BIKEPOC Wants You on a Bicycle

2021-04-14 - Adam Clare

Bicycles are the best form of urban transportation and more people should be out there riding on two wheels. In Toronto, like many North American cities, cyclists in the city are predominately white males (for a variety of reasons). With people stuck at home due to the pandemic there has been an increase in interest in cycling, particularly thanks to reduce vehicular traffic. Thanks to safer roads more people who identify as BIPOC are riding, and the group BIKEPOC is there to encourage even more riders. In 2019 Keiren Alam launched the group to create a more welcoming and diverse cycling community!

2021 will hopefully be a turning point for cyclists in Toronto!

Before the pandemic, Alam hosted monthly rides and workshops on skills like fixing flat tires. Her events were put on pause once the pandemic hit, but Alam organized fundraising rides for Black Lives Matter Toronto in July 2020. Shortly afterwards, she launched BIKEPOCâ€™s bike match program to pair donated bikes with people who had difficulty accessing them. â€œA lot of people need bikes and the demand is clearly there,â€ Alam says. â€œWeâ€™re in a pandemic and people are still trying to get to work and are avoiding the TTC for safety.â€

BIKEPOC partners with local community bike groups like Charlieâ€™s FreeWheels and Bike Chain to build and repair donated bikes. They completed 20 bike matches last year, getting bikes in the hands of women, children and people of colour. After a winter hiatus, Alam relaunched the bike match program in mid-March and, in two days, she received applications from over 25 people in need of a bike. Thatâ€™s in addition to the people who signed up last year but still havenâ€™t been matched. â€œWe have a lot of demand and not a lot of bikes coming in or getting donated because thereâ€™s a massive shortage of bikes right now.â€

You Donâ€™t Have to Love Your Job

2021-04-13 - Adam Clare

Too many people are told to follow their passion and find their dream job above all else. This is bad advice. Instead, go get a job that you can do, pays you well, and is filled with respect. There is no reason to be a sycophant at work.

Sarah Jaffe recently wrote a book titled Work Wonâ€™t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and in it she explores our modern and utterly bizarre expectation that you should love your job. Over at the Next Big Idea Club she highlighted five key points from her book, and it’s worth looking at.

2. The idea that we should like our work is actually a relatively new concept.

The way we work and the way we think about work have changed over time. And so while humans have long been presumed to do some kinds of work for the love of it, thatâ€™s an expectation that has grown and spread from a couple of types of work to pretty much everything. The idea that we work in order to find fulfillment, rather than a paycheck, wasnâ€™t particularly widespread even just a couple of generations ago. When youâ€™re digging coal or building cars for a living, no one expects you to do it because you like it. You did it because it paid decentlyâ€”or because it paid at all.

France Banning Short Flights to Reduce Carbon Output

2021-04-12 - Adam Clare

Flying isn’t so popular right now due to the pandemic and many airlines are financially hurting, and in France they are helping the Air France. Due to ineffectiveness in the private company the French government stepped in and doubled it’s stake with one key condition: the airline eliminates some of its routes. Short flights of 2.5 hours or less will no longer be permitted in France as the carbon output of one of those flights is 77 times that of a train. Train service in the country is good, but with the additional passenger load the service will improve with expansion.

Given how horrible plane travel is for the environment all of use should be grateful for France leading the way on this smart transportation policy.

The measures could affect travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux.

The French government had faced calls to introduce even stricter rules.

France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.

A Net-Zero Economy will Save $30 Trillion a Year

2021-04-08 - Adam Clare

Economist argue that efficiency produces profits, which is why we see mass layoffs and (bizarrely) large payouts for executives. 20th century economists ignored a lot of opportunities for more efficient operations because the costs weren’t put on corporations themselves. The costs of running the business were covered by the governments. There is no better example of this than how companies treat the environment.

An easy example is in Alberta where companies in the tar sands have ransacked vast tracts of land for low-quality bitumen while leaving the costs of cleanup on the government. If companies had to pay for their environmental damage then the tar sands wouldn’t be profitable.

Finally economists have caught up to what environmentalists have been saying for decades: if we don’t act on the damage done to the environment by companies then all companies will suffer (obviously nature suffers more). Recent studies show that not getting to a carbon net-zero economy soon will cost the global economy $30 trillion a year due to ecological destruction.

Sylvan said he was surprised that so many saw net-zero action as â€œeconomically desirable, even on the pretty short timeline that weâ€™re talking about.â€

Most of the international climate economists questioned for the survey in February said they had become more concerned about climate change over the last five years. The most common reason they gave was the escalation in recent extreme weather events, which have included climate-linked wildfires and heat waves.

Things Are Good

Inspirational and good news.

BIKEPOC Wants You on a Bicycle

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You Donâ€™t Have to Love Your Job

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France Banning Short Flights to Reduce Carbon Output

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A Net-Zero Economy will Save $30 Trillion a Year

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