On Riding

Over the weekend that just past I went on two rides. The first one I did on my own, I had been planning on going on a Saturday morning Steady State ride, but when I got downstairs in my bike jersey and shorts, got to the front door opened it wide and saw the rain coming down in buckets I decided to heed the weather report, went back to bed, and as promised, by noon the sun was shining. Below is my route, quite possibly the easiest route I ever drew up, Google Map from home to Hamilton, come up 2km shy, avoid highways and take Lakeshore Blvd. (I did use the MGT across downtown Toronto, but the rest of the ride was Lakeshore.) When I was deep in the heart of Oakville I noticed that my knees started hurting, thinking that I would be climbing Rattle Snake the next day I decided that no matter what at 2:00 I would turn around. At a street called Delaware and Lakeshore, in Burlington I did a 180 degree turn and made for Toronto, with a modest tail wind. Had I known:

1. that I was just over 2km from Hamilton or,
2. that I had faced a headwind the whole way South West or,
3. that the club Sunday ride would not be anywhere near Rattle Snake,

I would have kept on trucking and done Hamilton Beach and been able to prove it is possible to get to Hamilton Beach from my house without using a single drop of fossil fuels.

Due to the Gay Pride Parade and all the traffic insanity the parade implies, the Sunday ride took a different route. Someone else in the club drew up this map and I am not entirely confident in every detail, but then I am even less confident in my own memory. Here are some pictures from that ride, most courtesy of Dan Yang (the guy who runs the club).

Alright, lets just get the photo out of the way, there it is, everyone point and laugh, what an idiot! (But at least my teeth and nice and clean!)

That's me talking to Jeff, he's the guy who basically saved my sorry rear end on Tuesday when I forgot my water bottles. I don't, for the life of me remember the name of the guy in the foreground.

Ah-ha! Photographic evidence I do know how to ride a bike! I really should learn the name of the guy to my right, he lives around the corner from me.

I really ought to shave before these rides, I don't really plan on it, but it seems to me that I should be as much prepared for a photo shoot as a bike ride. Above are most of the people who went on the Sunday ride. Notice I am in the far left. There are 25 people in this picture.
The guy in the foreground is Dan Yang, this club is all his doing. (I would say nice things about him, but on the off chance he ever reads my Blog I can't let him start thinking I actually think nice things about him.)

So I was reading about oil recently. It seems Canadians are more concerned with high energy costs than with the environment. I guess when push comes to shove it is a lot like public transit. "Public transit is great and everyone else should use it." Worrying about global climate change is great and everyone else should stop driving so I can get my cheap gasoline fix. In Europe I believe gas costs in the neighbourhood of a couple bucks a litre, and we are complaining about $1.30/L! Are we nuts? (!) Stupid high expensive gas prices are exactly what we need. We need to end our love affair with the Stupid Ugly Vehicles like the Hummer, the Esclade, the Suburban and start using transit, get off our collective duff's and start riding or walking.

Meanwhile our "friends" the world's top smack dealer, the Saudi's just changed their song. For about a year just would not stop singing the same tune about market speculators driving up the price of oil and the supply is fine, not gonna increase production (even went ole' Georgie Pudding Pie Bush kissed their asses back in April) went out and announced a four hundred thousand barrel per day (400kbpd) production hike to alleviate high prices. (Guess what did nothing to alleviate high prices. Hey in a World that consumes something in the neighbourhood of 87Mbpd did anyone actually believe 0.4Mbpd would make the slightest difference?) Before I start on an environmental rant, consider how much oil, 1Mbpd is, I mean, we are talking about 42 gallons of oil in a barrel, then something between 14 and 28 gallons of gas (since between one and two thirds of a barrel of oil is gasoline), so, lets suppose 20 gallons of gas per barrel times a million barrels per day, times say, 3.8L/gal is 76 Million liters of gasoline in a million barrels, and the world is consuming over 80 million barrels a day. That's about 6.1 Billion liters of gasoline every single day that we are basically dumping into the atmosphere.

But back to the Saudi's for a second, their excuse is that market speculation is driving up the price of oil. Let me explain how the markets work. Lets suppose you own a corn farm in Iowa, and you want to sell your crop in August, so in say January you draw up a contract with someone to supply corn at a set price, now you can borrow money against the sale of corn that does not exist yet, so you can buy seeds and fertilzier and all that good stuff. Well now you have a contract for August delivery on the corn futures market.

Well oil works the same way, except that most corn and pork bellies and other commodities contracts change hands in Chicago, oil contracts are mostly traded in New York and London, but its the same arangement. Except that I only described what the producer does. What about the speculator? Well they take delievery of the corn in August and let me tell you, if you are a corn farmer who had a crappy spring, it really sucks cause now you have to run out and buy corn from someone else to meet your contractual obligations.

Anyway so the buyer buys the corn and turns around and sells it to clients who need corn for feeding their pigs which become next season's pork bellies, thus the cycle continues. But notice the speculator does not actually touch the corn? The speculator was in Chicago wearing a funny suit yelling numbers in a crowded room, he wouldn't know an ear of corn from a pork belly if you hit them over the head with a pork chop! Its the same story with oil, the speculator draws up an August contract with the Saudi's or with Syncrude or anyone else, and on a set date an amount of oil is delivered to... well the speculator wouldn't know what to do with the oil, but that does not matter, he's turned the contract over to Exxon Mobile, or maybe Royal Dutch Shell, but the point is the oil is still there, the speculator never actually used it, the demand did not increase because of a guy in a fancy office on Wall Street. All that speculation does over the long term is afford a chance to borrow money with some foreknowledge of what the product will sell for when the time comes. In short, speculators actually level the market's peaks and troughs.

Put even more bluntly, despite what the Saudi's are saying, we really really are running out of gas and the recent rise in gas prices is not some summer spike, I mean sure when the summer driving season ends things will settle down a little bit, but the inflated price of gas is the new normal and anyone who things they will see a return to $1.00/L gas in Canada is just out to lunch. We are entering the period of the Long Emergency and well frankly I'm glad I love riding so much.

To me riding is freedom, freedom I suppose in a way similar to driving was back when gas was a nickle a gallon. On skates I can see the same trail over and over and over again, but on a bike, I can go anywhere, be it Hamilton or Claredon. Unlike the car that needed $1400 in routine repairs just a couple months ago, on a bike, just a limited knowledge of bike repair is all I ever really need there is no worry about mechanical issues.

I hope we run out oil sooner than expected, I sure hate sharing the road with all the bad drivers out there.