Downhill From Here: How climate change threatens cycling as we know it

UK is once again an outlier on ebikes – most of the rest of Europe they are either utility vehicles or are older folk pootling around for leisure

Only this week I was sat in a meeting where one of the UKs largest water companies were back pedaling (excuse the pun) on a new large scale water infrastructure project (which if implemented would devastate MTB trails in a national park with 20million people living within 1 hours travel time). The need for the project has been brought about by climate change and water scarcity risks over the next 30 years. The project has been put on the back burner for the moment, however may be brought out again in a a few years, and will be replaced by smaller scale projects, which also pose a risk of restricting/ preventing a generation of MTB cyclists from enjoying large areas of a national park.

No we don’t, because as has been discussed at length on other threads unless all the worlds governments agree to do something meaningful then it’s a waste of time

In terms of scale I get what you’re saying but it’s also convenient blame shifting and buck passing for people who don’t want to change.

Carrying on doing what we do suits them just fine. They also won’t change while we don’t.

Yes the govts are serving BP and Shell etc but if we all (for ex) stopped flying it would inconvenience us but uses our capitalist votes well and change would happen. If airline demand plummeted other enterprises and investment would fill the gaps in time. A practical fix/argument for a fast fix, no. But change happens slowly then quickly (like the climate will I suspect). It’s the type of change we can all make, mostly, and now.

Like flying to ride … the unfortunate truth is that we can all make more difference to our C02 impact by not flying anywhere. That means we lose out or do less nice things while watching others carry on regardless. But carrying on ‘because they do’ is inaction and being part of the problem. Pick a side, I reckon.

I say all that as someone struggling to do a job that doesn’t involve flying, I can’t change the world, I can only work on it and make my own changes.

 

UK is once again an outlier on ebikes – most of the rest of Europe they are either utility vehicles or are older folk pootling around for leisure

emtb were the norm in verbier this year. Else are the only people at the col de Mille who hasn’t used e-bikes

The need for the project has been brought about by climate change and water scarcity risks over the next 30 years. The project has been put on the back burner for the moment,

In order to protect shareholders interests?

In order to protect shareholders interests?

More because it’s a massive and very costly project and involves unpopular things like destroying large chunks of National Park (which was kind of how those reservoirs were built in the first place but that was before inconvenient things like legislation and environmental protections).