KCC was founded on the principles of inclusion, equity and diversity. With a collapsing ecosystem, human rights and values like these are the first to fall. How might we as a club, move the needle on a disaster that is already upon us?

Not a doom and gloom thread. A brainstorming ways to make us carbon negative thread. A how can we raise awareness around this subject thread. 

Off the bat, I'd like to propose two actions:

1. For the upcoming kit redesign we add a nonprofit that is attacking climate head-on— NGOs like 350 or political action groups like Extinction Rebellion—and support them with a portion of our dues. 
2. Switch to a carbon negative kit supplier and/or apply pressure on Champsys to make changes. Switching to carbon neutral shipping would be a great first ask.

Happy to lead a board subcommittee on this.

Planting trees is not the answer by the way. It's too late. Switching from carbon and removing greenhouse gases is.

Thanks John for starting this conversation. I think it's a natural and important direction for us to move. As bicyclists we're already a part of the solution in modelling bicycling as an alternative to carbon intensive forms of transportation. I think most, if not all, of us use bikes as our main mode of transportation, and probably prostelytize the biking life widely. I'm down with the suggestions you made. They're relatively easy to put in place and I think they would be good at sparking conversations with other clubs about taking similar actions. I do a fair amount of education and advocacy work around the connection between bicyling and carbon footprint reduction and getting more people out riding through my work with my youth bike club at El Puente. Since the demise of Recycle a Bicycle there is no longer any organization taking used bikes from the waste stream and training youth to refurbish them for their use. I digress, but there are many ways to go, things that can be done... I'd be happy to be be part of a committee focused on this.

That's awesome Joe, thanks for sharing all the good work you do. Sad to hear about Recycle a Bicycle. This is the decade to take action!

If @David Yang (kit orders?) and @PatrickGrehan (sponsorships) could chime in on this it'd be great to discuss. I don't see the 2022 board listed on our site. @StephenAschkenes could I help you get that posted?

Technology: Stephen Aschkenes
Treasurer: Jim Nelson
Vice President: David Yang
President: Matt Budofsky
Membership: Michael Cumming
Development: Eloy Anzola
Public Relations: James Reeder
Sponsorship: Patrick Grehan
Secretary: Adam Yaffe

@JohnMalcolmsonwhere will do! I’m thinking for more visibility it may be good to post it in the sidebar or header on our home page. I’m away this weekend but will do once I’m home

^ Thanks Stephen, previously we had it in Quick Links. Fell off somehow. 

I’ve got contacts in climate activism and organizing. I’ll drop them a line and ask them for some ideas.

This is a great discussion. We can certainly have that discussion with our kit sponsor. Not sure if there are carbon negative kit suppliers out there right now. Would be good to find out. 

PatrickGrehan said:

This is a great discussion. We can certainly have that discussion with our kit sponsor. Not sure if there are carbon negative kit suppliers out there right now. Would be good to find out. 

Several weeks ago I heard a Cyclingtips nerd alert podcast about a company that recycles carbon. If the company rep is to be believed it’s an incredibly eco friendly operation and they accept donations of carbon to recycle. I thought that Kissena could work to collect and ship carbon bikes and wheels that would end up in landfill and ship it to them. Maybe we could partner with hilltop on this. We would be responsible for shipping costs (I think they are in Tennessee)

Thanks Patrick:

1. A recycled/Sustainable custom kit supplier—Isadore: 
   - All shipping Co2 neutral
   - biodegradable packaging
   - natural and recycled fabrics
   - Pricelist: https://isadore.com/media/2022/01/8/5/isadore-personal-22-pricelist.pdf
   - Not as wide a range of offerings as Champsys. Possible we could split orders between the two.
2. For Champsys discussion: UPS also offers CO2 neutral (offset) delivery service from Shenzen, China to USA
3. Recycling carbon fiber. I like the idea and it is definitely worth supporting. Unfortunately it doesn't address atmospheric carbon/methane (in landfill carbon fiber doesn't degrade, it stays trapped). So could we look at another cause that's addressing CO2/Greenhouse gases?

JohnMalcolmson said:

We're headed to 1.5°C warming before 2026 ....

Well then in addition to supporting an NGO and looking for suppliers that prioritize reducing CO2/Greenhouse gasses, what can we do every weekend as a team and individually?

One simple thing is to carpool whenever possible. Given the stats you've cited above, it's crazy that people are driving separately to the same events as so many other NYC racers. This applies to people like myself who use zipcar/rental cars, not just car owners. I do realize we're still in a pandemic ...

We already have a travel coordination thread on our Slack channel that we encourage club members to use.

We could extend this idea to the NYC racing community by starting a facebook 'share-ride-race' page that serves as a hub for any NYC racer to coordinate carpooling or public trans options.

Another small way to help is making your own ride food and using reusable containers to bring that food, rather than single use wrappers. I'm looking into what kind of wrapper would be best and it seems like a reusable beeswax paper is the front runner. Anyone do this and have a preferred method?

For rides where I'm going through 2+ bottles, I make my own drink mix and bring it in zip locks.  Works great and the DIY bit makes it way cheaper than using pre-made mix.

James Reeder said:

JohnMalcolmson said:

We're headed to 1.5°C warming before 2026 ....

Well then in addition to supporting an NGO and looking for suppliers that prioritize reducing CO2/Greenhouse gasses, what can we do every weekend as a team and individually?

One simple thing is to carpool whenever possible. Given the stats you've cited above, it's crazy that people are driving separately to the same events as so many other NYC racers. This applies to people like myself who use zipcar/rental cars, not just car owners. I do realize we're still in a pandemic ...

We already have a travel coordination thread on our Slack channel that we encourage club members to use.

We could extend this idea to the NYC racing community by starting a facebook 'share-ride-race' page that serves as a hub for any NYC racer to coordinate carpooling or public trans options.

@James Reeder Great idea! A first step would be to sort the tech to enable it. Then approach CRCA board and Brooklyn clubs. 

An important thread and a great step for the club.
I'm always hesitant about the "live your life greener" steps because the bulk of greenhouse gasses come from industries that individual consumers have little direct control over. By all means do what we can individually (vegetarianism seems to have a lot of leverage by the way) but don't let that dominate the club's efforts. 

I'd suggest finding a well aligned PAC and doing things to help raise money towards it. The club can ask for a voluntary donation at each KCC sponsored race and or hold events to raise money. The club can also encourage members to donate directly.



https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

Jules raises a valid point.  Collective action is our only way out of the climate emergency.

Having written that, I think we're in a good spot to try to advance bike commuting.  Considering we live in NYC, our member base is probably 'greener' than the average American, so, too, our neighbors.  So that 14% is something we do have some influence over.  Though I haven't done the math on how many car rides we'd have to replace or average fuel economy we'd have to increase to drop that 14% number.  

I have, over the past several years, made it one of my missions to promote bike commuting at my kids schools.  The pandemic certainly got in my way.  I have, however, gotten the city to install bike racks outside my daughter's school--I can help anyone with this or getting a bike corral in place of parking spots near schools.  It also took too long, but I finally learned how to get bike racks installed on public school property.  The rules changed over the past few years, and I had to speak to multiple authorities within the system and have some ridiculous experiences to understand how the system currently works.  

Thanks for your thoughts Joe, James, David, Patrick, Matt, Greg, Jules and JP. Would any of you be interested in starting a subcommittee?

As far as I'm concerned any ideas that can help remove the 30 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere every year is on the table... maybe not geoengineering just yet.  

@J@"James Reeder" Are you up for taking your idea further?

@mugwump would you consider writing a How-To-Get-Bike-Racks-Installed-In-Public-Schools-Cheat-Sheet for TransAlt?

@Jules do you have a PAC in mind? https://www.lcvvictoryfund.org/ perhaps?

Yes, I'm interested. My area of experience has been primarily in getting young riders on bikes with the goal of getting them to see the personal and environmental benefits of being life long cyclists. I did a long ride through Brownsville and East New York with my club last weekend and was made accutely aware of how limited the bike infrasturcture is there and how prevelant the car culture and lack of green space is. I worked with DOT and Transalt in the past to map out routes for bike paths in these communities of color that are lacking them. I'd be interested in working on this and any other related initiative. 

@JohnMalcolmson I didn't have a specific one in mind but that one looks good. The main point was to find the biggest lever to push on and avoid getting snookered by the "ride your bike and recycle often" ruse.

@Joe Matunis let's see if we can chat on the next group ride. Are you planning on a weekend ride anytime soon?

@Jules I'm with you on the big lever. But I think we are at a point where we shouldn't hesitate to pull all the other levers too. We both know we're headed into a gerrymandered mess in the midterms, where the Dem's lose the house and any hope of setting a green agenda. Frankly, I think we all need to start thinking sea change. Or New Zealand. 

@JohnMalcolmson we regularly meet and ride on Thursdays after school and once or twice/month on weekends, depending on availability. School is winding down so I'm going to be planning some dates with them for summer rides. Discussing on a group ride sounds good.

 I agree with you on pushing all levers, especially the ones in front of us. It's so easy to fall into the "it's too big, nothing can be done" state of mind. While it is too late, it's also never too late. Many times big changes start with small actions that resonate and grow.

@JohnMalcolmson First, grateful you brought this up. I try to do my part to fight climate change in my non-cycling life, but never occurred to me to carry any of it over into here. 

I posed an open question to our rep about ChampSys's initiatives on climate change and, while modest, they are doing two small things that I can get behind. They and we can certainly do more, but as pointed out earlier in this thread (and something I personally agree with) every small lever counts even as we work towards finding those larger levers to collectively pull. 

1. They introduced the Performance+ Eco jersey made of Repreve fabric. These are the only jerseys I put in orders for and will continue to purchase with ChampSys from now on:
https://champ-sys.com/product/performance-eco-jersey/

2. They are using 100% fully biodegradable, *home* compostable packaging from Tüv Austria:
https://champ-sys.com/social-responsibility/


I'll bring up the topic around carbon neutral shipping or carbon offsets that we can help support through CS. If there are other local clubs/teams that use ChampSys as their kit supplier, perhaps this is something we can collectively request/pledge towards to show that there is broad interest within the community which may be helpful for them when creating a scalable program.

###

I vacillate between action and cynicism all the time. On some level I realize that for all my time spent carefully sorting recyclables, trying to purchase and support "green" products, companies, and politicians etc., there are much larger built-in institutional forces that seem immovable. But also to reach a higher level of action and advocacy, there needs to be a collective push as citizens and consumers to raise the baseline of sentiment to the larger forces and to gain traction. It can be slow going, but without the initial bit of momentum the inertia of doing nothing makes it that much more difficult to move the boulder.

What about the elephant in the room?

I.e. us (including myself) using a tremendous amount of energy while being on the smart trainer hours a week, blasting the fan and most likely having an entertainment system going on while we could just go outside and ride?

Kissena making a pledge not to use them could be a meaningful commitment. 

Remy Forgues said:

What about the elephant in the room?

I.e. us (including myself) using a tremendous amount of energy while being on the smart trainer hours a week, blasting the fan and most likely having an entertainment system going on while we could just go outside and ride?

Kissena making a pledge not to use them could be a meaningful commitment. 

I don't understand why all that power can't be output. Seems absurd to generate a couple of kilowatts and still need to pull current from the wall.

@Jules

Seems to me like the issue is a desire to build such a trainer.  I'd think there could be a bike-powered battery that could be charged at the end or beginning of a ride, like a warmup or cooldown, and that would hold more than enough charge for the meat of the workout to do more than power the rest.

I found a few links on what is currently available

https://gearjunkie.com/news/energym-regen-electricity-bike

"How does it work? The RE:GEN bike captures power generated during a workout, and then stores it inside a 100Wh battery called the Ohm. Once you finish a ride, simply unhook the Ohm from the bike, and you’re ready to start charging electronic devices. Basically, “burn calories, not carbon,” 


https://www.thegreenmicrogym.com/electricity-generating-equipment-2/

"The Cost to Produce and Purchase the Equipment is the Same
Until late 2014, although the technology to retrofit exercise equipment to send electricity back to the grid existed, it was not cost effective to do so. You would have to purchase regular equipment and then retrofit it.  That’s what I had been doing since 2009. It worked fine for me in my gym, but there was no way to scale up.  But now, SportsArt Fitness has come out with a line of grid-tied, plug into the wall fitness equipment, priced competitively with other gym-quality exercise equipment.  Their machines are priced on the high end of the gym equipment spectrum, but are not overpriced based on their quality or because they have grid-tied capability.  The reasons they are able to do this: 1. They are large enough ($100 million+ annual sales) to be able to do large production runs of the equipment, and 2. They are simply taking out old electronics and putting in new electronics.  The price of materials and components has not changed for them.  They just had to design new equipment."


But don't expect it to power your house

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/12/08/504790589/could-you-power-your-home-with-a-bike?t=1655227228418

"Pedaling a bike at a reasonable pace generates about 100 watts of power. That's the same energy-per-time used by a 100-watt lightbulb. So if you pedaled eight hours every day for 30 days (no weekends off), then doing the math, you'd generate 24 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy. Note that I'm not worrying about the efficiency in the electrical systems involved, which would drop the number closer to 16 kWh.

That's only 2.4 percent of the energy your house sucks up each month via the lights, the dishwasher, running the AC and playing video games on your PS4."

If I remember GCN has a video looking into the concept of powering houses, lights, etc. by riding the trainer and it was wild how little power we as bikers actually make in the grand scheme or what it takes to power our modern lives

Sounding like a coldplay concert 

Joe Matunis said:

Thanks John for starting this conversation. I think it's a natural and important direction for us to move. As bicyclists we're already a part of the solution in modelling bicycling as an alternative to carbon intensive forms of transportation. I think most, if not all, of us use bikes as our main mode of transportation, and probably prostelytize the biking life widely. I'm down with the suggestions you made. They're relatively easy to put in place and I think they would be good at sparking conversations with other clubs about taking similar actions. I do a fair amount of education and advocacy work around the connection between bicyling and carbon footprint reduction and getting more people out riding through my work with my youth bike club at El Puente. Since the demise of Recycle a Bicycle there is no longer any organization taking used bikes from the waste stream and training youth to refurbish them for their use. I digress, but there are many ways to go, things that can be done... I'd be happy to be be part of a committee focused on this.

@Joe Matunis @mugwump I happen to pass this store on Saturday , it appears Recycle a bicycle has moved locations 
to Fulton / Clinton avenue in Brooklyn 

It's a pretty good space.

It's been there for at least a year.  For better or worse, it doesn't have the junkyard vibe of the place in the east village or the place in DUMBO.

@Mark Taylor @mugwump. The store is still there, but the organization behind it no longer exists. The stores originally functioned to support the in-school bike programs that RAB sponsored in many middle and high schools around the city -including my school, El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice. RAB received donations of used bikes and refurbished and sold the best of them at the store and the others were available at their LIC warehouse for students to choose, refurbish and own. The schools supported by RAB were given sets of shop tools and repair stands and trained in bike mechanics. We were regularly re-supplied with bearing, cables, brake pads, grease etc. as needed. A few years ago RAB merged with Bike NY, but the relationship didn't work out. Karen Overton, the founder and director of RAB, left, and Bike NY dropped the Earn-A-Bike in-school program. Karen still runs some aspects of the program from the LIC warehouse -she's supported by the Kids Ride Club, (affiliated with NYCC and Woodhull Hospital), for the time being- but the supplies of bikes and parts are no longer available to schools. Most of the programs are in limbo. I continue to ride and do mechanics training with my students, but they can no longer earn bikes and I used my last brake cable last week... Over its 30 years RAB'S programming put thousands of NYC students who would otherwise never ride onto bikes and introduced them to the larger world of biking advocacy, (and biking advocates to them). I've been in conversation with other teachers and Karen about how to revive this program, but its currently on life support. I'd welcome any thoughts or interest members of the Kissena community might have.