Solution to the enegy crisis.

Energy crisis? Wait I though we were in an economic crisis.

Lest we forget, our economy, and the economy of the world, is very closely linked to the energy that powers it. So what fuels our economy right now? The quick answers are Coal, Oil, Natural Gas. People thinking a little further will start listing our electicity sources, Solar, Nucular, Wind, Hydro etc. But the one we often forget is food.

A huge segment of our productivity is human powered which means that the energy source is cheeseburgers, Clif Bars and sweetpotatos, and pasta. The beauty is that most food stuffs are domestically produced, renewable resources. So while our politicians work out all the details of trying to find ways to get greener sources of energy for our big machines, we have the ability to change many things in our lives over to food fuel.

Now I want everyone to stop and examine the treadmill.

A treadmill is a machine designed specificly to waste energy. The average treadmill user will get in their car, drive 2-8 miles to a gym, get on the treadmill, run for fourty minutes, get back in their car and go home. Now lets look at that in terms of energy.

Our treadmill runner had a cheeseburger for lunch which was 400 Calories which she now feels guilty about because she thinks it is going to make her look fat, so she heads to the gym. Assuming 5 miles each way in a car that gets 20 miles per gallon, the car ride to and from the gym will burn 1/2 gallon of fuel. At the gym she is on the treadmill for 40 minutes to burn the 400 Calories. Now remember that the treadmill is an electrically powered device with a roughly 2.5 horsepower motor that will be running for 40 minutes. The calculation of how much coal you have to burn to create the electricity to run a treadmill for 40 minutes is beyond me, so let it suffice to say that it is an amount that exists.

So in sum we are out the 400 Calories in the Cheeseburger, 1/2 gallon of gas, and some coal to power the treadmill. Net work done? zero.

All of this energy was wasted by design.

Alternativly, our heroin could have simply eaten the cheeseburger and ridden her bike home from work. The 400 Calories that she didn't want in her body would be gone, but they would have been used for productive means, and we would have saved the energy consumption of the trip to the gym.

Now I am not saying that we should stop using the gym, but I wonder if we all converted a fraction of the energy we waste by design into productive energy what kind of effect we could have on the energy market. Understanding that biking to work is not always logistically possible, here are the two big things that cyclist can do than many of us neglect.

#1. Ride to the Gym. If you go to the gym for your winter workout, ride your bike there and back. It makes for a great warmup and cooldown.

#2 Ride to your Ride. How many times have you gotten in your car and gone to meet someone to go riding? Next time ride your bike to the start of the ride, it saves you the effort of loading up your car, and you also get to feel smug about having ridden more miles than anyone else there.

Your bike is a great toy. It is also an amazing tool, and too many of us forget to use it as such.