What's your carbon footprint?

Published December 7 2005

The Daily Targum

If you're the type to read The Economist on mundane train and bus rides while your neighbors shove their elbows in your face turning the pages of their large, clumsy New York Times newspapers, then you'd notice the unusual frequency of environmental ads within this British weekly current affairs magazine.

One advertisement asks you, "What's your carbon footprint?" Which translates to: how much do you contribute to the carbon emissions that cause damage to the environment?

The same organization takes out another full-page color advertisement in a different magazine, saying, "Do you think solar energy will ever be a real alternative?" and continues below that, "it's a start."

A different concerned entity boasts in the Economist, "After investing heavily in a better technology to measure greenhouse gases, what do we do? Give it away."

Who are these environmental saints – creating 'carbon calculators' and giving us and their competitors other free technologies to measure our impact on the earth and how we can reduce it? They're oil companies.

And if you don't believe me – I know The Economist isn't exactly snatched off the stands by college students – perhaps you've seen the television commercials of a tanned, hippy-ish forty-something-year-old scrambling over red rocks looking for little sea shells, and talking about how she has a PhD. in environmental protection. And how she now works for Shell (the oil company, not the sea creature's disposable house).

British Petroleum launched a $200 million re-branding campaign five years ago, to take consumers beyond the fact that the company has had an unfortunate history with environmental unfriendliness (as I imagine most oil companies do) and convince them that British Petroleum is now thinking "Beyond Petroleum."

According to the company's website, "BP was the first major energy company to publicly acknowledge the need to take steps against climate change," and is now investing $350 million over five years to reduce internal CO2 emissions by up to one million tonnes each year.

They also claim to be one of the world's biggest investors in lower carbon fuels and technologies. Today, natural gas makes-up about 40% of BP's portfolio. Because of the higher hydrogen to carbon ratio in natural gas, the CO2 produced by natural gas combustion is 25-30% lower than with petroleum products and 40-50% lower than with coal, for the same energy output.

BP is one of the world's leading solar companies, and partners with more than 200 stores in America to bring solar-powered facilities to homeowners, making it easier to reduce their "carbon footprint" a few sizes. And the company is now the largest partner in the UK's Department of Energy's hydrogen program, working with car manufacturers to test hydro-powered vehicles.

Chevron-Texaco, the company that smugly announced in a two-page color ad in the Economist that it gave away its Energy and Emissions Estimating System to its competitors after investing heavily in its research, has also launched an aggressive campaign on its environmental friendliness, accusing its consumers of using 25 barrels of oil a year, and then asking, "So are you ready to do something about it?"

The ad states that since 1973 alone, "improvements in energy efficiency have resulted in a 50% reduction of our daily energy use, which is the same as discovering 25 extra million barrels of oil equivalent every single day.

It continues, "Clearly, saving energy is like finding it."

All this talk of energy conservation by oil companies, whose primary mission continues to be that of drilling the earth and extracting every last drop of black gold from her loins, sounds a little fishy, doesn't it? Could there be a greater oxymoron than an environmental oil company?

After all, Exxonmobil announced the largest quarterly corporate profits in global history at $7.04bn (£4.4bn) last year, on the back of increasing oil sales. The Texas firm's annual profit is higher than the gross domestic product of Syria. But even Exxonmobil has its own corporate citizenship site that addresses energy conservation, investment in new technologies, and Exxonmobil's contributions to science education and fighting malaria.

It seems the new drive for corporate citizenship and social responsibility, a phenomenon that has grown increasingly popular in the corporate world over the past decade, has infected the oil industry.

According to BP's Chief Executive of Exploration & Production, Tony Hayward, "if a company is going to be sustainable it must do two things. First it must run a successful business that makes a profit and invests for continued growth – this is fundamental and distinguishes business from other parts of society. Second it must be trusted and supported by those it does business with – customers, suppliers, governments, communities, informed observers and experts such as NGOs."

Businesses are increasingly finding that it makes more sense to put a little effort into helping the human population than to steamroll over the masses who can't afford your product to get it to the few who can. Better idea – contribute to lifting more people out of abject poverty and sickness, and you get a larger consumer base to buy your stuff.

In the oil industry, the corporate citizenship idea takes the form of encouraging conservation because, realistically, oil companies know that encouraging American consumers to reduce their carbon footprints may decrease oil sales here, but they have the mushrooming industrial nations in the East – India, China and Central Europe –consuming oil at phenomenal rates over the next few years. Oil sales won't suffer from American and European conservation, so why not go a little green in these countries and polish the industry's image a bit?

It may be a superficial publicity stunt, and it may pain me a great deal to say this, but as BP puts it, "It's a start." In the meanwhile, I say whip out that carbon calculator [available at www.bp.com] and keep a watchful eye on the push beyond petroleum.

Fleshing out our diets

Published October 26 2005
The Daily Targum

Animal activists have got to face the sad reality that most humans like a little meat in their diet, be it cow, chicken or the other white meat.

But, given the mad cow fiasco of a few years ago in Europe, the Foot and Mouth epidemic in Southeast Asia more recently, and now the Avian Flu, perhaps it’s time the meat eaters of this world paid attention to some of what these activists are saying.

Mad Cow Disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is “a slowly progressive, degenerative, fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle,” according to the US Food and Drug Administration. It broke out in an epidemic in Britain in the early 1990s, with cases of BSE peaking at over 36,000 in 1992.

What was the cause of the epidemic in cows? Farmers had been feeding cattle food prepared from bovine tissues, such as brain and spinal cord matter, which were contaminated by the BSE agent. Their feed also included sheep brain matter, infected with scrapie, the form of the disease manifested in sheep.

But humans have been eating various sentient beings and their brain matter, their intestines and their hooves in McDonald’s hamburger patties for decades, you might say! What’s the big deal?

The odd crop of crazy cows dropping dead wouldn’t have mattered much to us, but alas humans began contracting the disease from BSE-infected beef in the form of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a human neurodegenerative disease. While there have only been around 73 cases of vCJD globally so far, scientists have predicted epidemics of up to 250,000 cases of the lethal disease.

As a result, governments across the world have cracked down on cattle and other meat industries, requiring them to eliminate animal parts from feed. The livestock industry in the U.S voluntarily banned sheep and certain other animal parts from their feed, and then the FDA formally banned “any proteins from cows, sheep, goats, deer or elk -- animals that get similar brain-wasting diseases -- from feed for cows, sheep or goats.” Poultry and pigs could still, however, eat these proteins, but their feed would have to be labeled "do not feed to cows or other ruminants" and companies had to have systems to prevent accidentally mixing up the feeds.

Yet, according to the Associate Press, FDA inspections in 2001 found that around 20 percent of U.S feed mills, companies that turn slaughtered animals’ parts in to meat and bone meal, feed considered ‘risky,’ lacked these warning labels and had no system to prevent feed mix-ups.

The next edible animal epidemic to hit the scene was Foot-and-Mouth disease, which affects all cloven-hoofed animals, and is the most contagious of animal diseases, according to the British Journal of Medicine.

The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease two years ago in Scotland cost the Scottish economy up to £29million. More than half a million sheep and 80,000 cattle were slaughtered in the area after 177 farms were infected.

In 2002, The South Korean authorities, trying to contain an outbreak of swine foot and mouth disease, slaughtered more than 55,000 pigs and cattle.

While foot-and-mouth disease (so named because it causes painful blisters in the mouths and on the feet of infected animals) does not pose a health threat to humans (yet), the financial losses from it have been significant in the affected industries.

Avian influenza, the latest of these diseases doesn’t usually infect species other than birds and pigs, according to researchers, but humans came down with the bird flu in 1997 in Hong Kong, and out of 18 people who were infected, six died.

The strain of the flu that infected and killed these people then went on to kill 60 others across Asia, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, who are thought to have been infected after coming into contact with infected bird feces.

Hong Kong’s entire poultry population, around 1.5 million birds, was slaughtered within three days.

Since its appearance in Hong Kong, the Avian Flu has moved on through Asia and has now been detected in Russia and Turkey, following the paths of migratory birds. According to The Food and Agriculture Organization, 140 million birds have been killed or have died from the disease, resulting in financial costs of up to $10 billion.

The World Health Organization has said the H5N1 strain of bird flu is endemic in poultry in China and across much of Asia, and it may only be a matter of time before it develops the ability to pass easily from human to human.

Fears that the disease could easily spread across the European and North American continents through migratory bird transmission, and become a pandemic with not only significant economic costs but also threat to humans, have propelled the European Union into considerations of implementing a ban on not just poultry imports, but imports of pet birds!

The host of such diseases, sickening and killing off the animals we would otherwise have slaughtered anyway, begs the question – are we responsible for these epidemics?

A report released recently by Worldwatch Institute, an independent environmental think-tank, explains: “Factory farms were designed to bring animals to market as quickly and cheaply as possible. Yet they invite a host of environmental, animal welfare, and public health problems.

“Crowded, inhumane, and unhygienic conditions on factory farms can sicken animals and create the perfect environment for the spread of diseases including avian flu, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease), and foot-and-mouth disease, according to the author, Danielle Nierenberg.

Nierenberg continues that many factory farmers have turned to irradiation and genetic engineering, as well as the use of antibiotics in animal feed to ensure their products are safe, but, while these “end-of-the-pipe remedies are certainly innovative, they don't address the real problem: factory farming is an inefficient, ecologically disruptive, dangerous, and inhumane way of making meat.Did you hear what the Rutgers Dining Hall Services do with student leftovers and excess catered food? According to Charles P. Sams, the director of Dining Services, who was interviewed earlier this month by the Targum, it goes to the pigs

What's left after the food is pulverized and its liquid extracted, “is a barrel of unused edible food waste resembling the consistency of oatmeal and is suitable for only the most indiscriminate of livestock,” the article said.

It may just be that this lack of discrimination lies with humans in their treatment of livestock, and not the pigs.

On Hurricanes and Bicycles

Published October 12 2005
The Daily Targum

While yet another hurricane sweeps across the American Gulf Coast, killing at least 300 people in Central America, the Arctic Council of Indigenous Peoples are mounting pressure on nations such as the United States over the shrinking arctic icecap.

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for the fourth consecutive year, according to a study released by US scientists, and September 2005 will set a new record minimum amount of Arctic sea ice cover.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, which produced the new data, concluded that human-induced global warming is at least partly responsible for the arctic meltdown.

The Arctic Indigenous leaders are therefore calling for the United States, the world's biggest polluter, to cap emissions of heat-trapping gases from cars, factories and power plants, the sources most scientists blame for global warming.

This phenomenon of global warming could also, according to many leading scientists studying global weather patterns, be the cause of the recent rash of unusually strong hurricanes across the US gulf coast.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, have analysed global tropical cyclone statistics since satellite records began and found that between 1975 and 1989, there were 171 severe hurricanes but the number rose to 269 between 1990 and 2004.

The author of the study, Dr Peter Webster, told the BBC News website: “The increase in intensity is probably accounted for by the increase in sea surface temperature and I think probably the sea surface temperature increase is a manifestation of global warming."

The United States pulled out of the Kyoto Agreement of 2001 amongst major industrial countries to cap emissions, because President George Bush declared the agreement would be too costly and would unfairly disadvantage developing nations.

Leading British Scientist and chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, has gone so far as to say, “if this makes the climate loonies in the States realize we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation.”

And indeed, through a strange series of events, the United States seems to be curbing its emissions, not because of the government’s guilty conscience over global warming, but because of the price of oil.

The two rising economic behemoths in Asia have long known the secret to low public fuel consumption – bicycles. The crouching Tigers of China and India rode to work for years, if they could afford a bicycle, on the cleanest and greenest mode of transportation besides walking before economic liberalization and development allowed them the luxury of buying cars.

Today, the biggest consumer of oil, the greatest polluter and producer of waste in the world, the United States, is following in the footsteps, or rather the tire tracks, of India and China.

According to the United States Chamber of Commerce, more bicycles have been sold than cars in the last 12 months. The reason – astronomical gas prices in the U.S that are forcing those who have cars out of their vehicles and onto the saddle. Americans considering buying cars have also turned to bicycles as a cheaper and more cost-effective alternative.

Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, an industry association, told the AFP, “Bicycle sales are near an all-time high with 19 million sold last year -- close to the 20 million sold during the oil embargo in the early 1970s.”

Following the two hurricanes that have ripped apart the oil refining industry in the American Gulf Coast, the President of the United States, a professed Texas oil man at heart, has even started to encourage US citizens to take their pedals off the metal and try to conserve as much energy as possible.

Bush said last month, after a briefing at the energy department in Washington, that it was up to all Americans to "pitch in" by being better conservers of energy: "I mean, people just need to recognise that these storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive ... on a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful.”

If it makes sense for the American citizen to curtail non-essential travel, he added “We can encourage employees to car pool or use mass transit, and we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation," he said.

The US President is even reported to have been pottering around the White House, reminding staff to turn off lights.

Has Mr. Bush had a change of heart? Is he going green? Not likely. The president of the United States is encouraging his citizens to consume less oil because the cost to US treasuries of subsidizing oil following Hurricane Katrina is probably keeping him up at nights.

The price of oil per barrel broke records, rising to around $70 a barrel on August 30^th this year, just after Hurricane Katrina. While that number has gone down to around $62 a barrel, the US energy department said that refineries were operating at just 69.8% capacity in the last week of September and a dozen refineries in the US Gulf of Mexico region are still shut after being damaged by the two storms.

The International Energy Association has offered to release 2 million barrels of petrol a day (the amount Kuwait puts out) to the US, but the American government is already using its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks to counter the sharp rise in gas prices.

It is here we come to the tail end of the cycle that put Americans on their cycles. Meteorological experts around the world have been warning for over a decade that at the rate we release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, global warming is becoming a significant and imminent threat.

And the United States, world leader of industry and development, has ignored these warnings until now, when two hurricanes, very probably enhanced in their strength and ferocity by global warming caused by US fuel emissions, have ravaged the very industry that caused them.

If this isn’t Mother Nature’s revenge, it certainly makes for an extraordinary coincidence.

The Dalai Lama's Dilemma

Published September 28 2005
The Daily Targum

"It seems to me, peace is not just the absence of violence but much more," the Dalai Lama said this past Sunday in his talk, "Peace, War and Reconciliation."

Peace, according to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th dalai lama of Tibet, means creating and coming into being. It has to do with attitude, motivation and compassion.

The peace of the Cold War, for example, was not peace at all, because it was a time where the terror of nuclear annihilation kept the nations of the two blocs in a relative military standoff. But fear and suspicion ruled for decades.

"Any action which is motivated by hatred, anger or jealousy, is essentially violent," he said. The Dalai Lama's speech was disarmingly simple, yet full of a wisdom that is so uncomplicated it will take most of us a lifetime to even begin to implement in our lives.

"We are all living things, including those trees, flowers, this grass. ... Is this real grass? It looks like real grass!" the Dalai Lama said.

He was referring to the Astroturf on which a hundred or so people were sitting, in front of the stage.

It is, unfortunately, the most straightforward and uncomplicated things that are hardest for those of us entangled in the chaos and overstimulation of modern urban life to grapple with.

For example, the monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery of Tibet have been working on a sand mandala - a circular patterned drawing made out of different colored sands - since Wednesday last week and finished off their beautiful mandala at the Zimmerli Art Museum on Saturday.

Sand mandalas are symbols of the universe and its energy and are also used by Tibetan monks in meditation and the initiation of new monks. Tibetan monks have been traveling around the United States over the past decade or so, publicizing their struggle for a Tibet free and independent from China. They have shared sand mandalas and prayer chants with audiences throughout the United States to raise awareness of their culture and what is being stifled by communist China's occupation of Tibet and the forced exile of its monks.

These sand mandalas represent the cycle of life and death; the mandala is created laboriously over a few days by several monks and then destroyed. The sand is emptied into a nearby body of water - in this case, the Raritan River.

This process symbolizes the transience of life and the ideal of avoiding attachment to the material world.

It surprised me, then, to see that once the mandala was destroyed, bags of the sand were to be distributed to museum visitors - of which there were hundreds - as a souvenir of the event.

It surprised me even more that people were scrambling into place to get their bags of sand first, in case the stuff ran out, and they couldn't take home their own little piece of the art.

Intentions were, I have no doubt, good-hearted. Those who were interested enough in the culture of another nation to turn up at the Zimmerli wanted to show their respect to the monks in taking a piece of their hard work home with them. They also wanted to support the monks by buying books, incense, Tibetan and Nepali cloth work and, of course, T-shirts. There was also a "donations" box, which, while it had some dollar bills in it, went largely ignored by the majority.

We were all awed by the mesmeric chants of the Drepung Loseling yellow-hat monks and their intricate sand drawing. Everyone who attended either the Zimmerli exhibition or the Dalai Lama's talk - I'm sure the population of both events overlapped a great deal - came away with a greater awareness of an ancient and inspiring tradition and its political perils with China.

What escaped many of us, however, was the essential spirit in which these monks, including the Dalai Lama, approach the world, which gives them such quiet sophistication that most of us can only imitate at best.

The point of destroying the sand mandala was that beauty and art, like life, must be enjoyed for what they are but then let go. The sand, the monks explained, is usually released into the water so it can carry the monks' blessings into the ocean and then into the rain, which spreads the blessings and prayers over the earth. Taking home bags of colored sand, whose pattern and beauty has already been destroyed, defeats an essential point of Buddhist philosophy - and of most spiritual philosophies, for that matter.

What is even more unfortunate than our lack of understanding of what it means to enjoy life without wanting to take it home in a bag, is this understanding does not come with being Buddhist or any other religion.

Most of us in the world are born into one religious background but have managed to carry the most hollow remnants of spirituality with us into our urban adulthood while leaving behind the essentially similar tenets most religions are founded on: compassion, tolerance and contentment.

Osama bin Laden, in terrorizing the globe with random and ignorant acts of violence, acts in the hope of bringing everyone to Islam, which, according to him, "is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights and defending the oppressed and persecuted."

While he has the tenets of his religion down pat in this statement, his actions and those he has orchestrated couldn't be further from the teachings of Islam.

Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, who theoretically share the Dalai Lama's philosophy of peace and nonviolence, have been heavily involved in the politics of the civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government and the mainly Hindu Tamil separatists. The monks are fully supportive of the government's war against and extermination of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.

Speaking to a reporter from The Associated Press, one politically prominent Buddhist monk said, "Nowadays, monks cannot go and sleep in the forest. The monks of Sri Lanka have always been involved in national issues."

According to the article, "Rathana, an official with a powerful Buddhist group, dismisses Sri Lanka's peace process and urges renewed military action against Tamil Tiger separatists."

"We should fight against unjust activities," Rathana said, according to the AP. "Yes, we should fight."

It seems, therefore, that while we are blessed with the immensely wise canons and values of ancient, but still relevant, religions today, most of the world's leaders, political actors and even everyday citizens - including those of us fortunate enough to witness Tibetan Buddhism at the Zimmerli and Rutgers Stadium - are somehow missing the point. Hopefully, listening to and understanding the Dalai Lama's call to tolerance, compassion and contentment will clear our minds of the complicated inanities of life and give us a glimpse of the simple profundities.

Hooked on Oil

Published September 13 2005
The Daily Targum

I have little doubt that everybody who drives a car is woefully aware that gas prices in the United States, a meager $1.86 a gallon just a year ago, have jumped over a dollar since then to around $3 a gallon today. I don’t drive a car, fortunately for the environment and not so fortunately for me in the middle of highway-clad New Jersey suburbia. But I’ve been assaulted left and right, nevertheless, by cries and sighs of indignation over the phenomenal price of oil these days.

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the US Gulf Coast explains the recent hike in prices – more than 83 percent of gas production and 95 percent of oil production in that region has been shut down over the past week because of the damage to oil rigs and refineries, according to the BBC.

The BBC reports that about 30 percent of the country's entire crude oil output - is out of commission.

The price of oil per barrel broke records, rising to around $70 a barrel on August 30^th this year, just after the hurricane. This is the highest price of oil ever recorded, but still falls short of the oil crisis of the late 1970’s, where, adjusted for inflation, the black gold was selling for about $90 a barrel. So cheer up, things have been worse.

Oil prices are already slowing falling, partially because various oil producing countries have offered to provide the US with oil to buffer the shortage caused by the hurricane’s impact.

The International Energy Association, for example, has offered to release 2 million barrels of petrol a day (the amount Kuwait puts out) to the US. Consisting of 26 countries including France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the IEA holds a combined stockpile of 4 billion barrels of oil, 1.4 billion of which are available to these governments for emergency use.

While this buffer supply is yet to arrive in the US, the American government is already using its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks to counter a sharp rise in gas prices, according to the BBC.

Prices fluctuate, however, not only with actual rises and falls in oil availability, but with speculation on disaster and how much damage will arise. This explains why the price of oil leapt from about $66.86 (set on August 12 on the New York Mercantile Exchange) to $70 before demand for oil outstripped the interrupted supply from the Gulf Coast.

The price of crude oil has been steadily rising for other reasons, since far before Hurricane Katrina struck refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Upsets in oil supply from major oil-producing nations such as Niger (undergoing internal political strife), Iraq (undergoing an externally induced chaotic cataclysm and recently a rebellious sabotage of the power grid) and Venezuela (where strikes interrupted oil export) also contributed to the edging up of oil prices.

If that’s not enough of a complication of the usual media-pulverized, mushy public-feed that oil prices are up plainly because Katrina struck, here’s another one: an overall rise in demand for oil has driven up prices in recent years because the supply of oil is restricted (both by what the poor earth has left in her tired loins as well as by oil producing cartels like OPEC).

China, the new oversized kid on the block, consumed about 6.7 million barrels of oil per day last year, 3.2 million of which came from imports. Its consumption is speculated by the various bespectacled cogitating oil gurus to increase as its economy expands.

The US and Europe have also increased demand over the last few years, putting more of a strain on oil supply.

While North America contributes about 4.8 percent to global oil production at just over 14 million barrels a day, oil greedy America boasts the highest consumption in the world and has to import an addition 11 million barrels a day to support its needs.

The fact of the matter is that this precious commodity that keeps the United States on its knees before Saudi Arabia and Kuwait while it kicks Iraq and Iran in the pants for Islamic fundamentalism (bred largely in Saudi-funded madrasas) is a slippery fish that will never leave us with our bellies (or rather, our gas tanks) full. So why do we so desperately cling to it? What on earth do we use all this oil for?

Perhaps the national obsession with Sports Utility Vehicles (SUV’s), Hummers and other generally colossal, compulsively oil-guzzling American-made cars has something to do with it.

One online news source (yes, the BBC again, sorry) tries to convince us that sales of the SUV, “the nation’s top selling car,” are “sluggish with a disappointing 4.1% increase for the year.” That’s a sluggish increase, by the way. Hummer sales, however, declined by 21 percent, and the Hybrid, a more environmentally-friendly car that combines petrol and electric power, is basking in the sun of celebrity endorsements by the likes of Cameron Diaz and Leo Di Caprio. American registrations for Hybrids rose over 25 percent last year, apparently, to nearly 44,000. That number may seem impressive on its own (even then, not really), but when compared to just one car company’s - Toyota’s - 675,809 American light-truck sales (SUVs, vans and pickups) last year, the number of Hybrids on the road in the U.S today is, in fact, insignificant.

Decades of environmental activism, warnings from international conservation groups, and even oil companies like Shell and Chevron, that the current levels of fuel consumption are ruining the environment and exhausting a non-renewable natural resource, haven’t curbed our consumption of oil. Maybe the only thing that will is astronomical gas prices. If this is the case, I say hitch up the price a few more dollars, OPEC!

There are viable alternatives to driving huge cars back and forth across the vast smoggy expanses of America. Bicycles (two-wheeled, non-fuel-consuming and human-powered machines) are one great way to traverse short distances and jettison those two pounds you’ve been trying to lose since the 90’s. Walking is another.

If exercise isn’t your thing, other alternatives such as trains (NJTransit is offering FREE trips to and from New York all this week), busses and car-pooling in regular or hybrid cars do exist.

Gas prices may descend eventually, but in the meanwhile, I suggest taking this opportunity to leave the car in the garage and explore the world of the bipedal!