure. :(
No, not at all. If there was some incentive for people to drive less, or good alternative forms of transportation, or more efficient home heating systems, or anything like that, it might be easier. As it is, trying to make changes when it seems nobody else is even aware that there are changes that could be made, or any need to make them, is really discouraging.
Eg, this summer. Temperatures soaring, us sweating away in our home, and the radio was telling people not to crank their air conditioning up too much, though of course for health reasons everybody should spend at least two hours a day in air conditioned buildings.
WTF?
Yeah, a lot of people probably should; the sick, the elderly, small children, people with all sorts of medical conditions. But everybody?! Perfectly healthy adults, unable to survive 35C (95F) temperatures? Damn, people, we're in Ottawa, not Calcutta, y'know? There actually is a difference between what you want and what you need, and I'm sorry, but for healthy adults air conditioning in a heat wave is very very nice, but not a necessity of life.
So there we were, finding creative solutions to the heat, taking out the wading pool, or just enduring, and most of the rest of the city was busy cranking up every cooling device known to man and because they absolutely positively had to do so or they would die.
Well, hell. What's the point, then?
Ahem. /rant>
no subject
Date: 2006-11-08 03:42 am (UTC)Hee! Yeah, I can't wait to show it to Daniel. He's very visual.
I'm doing it on Ecological Footprints and why we need to have a smaller one and what we can do.
Ooh, yeah, there's a few of the maps that might be really good for that. Natural resource consumption stuff.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-08 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 01:27 am (UTC)But I know what you mean.
I try to use rags rather than paper towels, hankies rather than tissues, we use cloth napkins, replaced our windows and siding to save on gas and electricity, I drive a Prius (walking/biking isn't much of an option for us; more in a bit), etc. But it isn't enough. I need to make some more changes. But like you say, when you see all your neighbors driving SUVs/trucks or whatever, you think, "why bother? no one else cares." It's hard to fight that.
We had a speaker at church a couple weeks ago, and he was awesome. He's the kind of speaker who can make you want change without making you feel guilty about your own faults. He can stand up to polluters/environ murderers without being aggressive. He has a way of explaining things that frames it in a "I know you didn't know this, cuz if you did you'd of course make the correct choice, so now that you know, yay!" KWIM? I wish the whole world could hear him speak. He has some great stories to tell.
*steps of soapbox*
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:42 am (UTC)Yeah, see, I'm all for AC and cars and lots of other stuff that makes our lives easier and more pleasant... but the idea that we need it is the part that really gets to me. Not as a luxury when it gets really hot, but as a way of never having to feel heat at all. And when there's a heat wave and the power stations are groaning under the strain, the idea that the radio would tell people everybody needs to be in air conditioning for health reasons... come on. Maybe below the Mason-Dixon line. But in Ottawa? Get real. It would be like telling people where you are that the moment the temperature dips below 60F, you need to crank up your heat because OMFG you'll FREEZE to DEATH otherwise...
Hell, come on, guys, put on a sweater.
I try to use rags rather than paper towels, hankies rather than tissues, we use cloth napkins, replaced our windows and siding to save on gas and electricity, I drive a Prius (walking/biking isn't much of an option for us; more in a bit), etc. But it isn't enough.
Well, you're doing a hell of a lot more than we are. We try going granola as much as we can, but we're in the same boat; we know there's more we should be doing, but it's not always terribly easy to keep it a priority, especially when we look around and don't see much incentive to change.
We had a speaker at church a couple weeks ago, and he was awesome. He's the kind of speaker who can make you want change without making you feel guilty about your own faults. He can stand up to polluters/environ murderers without being aggressive. He has a way of explaining things that frames it in a "I know you didn't know this, cuz if you did you'd of course make the correct choice, so now that you know, yay!" KWIM?
Oh I love speakers who can do that. Yeah, sounds like somebody who should get more air time :)
I read a book a few years ago that was wonderful in the same way. "Divorce Your Car." It pointed out all sorts of stuff about our relationship with our cars, and all that was wrong with it, how it was costly in terms of our personal health & wealth and the environment, and then it offered helpful suggestions. And the wonderful thing was, it was done realistically. First off, while the title was "Divorce Your Car," the authors were pretty down-to-earth and admitted that probably for most people in North America, actually getting rid of our cars was not really a viable option, just because of how our lives and cities and neighbourhoods are structured. But then it outlined all sorts of things people could do to lessen their dependency on their cars, and to work towards city planning/lifestyle choices that might actually some day make it possible for them to go car-free or at least very, very car-light ;)
no subject
Date: 2006-11-09 04:43 am (UTC)Well, my kids are now 6 and 9 so there's not much baby stuff going on any more, and we don't take our bikes most of the time. But I try really hard to do at least some of our shopping car-free. It helps that we're very close to a big store.
When the boys were really small, I would stick them in their double-stroller and put all the groceries in the baskets below. Not practical when you've only got a single, or don't have huge baskets. When I did take the bike, I would put the baby in the bikeseat behind me and bring groceries home in my backpack, with lighter items sometimes hanging from the handlebars, which I wouldn't really recommend. The handle-bar thing, that is; the backpack was fine.
As they got older and both moved onto their own bikes, I started to use the old baby bike seat for another bag of groceries, and slowly started adding items to their own backpacks. It's much more doable now; for the longest time, I could only do the grocery trip for small excursions, because just picking up milk pretty much took care of half my backpack storage space.
I've seen lots of people take those little baby-tote wagons and fill them with groceries while the kid is on the baby bike seat. Don't know what kind of success they have.
The other thing that makes bike shopping attractive for me is that my kids have always been pretty hyperactive (both boys), and I'm mosty an indoors-type person. By going bike shopping, I get exercise, they get out of the house, spend some energy, and we save on gas money and feel better environmentally. By the time we get back home, they're tired and I can feel OK about going inside and not entertaining them or feeling like I've kept them cooped up inside all day long. It works for us :)