Bicycles — Cleantech?

What is the purpose of cleantech and our coverage of it? There are many purposes, of course, but I’d say some of the top things on the list are addressing global warming, improving human health, reducing human suffering, increasing energy independence, creating a more democratic energy system, reducing inequality, and improving the economy.

Now, aside from cleantech, there are a few other things that stand out as helping with all or most of the above — some are related to food and some are related to transportation and urban design. While I don’t think it makes sense for us to get into the food topics much here, there’s one transportation and urban design topic that often comes to mind as a potential sector of relevance for CleanTechnica — I have a feeling you can guess what that is (bicycling, of course).

While we don’t post on bicycling much here, we do post on high-tech bikes, new electric bikes, and electric vehicles of other sorts. It always seems a bit odd, though, to think that we ‘can’ cover hi-tech and electric bikes but not normal bikes. Why not post on conventional bicycles, as well? Presumably, they’re not cleantech (I’ve never seen them mentioned in any definition of cleantech). But in the context of the purpose of this site and cleantech, as just discussed above, and since I don’t think it makes sense to just cover hi-tech and electric bikes and vehicles but not conventional bicycles (widely considered the most energy-efficient mode of commonly used transportation), I think it’s about time we include ‘low-tech’ bikes within our content jurisdiction,… as well as the more high-tech bikes we already cover from time to time (like those with cool LED lights).

One might be opposed to this idea if they thought cleantech was just about replacing dirty tech and that bicycling wasn’t replacing dirty tech trips made by automobiles, but it is…. Bicycling is growing at a very rapid pace, similar to solar power. Additionally, as Katie Omberg of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) recently noted, bicycling is increasingly being viewed as a key component of a different lifestyle (not just a recreational activity) — a cleaner, healthier, cooler lifestyle. She shared a few recent ads that featured bicycling as such in a post on the LAB blog; I’ll close with two of those and one more along those lines to get the mood of this new focus going a bit:

(And if you want to read a bit more along the lines of this post, check out this 10 benefits of bicycling post.)

More posts along the lines of what I’m thinking about:

• DIY, Crowdsourced Bike Map in Moscow
• London’s Boris Bikes Bike-Sharing Program Gets Bigger
• 1 Mile on Bike = $0.41 Societal Economic Gain, 1 Mile in Car = $0.20 Societal Economic Loss
• Bike Helmet Video Cameras
• Bikes Belong Announces 6 Cities that Will Get Fast-Tracked Protected Bike Lanes
• Young Americans Dropping Cars for Bikes & Buses
• WHO Tool Calculates Health Savings of Bicycle & Pedestrian Infrastructure
• 1/3 of US Adults Struggle to Afford Their Car
• Join the National Bike Challenge Before May 1!!
• Beijing Bike-Sharing System to be HUGE
• 4 Awesome Bicycling Videos!
• Do You Work 120 Minutes (2 Hours) a Day for Your Car & 3.84 Minutes a Day for Your Bike?
• Comprehensive 2012 Bicycling & Walking Report