Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

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Cowsham
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Cowsham »

Bmblbzzz wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 6:36pm I think Cowsham is agreeing with you that fossil fuels should not run out, we should leave them in the ground while there's plenty still in there.
No I'm not agreeing with him -- if fossil fuels ran out before we can harness other forms of power millions would die. I wouldn't wish that on society.
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mattsccm
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by mattsccm »

We're stuffed. Only question is when.
Of course what we are not doing is addressing the problem. Instead we are pretending it doesn't exist and only catastrophe will sort it out.
It is of course over population.
cycle tramp
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by cycle tramp »

Cowsham wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 10:57pm
Bmblbzzz wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 6:36pm I think Cowsham is agreeing with you that fossil fuels should not run out, we should leave them in the ground while there's plenty still in there.
No I'm not agreeing with him -- if fossil fuels ran out before we can harness other forms of power millions would die. I wouldn't wish that on society.
I think that's what the petro-chemical companies would like you to believe, but I and others would expect the truth to be more prosaic. Much like Cuba is doing now, there would be a shift in effort for everyone to grow as much locally sourced food as possible, perhaps with a focus on forest gardening or permaculture type ideas. Local farms would diversify and we may see long forgotten strains of grain and vegetables becoming more widely known.
I also suspect that the labour market would also change with more demand for farm workers, and we may even see horses and donkeys replace some of the tasks currently undertaken by tractor. I suspect the number of people keeping bees, chickens and pigs would increase. Certainly golf courses would be dug up to make way for allotments we may also see a rise in produce grown by aquaculture.
It's time to go :-)
prestavalve
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by prestavalve »

Cowsham wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 10:57pm ...before we can harness other forms of power...
Nuclear power exists, and works.
Pete Owens
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Pete Owens »

Cowsham wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 10:57pm
Bmblbzzz wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 6:36pm I think Cowsham is agreeing with you that fossil fuels should not run out, we should leave them in the ground while there's plenty still in there.
No I'm not agreeing with him -- if fossil fuels ran out before we can harness other forms of power millions would die. I wouldn't wish that on society.
If you think that then your really don't understand the seriousness of the situation.

The existence of human civilisation is dependent on a stable climate - without that agriculture will become imprecticle, crops will fail and large parts of the planet will be uninhabitable - millions will die. Now humans are very ingeneous at solving technical problems - how to make the best use of scarce resourses - and fossil fuels "running out" would mean that on Tuesday morning all the lights went out, but that they would over time become scarcer, thus more expensive, and would be used less and less.

Unfortunately there is no "danger" of fossil fuels running out and saving us - there is very much more in known reserves than we can afford to burn. The problem is now political rather than technological or economic. How do we prevent the individuals and states who own these reserves from extracting them. And unfortunately political problems are very very much more intractable than technical ones - just think of the amount of energy the Britsh and French governments are spending on access rights of a fandful of fishing boats.

And the "before we can harness other forms of power" really is nonsense on stilts. This is not a technological problem - we do have plenty of other forms of power. They might not always be as cheap or convenient as burning stuff, but we do know how to use them. Again, it is a political decisions to inverst in infrastructure to exploit these forms of energy, rather than say issue licences to prospect for yet more oil reserves under the North Sea.
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Cowsham
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Cowsham »

Pete Owens wrote: 5 Nov 2021, 12:11pm
Cowsham wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 10:57pm
Bmblbzzz wrote: 26 Oct 2021, 6:36pm I think Cowsham is agreeing with you that fossil fuels should not run out, we should leave them in the ground while there's plenty still in there.
No I'm not agreeing with him -- if fossil fuels ran out before we can harness other forms of power millions would die. I wouldn't wish that on society.
If you think that then your really don't understand the seriousness of the situation.

The existence of human civilisation is dependent on a stable climate - without that agriculture will become imprecticle, crops will fail and large parts of the planet will be uninhabitable - millions will die. Now humans are very ingeneous at solving technical problems - how to make the best use of scarce resourses - and fossil fuels "running out" would mean that on Tuesday morning all the lights went out, but that they would over time become scarcer, thus more expensive, and would be used less and less.

Unfortunately there is no "danger" of fossil fuels running out and saving us - there is very much more in known reserves than we can afford to burn. The problem is now political rather than technological or economic. How do we prevent the individuals and states who own these reserves from extracting them. And unfortunately political problems are very very much more intractable than technical ones - just think of the amount of energy the Britsh and French governments are spending on access rights of a fandful of fishing boats.

And the "before we can harness other forms of power" really is nonsense on stilts. This is not a technological problem - we do have plenty of other forms of power. They might not always be as cheap or convenient as burning stuff, but we do know how to use them. Again, it is a political decisions to inverst in infrastructure to exploit these forms of energy, rather than say issue licences to prospect for yet more oil reserves under the North Sea.
Yours is precisely the attitude of the people who don't believe fossil fuels are running out. This is where we differ most -- I still believe we need to do the following asap

1 Move to cleaner/renewable forms of energy
2 depopulate by birth control as the Chinese did a few years ago because if you take away fossil fuels too quickly the over population will still burn stuff to stay alive and warm etc killing the atmosphere even faster.
3 ride bicycles. :wink:

We are the victims of our own success so we need to moderate growth not continuously propagate ourselves, forcing the planet to produce ever more resources. Climate change would just be the planets way of regulating us or whatever other parasite lives on it at the time.

We can't leave and go to another planet. We evolved here and by our very nature are trapped here. Our offspring the machines won't be.
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Bmblbzzz
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

The latest figures I saw were that we have about 45 years' worth of proven oil reserves at current rates of use. More could presumably be found with exploration, which is mostly linked to the oil price. 45 years might not sound much, but it's irrelevant; if we carry on for the next 45 years, we'll have released so much CO2 into the atmosphere that we'll have changed the world in ways we can't really imagine.
Wilhelmus
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Wilhelmus »

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Last edited by Wilhelmus on 25 Nov 2021, 2:04pm, edited 1 time in total.
Pete Owens
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Pete Owens »

Indeed, and we can only afford to burn less than half of those known reserves - the rest needs to be left in the ground. Whether, humanity is capable of taking the necessary political action to prevent those reserves being extracted and burned to ensure our long term survival as a species is the question.

I am really not optimistic. Even somewhere like Norway - which is probably one of the world leaders when it comes to decarbonising domestic consumption - is actively seeking new reserves to extract.
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Cowsham
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Cowsham »

This all leaves the important question -- could robots learn to cycle and perpetuate the golden age of cycling?
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Philip Benstead
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Philip Benstead »

Cowsham wrote: 5 Nov 2021, 5:30pm This all leaves the important question -- could robots learn to cycle and perpetuate the golden age of cycling?
They can already look up asemov?
Philip Benstead | Life Member Former CTC Councillor/Trustee
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Philip Benstead
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Philip Benstead »

Cowsham wrote: 5 Nov 2021, 5:30pm This all leaves the important question -- could robots learn to cycle and perpetuate the golden age of cycling?
They can already look up asemov?
Philip Benstead | Life Member Former CTC Councillor/Trustee
Organizing events and representing cyclists' in southeast since 1988
Bikeability Instructor/Mechanic
Jdsk
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Jdsk »

Cowsham wrote: 5 Nov 2021, 5:30pm This all leaves the important question -- could robots learn to cycle and perpetuate the golden age of cycling?


Jonathan
Jdsk
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Jdsk »

Philip Benstead wrote: 5 Nov 2021, 5:49pm
Cowsham wrote: 5 Nov 2021, 5:30pm This all leaves the important question -- could robots learn to cycle and perpetuate the golden age of cycling?
They can already look up asemov?
Asimov or Honda's ASIMO?

Thanks

Jonathan

Last edited by Jdsk on 5 Nov 2021, 7:45pm, edited 1 time in total.
Bmblbzzz
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Re: Has cycling's 'new golden age' been and gone?

Post by Bmblbzzz »

Interesting project. I'm struck by how they've chosen to style it/him/her/them on an astronaut – humanoid rather than explicitly human. The text to speech is pretty good – better than most speech to text softwares – but has a little way to go with homographs. I wonder if it does better in Japanese?
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