In case your green lifestyle leaves you feeling overly smug, there’s now a Nitrogen Footprint Calculator to abase yourself with.
This Nitrogen Footprint calculator is more difficult to use than the simple carbon footprint calculators I’ve seen. I have to think about specifically what I eat (fruit w/ yogurt most mornings, sandwich w/ luncheon meats for lunch, something more elaborate for dinner most nights) and I had to look up my energy usage (under 350 kWh / month electric usage and under 1000 cubic feet / month natural gas); and whether my local water district uses tertiary sewage treatment or not (it does).. The left chart is supposed to be the average U.S. nitrogen footprint. My footprint in the middle looks pretty good compared to that, but if you look anywhere else in the world (such as the Netherlands shown to the right), I’m still a profligate wastrel.
This guilt trip courtesy of Grist.
Bicycle News
Streetsblog talks with San Francisco’s new mayor, who says he likes to ride his bike on the weekends.
La Dolce Velo in San Jose moving from Stevens Creek to expanded digs on The Alameda.
Australia! Super Tuesday Bike Count.
Ferrari introduces what they say is *ahem* “the only bamboo bicycle in the world” at the 7th Asian Sport Products and Fashion Show in Beijing.
Video: 2011 Bike Centric fashions from Rapha and Paul Smith.
Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel seen as pro bike and pro transit (though he also has an immediate deficit of $600 million [!] to deal with).
Meanwhile in Texas, Houston transpo officials plan to cut bike, transit and pedestrian projects to balance the budget. Cyclists plan to show up en masse and protest the cuts.
In Colorado, a 9 year old, blind paraplegic girl receives a hand cycle.
Colorado cyclist hit by a car, both parties get a ticket.
Bait bike catches a bike thief in Florida.
Ottawa to install segregated bike lanes.
Don’t bike on the sidewalk, Bro. Bronx teen gets a beat down by the cops for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk.
Driver in fatal car vs bike crash had 11 tickets.
Second hand smoke: car exhaust is worse for your health than cocaine.
And finally apropos to the title of this post, Gaddafi’s rumored destruction of his country’s oil infrastructure.
Photo by Mark Stosberg in Richmond, Indiana, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Loads of nitrogen are responsible for the high yields of grain crops like corn (or maize). U.S. farmers routinely rotate their corn crops with soybeans as part of pest and disease management and to more naturally enrich the soil with nitrogen, but corn still need tons of ammonia fertilizer. Ammonia fertilizer is mostly manufactured from natural gas.
Whenever I see the phrase “segregated bike lanes” I think this will involve one lane of scraper bikes and one lane of fixies.
It’s my daughter’s third birthday today. ( She’s under the sun net in the bakfiets photo. )