Electricity transmission should remain public property

About one year after she became the leader of Canada's largest province, Kathleen Wynne announced that her government was going to privatize Hydro One, one of Ontario's largest publicly-owned corporations.

The announcement, made this year, was a highly controversial one. Hydro One generates more than $740 million (CAD) profit each year. This money goes back to the province and helps pay for social programs like education and health care. However, the Premier wants to sell the province's shares in the company because, she says, the money is needed to pay for vital, new infrastructure projects. She's expecting it to net $9 billion for 60% of the crown corporation.

This may sound good at first, but it is terrible, terrible policy. And here's why:

Hydro One is vital infrastructure.

Wynne's key argument for privatizing Hydro One is that the money is needed to invest in much-needed infrastructure such as transit and roads. Unfortunately, this is terribly myopic way of defining the word 'infrastructure'.

Hydro One manages nearly all of Ontario's electricity transmission wires.  Selling that company, even just 60%, which is what the Premier is planning, is the electricity equivalent of selling 60% of the public roads, bridges, and highways in the province, just so you can pay for new commuter trains.

Roads, bridges, and highways are public in order to give the citizens greater access to the physical network of communities, towns, and cities that exist. Placing those assets into private hands threatens the public's access to the physical world around them.

Similarly, the electrical grid currently consists of a large network of producers and users, all linked together with electrical lines. In other words, the electrical lines aren't like typical electrical assets: They're vital pieces of infrastructure that connect all users and producers together. A power system without electrical lines would be like a city without roads. The public needs these vital pieces of infrastructure in order to properly function.

Recognizing this as vital public infrastructure means that they will need to be maintained at a certain level of functionality. If a storm blows out a bridge, or a falling tree takes down a power line, both the public nature of the asset, as well as the fact that the asset is vital infrastructure for the modern world, means that there is a responsibility to ensure that such damage is repaired. 

What would happen if a road or electrical line were privatized and then no longer deemed profitable? What would occur if the private company that managed the road or power line went bankrupt? These outcomes are all possible under the infrastructure privatization scenario.

It's giving a monopoly away to private interests 

One of the steadfast rules of a healthy market is the need for competition. Competition helps to ensure that no one company has so much power that they'll be able to dictate whatever price they want. And unlike in a government monopoly, where the benefits go to a public who can kick the government out if things go sour, a private monopoly legally serves only its shareholders.

In the past, governments have gone to war with powerful corporations over this key principle. In the early 1900s, the State of New Jersey took Standard Oil all the way to the US Supreme Court, which found that the company had forcefully created a national monopoly on a vital commodity: gasoline. The Court ruled that Standard Oil had to be forcefully seperated into competing firms.

If Wynne privatizes Ontario Hydro, the entire electrical transmission system would be privatized into a single company that would be beholden to shareholders rather than to the public.

"Sure", you might say, "But the people of Ontario would still be shareholders. After all, they would own 40% of all Ontario Hydro shares."

That may be true. But what happens when the 60% of majority of private shareholders don't like a particular policy of the government that holds a 40% minority stake? Or the 60% majority of private share holders don't like the CEO that the government proposes and has someone else in mind?

It's potentially deadly for Ontario's Renewable Energy Growth

One of the best policies enacted by the previous Ontario Liberal government was the Green Energy Act. It has turned Ontario into a renewable energy powerhouse. Now Ontarians have many different options to buy and sell electricity to the grid, including many, many, many fossil-free alternatives. Further, your individual house can, if it produces more energy than it uses, sell electricity back into the grid. That's a fantastic thing.

But the sale of Hydro One could bring all that to question. What happens if, say, Exxon Mobil comes in and buys a 51% stake in Hydro One. Will Hydro One charge certain customers more than others? Will certain kinds of energy producers have precidence over others? If I wire my home with a solar panel to sell energy back into the grid, will that be allowed? How easy will it be to install a electric vehicle charging station on the side of the road? And what if power outages constantly uccur in the same remote community again and again and again and an upgrade would be deemed not a financially profitable investment, will a private Hydro One leave the community in the dark, forcing it to resort to diesel generators?

What Wynne Should Do 

Instead of selling off Hydro One like it's a penny stock, she should see Hydro One as what it is: the administrative arm of a vital network of Ontario infrastructure. And like Ontario's roads and bridges and transit systems and bike lanes, Ontario's electrical lines need care and thoughtful upgrading. 

The electric age, which we've been living in for more than one hundred years, is in the midst of a major revolution. More and more buildings are feeding electricity into the grid. Cars and massive batteries are set to be major consumers and contributors to the electricity grid. Networks of charging stations for electric vehicles are being built across the continent. How we use electricty in fifteen years will look nothing like how we use it now.

Upgrading the network to allow for these activities will cost money. But guess what? These are all potential new income generators. If Hydro One remains in public hands, it gives the people of Ontario a say as to what those grid connection fees might look like. If it goes into private hands? Well... let's say my phone bills haven't exactly been reasonable since Bell Canada was privatized.

When cars first became popular, we didn't privatize all the roads. Instead, we recognized that there was a value in ensuring public access to high quality transportation infrastructure. Roads were expanded. Paved. Improved for public safety and ease of access (also, it's harder to trip on pavement than it is on cobblestones).

Now is the perfect time to invest in a 21st century electricity highway that has high quality, public access at its core. Selling Hydro One won't guarantee any of that.

Thankfully, Wynne has some help from the incoming Prime Minister elect who has promised $20 billion in infrastructure spending over the next three years. Wynne's 60% sale of Hydro One was expected net a one-time amount of $9 billion. But since nearly 40% of all Canadians live in Ontario, I would expect that the province would receive at least a third of $60 billion that the new federal leader has promised. And meanwhile she'll get to keep all the three-quarters of a billion dollars (and growing) that the Ontario government currently recieves in Hydro One profits. That should solve her financing problem right there.

The music that trees make

Bartholomäus Traubeck, a German artist, has created a beautiful installation that translates tree rings into music that can be understood and appreciated to human ears.

He uses an optical sensor that 'reads' the rate of growth, thickness, and strength of tree rings while also accounting for their differences in the colour and the texture of the wood. The data is turned into piano music. He uses samples from different kinds of trees, including Spruce, Ash, Oak, and Maple.

Repairing humanity's relationship with the environment requires a deeper, more meaningful interaction with the natural world. When I say this, I don't just mean that everyone must learn how to rough it in the woods (though they should). We also need interpretations that resonate with our modern lifestyle — interpretations that force us to pause our everyday routines and reexamine our fundamental understanding of the world.

This kind of art can help us do that.

Projects like Traubeck's are important because they reconnect our day to day lives with new understandings of nature. This project gives voice to a part of nature that otherwise stands silent — the life story of a single tree. You can almost hear the long passage of time encoded within the tree rings. It's compelling and deeply meaningful.

Give it a listen here.

What bike helmets can teach about climate change

My previous post on bike helmets seems to have garnered a lot of interest. My little blog went from a handful of visits a day to several hundred visits an hour. According to my web host, my week to week page views are up a projected 62,000%. Someone even linked my post on Reddit. I'm not sure if this counts as going viral (33,000 viewers is far short of millions of viewers), but for some reason my post seems to have struck a chord.

Many have found my reasoning to be counter-intuitive. And it is. I want to focus on one counter-intuitive result from my piece that I think has wider implications for a series of difficult problems that we face today.

The problem of collective action 

If having a helmet reduces the chance of getting a serious head injury, how can biking without a helmet increase my safety?

If we zoom out and look at this problem from a bird's eye view, we'd see this as a type of problem that economists, sociologists, environmentalists, and political scientists all call a collective action problem. These are conundrums that occur when a group of individuals, acting in a completely rational, self-interested manner, collectively produce an outcome that hurts everybody. Wearing a bike helmet makes me safer, but it also sends a message that cycling is dangerous. This means that when I put on my helmet, I am incrementally increasing the risk to me and to all other cyclists because a helmet indicates to the casual cyclist that the roads are dangerous, dissuading her from cycling and making the roads less safe because there are fewer cyclists on the road.

This is exactly what a collective action problem looks like. The direct benefit to me outweighs incremental cost. I perceive the benefit of protection to me now is far greater than the potential costs — in this case et cost is my helmet's contribution to the culture of fear surrounding urban cycling.

This dynamic of individual benefits producing a collective cost was identified in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, a biologist at UC Santa Barbara. The Tragedy of the Commons goes like this: Back in the day, communities used to have pastures for cattle grazing. These commons were open to the entire community. All you had to do to take advantage of the common was to just show up with your cattle, and they'd be allowed to graze happily.

Unfortunately, the common has a limited capacity to support cattle, and with enough cattle, what results from the unlimited, unregulated use of the commons is its degradation. Eventually it becomes useless for everybody. Everyone is working in their own self interest, and the collective outcome of these individual, completely rational choices, makes everybody worse off.

In the case of bike helmets — because helmets can discourage cycling, they may actually have the effect of making cycling less safe by reducing the number of bikes on the road. The more people feel that one shouldn't bike without a helmet, the less likely they'll bike. The resulting lack of cyclists on the road makes it more dangerous for all cyclists.

You can see the same kinds of dynamics in other problems. Highway rubbernecking is one. An action that takes a fraction of time — slowing down to look at an accident — causes massive amounts of traffic congestion because of the number of drivers who partake. It makes total sense that drivers pause to look: You've been stuck in traffic all this time for no reason. The least you could get out of it is to see what all the fuss was about. It may be a split second for you, but the result of so many drivers spending that split second is what creates the congestion behind you.

When it comes to the bike helmet issue, there are two collective action problems that we need to consider, both with significant implications for bike safety. The first was addressed in my February post: The more cyclists feel as if helmets are mandatory, the more cycling is discouraged. This causes streets to be less safe for all people. 

The second collective action problem is related to the sharing of available street space. Many cities in North America have seen a doubling or tripling of cycling over the past decade, much of that in the amount of commuting (as opposed to recreation).

This increase in bike traffic creates another collective action problem: There's only so much road space. Right now it's within everyone's personal best interest to wrestle for space every city's limited roadways. It's easy to make this a car versus bikes argument: The rights of one person versus the rights of others. How do we incorporate the growth of cycling into the urban streetscape? How do we build our cities so that they incorporate safe modes of transportation towards all users when there's limited space?

A car-centered culture may have made sense in the 1960s, but our cities can't handle a car-based culture anymore. There are far more people than many of these cities were designed to handle. Here's another way to think about the problem: Today, more than half of the world's 7 billion people live in cities. That's 3.5 billion people living in urban centres. In the 1960s, when most of North America's car-centered cities were designed, there weren't even that many people on the planet.

I'll say that again. There are more people living in cities today than there were people on the planet during the era when cities became car dependent. Why do we insist on designing our cities around the car? Even if we take away all the concerns about oil and gas, air pollution, climate change, and car accidents: Eventually cities will simply run out of space for single-occupancy vehicles. Why do we continue to believe that our cities should be based on a car-centered design paradigm when it's clearly unsustainable?

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Climate change as a collective action problem

In trying to solve climate change we're faced with some of the same kinds of collective action dynamics that we see in bike helmets. Or rubbernecking. Or the Tragedy of the Commons. These are problems that can only be solved collectively in an environment where the most rational choice for individuals is to act against the common good, like burning fossil fuels to go to work or to stay warm in the winter.

Like many collective action problems, climate change can't be solved by changing one variable or by changing a single law or rule. It may work, but in many such cases the temptation to disobey is often too great to pass up.

For example: What do you do with a roommate who doesn't scrub the shower even though it's clearly their turn? You can try to set up punishments. Maybe shame her into cleaner behaviours. But doesn't that just make the living situation less tolerable? Ruin a friendship?

If you ponder the roommate question, you'll immediately see how difficult the question gets the more roommates you have. With four people in a flat, it's easier for one person to free ride than it would be if there were only two. 

Like the roommate who doesn't clean the tub on their turn, these kinds of problems tend to require a significant shift in thinking away from individualist, ego-driven thinking towards collective problem-solving. Rather than make cleaning an independent chore, perhaps you'll make it into a fun social activity where cleaning suddenly becomes a desirable activity? Or maybe you adjust the standardized norm that everyone must clean everything and collectively agree to hire a service that does the cleaning that you as a group are unwilling to do.

The same goes with bike safety. Or climate change. These kinds of problems require us to shift to a point of view outside of ourselves, to transform ourselves from individuals caught in a system to become problem-solvers within that system. We need to move towards more holistic ways of looking at these problems. And that's hard to do. One of my justifications for not using a helmet is that biking is not nearly as dangerous as we've been socialized to believe. But that doesn't eliminate the fact that a helmet does, indeed, have protective value. Cyclists shouldn't feel like the choice to wear a helmet is 'damned if you do, damned if you don't'. Building separate bike friendly infrastructure, separating bikes from other forms of traffic, teaching drivers and cyclists to share the road... these are what we should be arguing for. Unfortunately getting a bike lane installed with a group of your friends doesn't give you the same dopamine hit that you get when you win an argument about helmet use.

Similarly, it doesn't matter how much an individual reduces their individual carbon footprint. The best that it can do is give him some level of moral authority. But there's no way we can solve climate change unless a mass social, cultural, technological, and political change occurs. It's easy to focus on the smaller things... the LED light bulbs and the reusable bags. What becomes difficult is creating sustainable change that lasts into the future.

Moving forward

About five years ago, environmentalists were up in arms with one another. There were enormous arguments as to whether or not carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system was the superior policy instrument to tackle growing emissions. Both policies would place a cost on carbon in a manner that economists agree would reduce emissions (though the extent either would do so was in contention).

What happened? Support for any type of carbon pricing fizzled. Any political momentum we had created was lost. Like the pro- and anti-bike helmet debaters, climate change activists had chosen the wrong problem. For cycling, the problem isn't bike helmets, the problem is bicycle safety. Rather than focus on helmet versus non-helmet, cyclists should be using the energy we see in the community today to push for better road infrastructure. Because there's no guarantee that this momentum will last.

Similarly, climate change activists should have realized that the key problem about carbon pricing wasn't whether or not a tax or a cap-and-trade program was superior. The problem was that the public had not yet been sold on the idea that carbon has a cost. Instead of having a convoluted argument about whether or not a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax was the better solution, we should have used our political momentum to simply push for any carbon pricing system — to go to governments and say "here are the benefits of a carbon tax, and here are the benefits of a cap-and-trade. We'll support whichever one all the way." In other words, socializing governments and the public to accept a price on carbon was far more important than what the mechanism would be.

Unfortunately that didn't happen. Getting environmentalists to agree on policy is, itself, a collective action problem. How do you get a diverse and disparate group of passionate people to agree to such a strategy when each person is quite logically pushing for what they believe to be the best outcome?

Why it makes sense to bike without a helmet

As I was cycling home the other night I came across a few of my fellow students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Several of them asked me: Where is your bike helmet?

I get this question a lot. I have made a careful and conscientious choice to not wear a helmet when I’m cycling in urban areas because I strongly believe that it will help improve the overall safety of cycling in the long run.

It’s an unintuitive position to take. People have tried to reason with me that because I’ve spent so much money and time developing my brain, and the cost of an injury would be so devastating, it’s clearly more important to wear a helmet. But if we start looking into the research, there’s a strong argument to be made that wearing a bike helmet may actually increase your risk of injury, and increase the risk of injury of all the cyclists around you.

Why doesn’t everybody wear a helmet?

Let’s first get one thing out of the way: if you get into a serious accident, wearing a helmet will probably save your life. According to a 1989 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, riders with helmets had an 85% reduction in their risk of head injury and an 88% reduction in their risk of brain injury. That’s an overwhelming number that’s backed up study after study. Nearly every study of hospital admission rates, helmeted cyclists are far less likely to receive serious head and brain injuries. These studies confirm what we feel when we’re out for a spin on our bikes: We are exposed. Vulnerable. Needing of some level of protection.

Sharing (or wrestling) road space from a never-ending stream of one-tonne metal vehicles can be very intimidating. As a cyclist you are completely exposed. Cars and trucks are constantly zipping around you and there is no metal cage around you to protect yourself. So a helmet provides a level of protection from this danger. It makes you feel safer.

But a broader look at the statistics show that cyclists’ fear of head trauma is irrational if we compare it to some other risks. Head injuries aren’t just dangerous when you’re biking—head injuries are dangerous when you’re doing pretty much anything else. There’s ample evidence showing that there’s nothing particularly special about cycling when it comes to serious head injuries.

In 1978 a team of scientists undertook an epidemiological study of head injuries in the San Diego area. As part of that study they looked at the overall causes of head injury by transportation type.

Here’s what they found:

Over half of all head injuries occur in motor vehicles and more people were hospitalized after walking down the street than riding on a bicycle. Consider another statistic: According to a 2006 French study, pedestrians are 1.4 times more likely to receive a traumatic brain injury than unhelmeted cyclists. We can also approach it from the perspective of injuries per million hours from a 1996 Australian study looking at head injury risk before the beginning of any helmet laws:

Risk of head injury per million hours travelled

• Cyclist - 0.41

• Pedestrian - 0.80

• Motor vehicle occupant - 0.46

• Motorcyclist - 7.66

In each of these three examples we see that cyclists are not the group at highest risk for serious head injury.

Let's be clear. I am NOT trying to say that studies definitively show that cycling is safer than driving or walking. The studies that are out there give us mixed messages about the relative safety of the different modes of transport. What I am saying is that these statistics raise an interesting question: If we're so concerned about head injuries, why aren't we wearing helmets all the time? Why do places that have mandatory helmet laws for cyclists not have them for drivers or pedestrians? The same 1996 Australian study suggests that a mandatory helmet law for motor vehicle occupants could save seventeen times more people from death and serious head injury than a similar law for cyclists.

Yet, despite the clear threat of fatal head trauma from these other activities, virtually nobody insists that people wear helmets in these situations. In fact, doing so is openly mocked. Consider a sentence from this recent article from Forbes magazine that reports that vehicle accidents are the number one cause of fatal head injuries among teenagers : 

Short of suggesting all teen drivers and their passengers wear helmets, the survey determined that states which maintain the strictest graduated driver licensing laws (GDL) are the most effective in reducing both brain injuries and fatalities among young motorists.

Did you catch that? Despite the fact that car accidents are the number one cause of all fatal head trauma among teenagers, the suggestion that teens wear helmets when they drive is simply brushed off. The passage treats the idea of mandatory driving helmets as completely preposterous. Yet we insist that children wear bike helmets (in fact, in some places, it's the law) despite data that shows kids are more likely to die of head injuries riding in a car than riding on a bike. Children and toddlers on foot are far more likely to receive traumatic brain injuries than cyclists, yet parents who place protective headwear on their walking toddlers are openly ridiculed.

In other words, if the reason we are supposed to wear helmets while biking is to prevent serious head injury on the off-chance we get into an accident, then why is it socially acceptable for pedestrians and drivers to go about bare-headed? Why has cycling been singled out as an activity in need of head protection?

There's an important caveat to the results of that 1989 New England medical study: It shows that bike helmets may reduce the risk of head and brain injury by 85-88%—but only for those who get into accidents.

If we take a closer look at the article we see that both the experiment and the control groups studied are those who have already been hospitalized for bike injuries. If one were to examine the medical and epidemiological literature on bike helmet effectiveness, you'll find the exact same condition over and over: Studies show that helmeted cyclists who are hospitalized are far less likely to have serious head trauma than bare-headed cyclists that have been hospitalized.

But wouldn't this be true, regardless of the activity? Logically, helmeted drivers should also receive significantly fewer head injuries than bare-headed drivers. Similarly, helmeted pedestrians should be less likely to receive serious head trauma than bare-headed ones.

But studies that compare head injuries for drivers and pedestrians simply don't exist as there aren't enough helmeted drivers or pedestrians to make a comparison.  Science, after all, can only be accomplished on observable phenomena. If no one wears a helmet when they walk down the street, how can we measure the effectiveness of helmets on pedestrians? In other words, one of the reasons we think helmeted cyclists are safer than unhelmeted ones may be due to availability of information more than actual levels of head safety.

Maybe that explains why there's no comparable fear of driving or walking without a helmet.

How bike helmets may be harmful

But say you are someone who is concerned enough about head injury to wear a helmet while you're driving or while walking down the street. Is there an argument that says that wearing a helmet actually increases risk of injury?

Turns out that there is. There is some evidence that wearing a helmet may directly increase your chance of getting injured in the first place. In 2001, an article in the New York Times reported that the rate of bicycle head injuries had risen sharply — an increase of 51% — during a ten-year period when bicycle helmet use became widespread. This during a time when statistics showed an overall decrease in bicycling in the United States. No one knows for sure why head injuries among cyclists increased, but there are a few theories.

First, wearing a helmet changes how drivers perceive the cyclist. A University of Bath study showed that drivers, when overtaking cyclists, gave helmeted cyclists significantly less space than they gave cyclists who don't wear head protection. The study found that drivers were twice as likely to pass closely to a helmeted cyclist, and that drivers passed an average of 8.5 cm (3 1/3 inches) closer when the researcher was helmeted than when he was not. Not only does this increase the chance of being clipped by a vehicle, it leaves cyclists with far less maneuvering room to avoid other potentially injurious road hazards like potholes and icy patches.

Second, the design of the helmets themselves may increase the chance of some types of injuries when incidents do occur. Three separate studies have shown that bike helmets may increase the probability of certain types of neck injuries. There's some evidence that having an enlarged piece of plastic and foam on your head increases the probability of hitting an object that you'd be able to avoid in the first place, or that otherwise glancing contact with a surface becomes a full-on blow when the head is helmeted.

Finally, wearing a helmet may create a false sense of security and induce risk-taking that cyclists without head protection might not make. Those wearing helmets may take risks that they wouldn't otherwise take without head protection.

There are even some startling statistics that show helmets may have little to negative effects on the incidence of head injuries outside of the cycling world as well. A recent study from the National Ski Areas Association found that, despite a tripling of helmet use among skiers and snowboarders in the United States since 2003, there has been no reduction in the number of snow-sport related fatalities or brain injuries. On the contrary, and 2012 study at the Western Michigan University School of Medicine found an increase in head injuries between 2004 and 2010 despite an increase in helmet use, while a 2013 University of Washington study concluded that snow-sports related head injuries among youths and adolescents increased 250 percent from 1996-2010, a timeframe that also coincides with the increased use of head protection.

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Helmets = fewer cyclists = more danger

So as much as helmets decrease the chance of head injury when you get into an accident, they may actually increase your chance of getting into an injury in the first place.

There is another significant way that the use of helmets harm cyclists: Bike helmets discourage cycling. An Australian study on mandatory helmet laws concluded that laws that required cyclists to wear head protection actually decreased the number of cyclists on the road. The implication of this study? The fewer cyclists on the road, the less likely drivers will be accustomed to sharing road space with cyclists, ultimately increasing the hazards faced by cyclists and further dissuading people from hopping on their bikes. 

As an environmentalist, this is very troubling. To improve public health and the environment, we need to do the exact opposite. People should be encouraged to take a quick bike ride, not the other way around. Unfortunately our society has conditioned cyclists to feel unsafe without a helmet, even though wearing one might actually increase the chance of a collision with a vehicle; and even though other activities capable of inflicting serious head wounds are enjoyed bare-headed without stigma.

The ultimate way to make cycling safe is to promote a culture of cycling, not bike helmet use. Helmet use is very uncommon in bike-friendly cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where cyclists have been socialized to see cycling as a safe activity and where there is the infrastructure to support it. In order to promote the same culture here, we need to encourage people who don't bike that they should give it a try. If my biking without a helmet can help with that, then great. Especially since it's not conclusive that cycling with a helmet reduces your chance of getting injured.

If there was conclusive proof that bike helmets reduce the total number of serious head injuries compared to other normal activities, then I'd reconsider my stance. But if I'm not the kind of person who wears a helmet when I take a walk or get behind the wheel of a car, then there's no logic to me wearing one when I'm on a bike, particularly if I'm confident in my urban bike safety ability.

Meanwhile the proof is pretty strong that vehicles give me more space when I'm biking without a helmet. In a city biking, that's the kind of injury I'm most concerned about. And I want to encourage more people to get on their bicycles, because the more cyclists are out on the road, the safer I'll be.

Says Chris Bruntlett in Hush Magazine:

... it is hard to overstate how our unnatural obsession with head protection is stifling the growth of our bicycle culture. It achieves little, except deterring the most casual cyclists, who also happen to be the slowest and safest ones on the road.

A critical mass of cyclists improves the safety for everyone. (Source)

Pedalling forward

I'm not saying that adults should not wear bike helmets. The main point I'm trying to make is that, when compared to other forms of transportation, the fear of head trauma from cycling is likely out of proportion to the actual risk — and that fear is leading many advocates to admonish bare-headed cycling, contributing to a culture that's counter-productive to the overall safety of all cyclists.

If you're not comfortable biking without a helmet, then by all means, you should wear one. In fact, some studies suggest that those in demographics that have had less biking experience (like children) should, indeed, wear protective head gear (as should teenaged drivers). I, for one, would put on a helmet if I were ever to take on long-distance biking, since I'm not as familiar with sharing traffic patterns with fast-moving cars.

But let's not believe that helmets are the panacea of bike safety. It's probably far more helpful that cyclists learn how to assert their road rights while also safely interacting with traffic. Understanding how to navigate your bike through the streets is far more important to a cyclist's safety than the helmet on their head.

If you do choose to wear a helmet when biking, don't stop there: Learn how to properly and safely interact with vehicles. Share the road. Know your rights. Learn to take the lane and feel comfortable about it. Not only do motorists treat you differently when you're wearing a helmet, studies show that helmets may be giving you a false sense of safety. I've seen cyclists speed through red lights, ride at night with no lights, pass between the curb and traffic into the path of a turning vehicle, and treat stopped automobiles as if they were permanently immobile. Those are all dangerous maneuvers, regardless as to whether or not you're wearing a helmet.

For me, perhaps future studies will show that wearing a helmet actually reduces the chance of injury, or that vehicles will start giving helmeted cyclists more leeway, or that seeing helmeted riders does not discourage others from hopping onto a bike.

Until then I ride the streets of New Haven without head gear hoping that it will encourage more people to get out on two wheels.

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Image Source - P.M. Lydon / CC BY-SA)

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Why we need environmental literacy

The other night I had dinner with a friend of mine from elementary school. When the topic moved to environmentalism I was given the opportunity to administer a simple test: 

I posed to my friend a simple question — The kind of question a six-year old might ask his father:

Do you know why the wind blows?

In order to protect the environment, it helps if people have a basic understanding of how it all works. But her response was the same that many other friends give me when posed the same question: A blank stare. Fumbling for words. Mumbling something about blue and red lines on the weather report.

It's remarkable to me that such a basic component of life on this planet is completely unknown by otherwise well-educated people. Whereas most have a basic understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics, those outside of environmental studies or geography never receive a basic education on some of the basic ways that Planet Earth functions. You would imagine that it should be mandatory topic in high school.

Sure, we learn about volcanoes and plate techtonics. And perhaps we learn about animals and food chains in elementary school. But that's generally where the details end. When, at 21 years old, I learned that the oceans affect and regulate temperature, gases and even airborne pollution, I was amazed.

As a result we have particle physicists who have a basic understanding of cellular biology, but can't explain why the ocean is salty. We have neuroscientists who can explain chemical combustion, but struggle to explain the factors that cause rain. Perhaps this is why we have scientists that create genetically-modified crops, but fail to realize that their seeds can, and do, spread throughout an ecosystem.

This is an enormous problem. How are we supposed to solve climate change if people don't have a basic understanding about atmospheric currents? How can citizens make informed decisions on fracking when no one is ever taught basic hydrology? 

As an environmentalist, 90% of my job is educating people on basic information they should already know. Items that, if there were an owner's manual for the planet, would be there the same way people learn about the electrical wiring and the plumbing in their house. People have no problem understanding the link between breathing and blood, but many have no idea how fossil fuels are actually used to generate electricity.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Earth sciences aren't mandatory is because they cross into the realms of biology, physics, and chemistry, and delineating which topic area goes into which scientific silo can be a convoluted process. Should glaciation be taught in Earth science, or should we place it in the realm of physics or, since animals inhabit these areas, into biology?

But if that were truly the problem, then why can I recall a few months during my high school years where I was learning quantum physics in chemistry class and organic chemistry during biology? Fitting these subjects awkwardly into a course description didn't seem to be a problem then.

If we're serious about a transformation to a sustainable society, we need to make basic Earth science education a mandatory subject. It's elementary.

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I now realize I was a climate change denier

For some time now I've been trying to write down my feelings about what CNN is calling Superstorm Sandy.

I've been working on climate change for ten years now. I earned my undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies, where I lived and breathed facts and forecasts on how global warming would drastically affect our humanity's interconnectedness with the world. Before the Arctic became nearly completely ice-free in the summer; before my home town regularly suffered 10- and 15-degree hotter-than-normal temperatures; before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans. I had learned that this phenomenon was happening and would only get worse.

But, I have to admit that a part of me really hoped that global warming wasn't happening. Actually, let me rephrase that: I didn't believe that climate change was happening. Of course I knew the statistics. I saw the news reports. I intellectually understood what was going on. But I did not believe it.

Let me be clear. I'm not calling myself that kind of climate change denialist. I know what climate change is. I trust the scientific consensus. Global warming is a serious issue that needs a diversity of policy solutions. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between knowledge and belief. And it's easier to 'believe' something if you feel that your personal bubble is bursting.

After all, I've never been to New Orleans. Or Tuvalu. Or Pakistan. Or the Arctic. As serious as these crises may have been, I had no personal frame-of-reference to the changes there. It felt more personal when Toronto got hit by heatwave after heatwave, but there was little direct destruction caused to the city itself. It was easy, even for someone like me, to think 'Perhaps the professional climate skeptics were right...'. The heat wave in my home town could just be part of the normal variability. After all, I studied Earth Sciences, so I knew what they were saying was a definite possibility.

But there's something about New York City. New York is embedded into the Western psyche. It's why everyone knows that JFK is also an airport and why taxicabs look strange when they're not yellow. New York is the model for how we think a city should be. Look at the word 'downtown': It's now English vernacular meaning 'central business district' even though the term makes no sense anywhere except on Manhattan.

And the icon is so powerful that it's intentionally targeted by terrorists and film directors alike, because they know we'll have a visceral reaction to the sight of the Empire State Building under siege.

When I see a hurricane flicking off the New York skyline and rising waters submerging the its subway tunnels and iconic taxicabs, global warming ceases to be an intellectual exercise to me. Rather than just knowing that the climate is changing, I start feeling it. I start believing it.

For someone who's been doing this as long as I have, realizing that a part of me has been denying global warming for this long is a little bit shocking.

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