Tag Archives: ecological footprint

April 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

ecological footprint vs. planetary boundary

This article in Ecological Economics tries to link the concepts of planetary boundaries and ecological footprint.

While in recent years both environmental footprints and planetary boundaries have gained tremendous popularity throughout the ecological and environmental sciences, their relationship remains largely unexplored. By investigating the roots and developments of environmental footprints and planetary boundaries, this paper challenges the isolation of the two research fields and provides novel insights into the complementary use of them. Our analysis demonstrates that knowledge of planetary boundaries improves the policy relevance of environmental footprints by providing a set of consensus-based estimates of the regenerative and absorptive capacity at the global scale and, in reverse, that the planetary boundaries framework benefits from well-grounded footprint models which allow for more accurate and reliable estimates of human pressure on the planet’s environment. A framework for integration of environmental footprints and planetary boundaries is thus proposed. The so-called footprint–boundary environmental sustainability assessment framework lays the foundation for evolving environmental impact assessment to environmental sustainability assessment aimed at measuring the sustainability gap between current magnitudes of human activities and associated capacity thresholds. As a first attempt to take advantage of environmental footprints and planetary boundaries in a complementary way, there remain many gaps in our knowledge. We have therefore formulated a research agenda for further scientific discussions, mainly including the development of measurable boundaries in relation to footprints at multiple scales and their trade-offs, and the harmonization of the footprint and boundary metrics in terms of environmental coverage and methodological choices. All these points raised, in our view, will play an important role in setting practical and tangible policy targets for adaptation and mitigation of worldwide environmental unsustainability.

I like ecological footprint because there is no ambiguity between stocks and flows. Natural capital is the underlying stock. The ecological footprint is a proxy for natural capital, the equivalent land area required to produce the annual flow of ecosystem services. It is very intuitive that if the ecological footprint is greater than the size of the Earth, you are digging yourself a  deeper hole each year, and if it is less, you are digging yourself out of the hole. Natural capital is like a huge trust fund or endowment that we can live off of for a long time. But if we are consuming more than the interest produced each year, there will eventually come a day when the trust fund is depleted.

Planetary boundaries, on the other hand, try to measure a mish-mash of stocks and flows. Fertile farmland, for example, is clearly a stock of natural capital. But the amount of fresh water consumed each year is an annual flow of ecosystem services. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is a stock – a sort of anti-ecosystem service, because it represents the opposite of the atmosphere’s ability to absorb further emissions (which are an annual flow). So it all sounds very scholarly, but it needs some cleanup before it will be a clear framework for figuring out what course of action we should be taking.

urban agriculture and carbon emissions

Here’s an article from Landscape and Urban Planning making a connection between urban agriculture and greenhouse gas emission reductions. It makes sense – any food that comes from nearby will reduce transportation energy use, air pollution, and carbon emissions. We could either decide to do this for ethical reasons, or we could build more of those external costs in the price. It probably makes sense to do some of each.

The expansion of urban agriculture assists in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions not only by producing food but also by reducing the amount of food transported from farming areas and therefore reducing the food mileage. This study seeks to estimate “the expected GHG reduction effect” in the case of a revitalization of urban agriculture. For this purpose, this study first calculated the area available for urban farming by targeting the metropolitan area of Seoul and then calculated the production per unit area by focusing on “the crops suitable for urban agriculture”. Using this estimated value, the study estimated crop production, the resultant food mileage decrement, and the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that could be obtained if the Seoul metropolis introduced urban agriculture. The results estimated that if the Seoul metropolis implemented urban agriculture in a 51.15 km2 area, it would be possible to reduce CO2 emissions by 11.67 million kg annually. This numerical value is the same amount of CO2 absorbed annually by 20.0 km2 of pine forests and 10.2 km2 of oak tree forests that are 20 years old. From the perspective of GHG reduction effects in the transportation sector, urban agriculture is expected to produce a considerable effect in diverse aspects such as the habituation of green growth, self-sufficiency, and food security.

photosynthesis

From the journal Cell, here is a long, technical but interesting open source article on photosynthesis. First, it concludes that the current rate of increase in grain yields will not be sufficient to keep up with population and demand growth through 2050. Then they go through a range of biotechnology research avenues that hold promise to boost photosynthetic efficiency by up to 60%. They argue that the pipeline from beginning the research to seeing it pay off could be 20-30 years. With a lag this long, we can’t just wait until scarcity develops and drives up food prices enough to make the investments obviously profitable. Instead, the research needs to start now.

Two questions come to mind. First, is it the right approach to rely on biotechnology to increase yields so that demand can keep growing forever? Or should we be finding smarter ways to reduce waste, modify lifestyles and make do with what we are producing now? If we remove sunlight as a limiting factor, something else may become the limiting factor, such as water or phosphorus.

Second, if we create super-efficient crops is there a chance they will escape into native ecosystems and choke out all our native plants? Maybe the kinds of modifications that help annual crops produce more edible biomass under industrial field conditions won’t help them compete in the wild at all – you don’t hear about genetically modified corn or wheat straying far afield now. But it still seems like the ethics need to be considered.

 

Sustainable Cities Index

Before I read the new Sustainable Cities Index published by ARCADIS, I gave some thought to how I would put together a sustainable cities index. (Disclosure: I work in the same industry as this company, but have no affiliation with it.) Here is what I would try to do, at least for the environmental component (I haven’t given much thought to the social component):

  • Estimate the consumption (food, water, energy, and materials) of people in that city. Also estimate the waste produced – solid waste, air emissions, and water pollution – that is not recycled in some way.
  • Try to figure out roughly where this food, water, energy, and stuff came from, whether from within the city or without. Figure out the impact on soils, water bodies, the atmosphere, and natural ecosystems of producing all these materials. You could try to express this in land terms, energy terms, dollar terms, theoretically even information terms – there is no best or perfect way, although “ecological footprint” in terms of land is possibly the most intuitive.
  • Figure out, if everybody on Earth lived in cities exactly like a particular city, whether the Earth could support that indefinitely, and what the ultimate state of the remaining natural ecosystems would be.

By doing this, you would have an absolute benchmark to compare any city against, rather than just a relative benchmark to compare cities to each other. The problem with a relative benchmark is that it doesn’t tell you whether your best cities are good enough.

A possible variation would be to attribute impacts to the city where a particular corporation or industry is headquartered, rather than where the demand is. Let’s say a particularly unsustainable, sprawling development pattern is built in India, but is designed by a firm based on Singapore, or Geneva, or wherever. Or people in a city with very clean air and water eat food grown on plantations owned by corporations headquartered in the city, but grown in recently burned-down rainforests overseas. You could assign all or a portion of the blame to the designer or owner rather than the people living where the impact is actually occurring, who may not always have had much of a choice.

Now, let’s see what ARCADIS did. I don’t mean to be too critical – good for them for doing something and giving people something to think about, which is more than most companies do.

The People sub-index rates transport infrastructure, health, education, income inequality, work-life balance, the dependency ratio and green spaces within cities. These indicators can be broadly thought of as capturing ‘quality of life’ for the populace in the respective cities.
The Planet sub-index looks at city energy consumption and renewable energy share, recycling rates, greenhouse gas emissions, natural catastrophe risk, drinking water, sanitation and air pollution.
The Profit sub-index examines performance from a business perspective, combining measures of transport infrastructure (rail, air, other public transport and commuting time), ease of doing business, the city’s importance in global economic networks, property and living costs, GDP per capita and energy efficiency.

2014 Report Card

It’s taken me a while to get out a “year in review” post for 2014, but anyway, here it is. This won’t be a masterpiece of the essay form. I’m just going to ramble on about some interesting trends and themes from the year, along with a few relevant links.

The critical question this blog tries to answer is, is our civilization failing or not? I’ll talk about our human economy, our planetary system, and make some attempt to tie the two together.

Overall Human Health and Wellbeing. First, there are some very happy statistics to report. For example, worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. What better measure of progress could there be than more happy, healthy childhoods? And it’s not just about increasing wealth – people in developing countries today have much better health outcomes at the same level of wealth compared to developing countries of the past (for example, Indonesia today vs. the United States when it passed the same income level). It’s hard to argue against the idea that economic growth and technological change have obviously eliminated a lot of human suffering. So, I think the important questions are, will these trends continue? Is the system stable? Can the natural environment continue to support this trend indefinitely? There may also be an important question of whether we had the right to exploit the natural environment to get us to the point where we are now, but that is an academic question at this point.

Financial System Instability. Let’s talk about the stability of our human economic system. The U.S. economy may finally seem to be picking up from the aftermath of the severe 2007-8 financial crisis, but it is certainly far below where it would be if that hadn’t happened and the prior growth trend had just continued since then. The rest of the world isn’t doing so well, however – Europe and Japan are looking particularly slow if not in an outright deflationary spiral, at the same time developing countries appear to be slowing down. Some are calling this a “new normal” for the world economy. More scary than that, the industry-written regulations and perverse incentives allowing the excessive risk taking that caused the crisis have not been fully addressed and the whole episode could recur in the short term.

Thoughts on Ecosystem and Economic “Pulsing”. 2007-8 was a textbook financial crisis – although it was caused by novel forms of money and risk taking beyond the direct reach of government regulators and central banks, it was not that different from crises caused by plain old speculation and over-lending back when there were no central banks around. It’s hard to draw a direct link from the financial crisis to ecosystem services, climate change, or natural resource scarcity. However, if we think about natural ecosystems, they are resilient to outside stressors up to a point – say, moderate fluctuations in temperature, hydrology, or pressure from non-native species. However, say a major fluctuation happens such as a major flood or fire that causes serious damage. In the absence of major outside stressors, the system will eventually recover to its original state, but in the presence of major outside stressors, even if they did not cause the flood or fire, it may never bounce back all the way. In the same way, our human economy may appear resilient to the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, soil erosion, and so forth for a long time, but then when something comes out of left field, like a major financial crisis, war, or epidemic, we may not be able to recover to our previous trend. This probably also applies to the effects of technology on employment, as discussed below. In the absence of major shocks coming from outside the system, we’ll see a long, slow slide in employment and possibly a long, slow rise in energy and food prices, with so much noise in the signal that it will be easy for the naysayers to hold sway for long periods of time. But when those major events happen, we may see sudden, painful changes that we have no obvious way of mitigating quickly.

Technological Change: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Automation, and Employment. After decades of slow but steady progress, these technologies are really coming into their own. Robots are being used to keep miners in line and to drive cars, for example. Manufacturing has become a high-tech industry. As computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow. At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

Will our society recognize and solve this employment problem? American corporate society, and its admirers around the world, are unlikely to. Something very similar to this happened with agricultural automation in the early- to mid-20th century, and with globalization in the mid- to late-20th century. As agriculture became more automated, many displaced workers moved from rural areas in the U.S. southeast to urban areas in the U.S. northeast, looking for factory work. Unfortunately, the factory jobs that existed previously were being moved to developing countries with abundant low-wage labor. The pockets of poverty, unemployment, and social problems created by these forces have not been adequately addressed to this day. To the individual worker, it doesn’t much matter whether your job is being taken by a local robot or an overseas human. Unemployment created by technological forces today could resemble what was created by globalization yesterday, only on a much larger scale. We can only hope that the larger scale will drive real political solutions, such as better education and training, sharing of available work, and more widespread ownership of the labor-saving technology.

Of course, one of the earliest and probably the most shameful example of a modern capitalist system generating wealth for an elite few at the expense of workers is the American slavery system of the 18th and 19th centuries. We just can’t trust amoral, self-interested private enterprise to maximize welfare in the absence of a strong moral compass coming from the larger society. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

Another example of extreme corporate immorality: Public apathy over climate change in the U.S. may have been manufactured by a cynical, immoral corporate disinformation campaign over climate change taken right out of the tobacco companies’ playbook.

The Gospel of Shareholder Value. There is an important debate over whether people who run corporations have any ethical responsibility to anything other than profit seeking. Well duh, everyone on Earth has an ethical responsibility. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned. There is even evidence that the ideology of profit maximization is a drag on innovation. Except billions of people out there who have worshiped at business schools would disagree with me. And I don’t want to offend anyone’s religion. Noam Chomsky had a quote that I particularly loved, so I am going to repeat it here:

In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger. So take the financial crisis. One of the reasons for it is that — there are several, but one is — say if Goldman Sachs makes a risky transaction, they — if they’re paying attention — cover their own potential losses. They do not take into account what’s called systemic risk, that is, the possibility that the whole system will crash if one of their risky transactions goes bad. That just about happened with AIG, the huge insurance company. They were involved in risky transactions which they couldn’t cover. The whole system was really going to collapse, but of course state power intervened to rescue them. The task of the state is to rescue the rich and the powerful and to protect them, and if that violates market principles, okay, we don’t care about market principles. The market principles are essentially for the poor. But systemic risk is an externality that’s not considered, which would take down the system repeatedly, if you didn’t have state power intervening. Well there’s another one, that’s even bigger — that’s destruction of the environment. Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.

Our Ecological Footprint. WWF issued an updated Living Planet Report in 2014 suggesting that our annual consumption of natural resources (including the obvious ones like energy and water extraction, straightforward ones like the ability to grow food, but also the less obvious ones like ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products) is continuing to exceed what the Earth can handle each year by at least 50%. We’re like spoiled trust fund babies – we have such incredible resources at our disposable, we never learn to live within our means and one day the resources run out, even if that takes a long time. As we recover from the financial crisis, we have a chance to do things differently, but the connections are not being made to the right kinds of investments in infrastructure, skills, and protection of natural capital that would set the stage for long-term sustainable growth in the future.

Other Big Stories from 2014:

  • World War I. 100 years ago, World War I was in full swing. Remember The Guns of August? Well, that was August 1914 they were talking about. Let’s hope we’re not about to blunder into another conflict. But (and I’m cheating a little here because I read this in 2015), the World Economic Forum named “interstate conflict” as both high probability and high consequence in its global risk report.
  • Ebola. Obviously, Ebola was a very bad thing that happened to a whole lot of people. To those of us lucky enough that we weren’t directly in its path, it is a chance to selfishly reflect whether Ebola or something even worse could be coming down the pike. Let’s hope not.
  • Severe Drought and Water Depletion in the Western U.S.: California has been in the midst of a historic drought, although they got some rain recently. Some are describing this as the new normal. Besides rainfall, glaciers, snowpack, and groundwater all seem to be disappearing in some important food-growing areas.
  • Solar grid parity is here! At least some places, some times…

Conclusion. Yes, I think we are on a path to collapse if nothing changes. And I don’t see things changing enough, or fast enough. There are glimmers of hope though. Lest you think I offer only negatives and no solutions, here are two solutions I harp on constantly throughout the blog:

  • Green infrastructure. This is how we fix the hydrologic cycle, close the loop on nutrients, begin to cleanse the atmosphere, protect wild creatures and genetic diversity, and create a society of people with some sense of connection to and stewardship over nature. Don’t act like it’s such a big mystery. It’s known technology. There has been plenty written about trees, design of wildlife corridors and connectivity, for examples. There is simply no excuse for cities to do such a crappy job with these things.
  • Muscle-Powered Transportation. Cars are clearly the root of all evil, the spawn of Mordor, as I pointed out several times (sorry, I just sat through 6+ hours of Hobbit movies). Unless you are perhaps that rare hobbit who can own a car without your morals being completed corrupted by its evil powers. But for the rest of us, I explained several times why getting rid of cars would be good. Here is just one example:

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

Planetary Boundaries 2

Johan Rockstrom and company have published a sequel to their original “planetary boundaries” work. Here’s a summary from the Stockholm Resilience Center:

Four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a result of human activity, says an international team of 18 researchers in the journal Science (16 January 2015). The four are: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).

Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are what the scientists call “core boundaries”. Significantly altering either of these “core boundaries” would “drive the Earth System into a new state”.

“Transgressing a boundary increases the risk that human activities could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries,” …

Nine planetary boundaries
1. Climate change
2. Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
3. Stratospheric ozone depletion
4. Ocean acidification
5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)
7. Freshwater use
8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

And for the video watchers, here is Mr. Rockstrom himself on Youtube:

Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy

Here is Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy report. They talk about the importance of fossil fuels in the progress in living standards over the past couple centuries. They talk about the rise of the middle class in developing Asia, and how that is going to lead to rising living standards and health, but also big increases in demand for energy, food and materials. Now, you can’t begrudge people rising living standards and health, which are wonderful things. However, I wouldn’t equate progress just with more traffic, concrete and shopping malls full of designer hand bags. I would equate it more with things like safe drinking water, affordable food and health care. And air conditioning – I would never begrudge any human being in the tropics air conditioning.

They make a crucial logical error – using the rate of carbon emissions, rather than accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere, as a proxy for ecological footprint. They say the rate of global emissions is expected to peak around 2030.

While every country faces a unique set of priorities and resource
constraints, we expect that most every nation, regardless of circumstance, will seek solutions that help curb emissions without harming the prospects of greater prosperity for its own citizens.
Toward this objective, two of the most effective solutions are improving energy efficiency across the economy (also referred to as reducing energy intensity) and reducing the CO2 content across the energy mix. Through 2040, each will play a powerful role in slowing emissions growth, and ultimately reversing what had been a decades-long rise in global CO2 emissions. In fact, we expect global energy-related CO2 emissions will rise
by about 25 percent from 2010 to 2030 and then decline approximately 5 percent to 2040.

In absolute terms, global CO2 emissions are expected to be about 6 billion tonnes higher in 2040 than they were in 2010. While that increase is significant, it is only about half the level of emissions growth seen from 1980 to 2010. This is all the more remarkable considering the growth in economic output from 2010 to 2040 will be about 150 percent more than the prior 30-year period.

Stabilizing the rate of emissions will not do the trick, unless the rate of emissions is below the rate the atmosphere can absorb without permanent harm to the environment or economy. That’s like saying the amount of credit card debt you add each month is the same each month. You are still spending more than your income, and one day this is going to “harm your prospects of greater prosperity”.

We will have really turned the corner if our rate of emissions is reduced to the point where the concentration in the atmosphere is stable or declining. And even if we manage to do that, we need to think about other impacts – nutrient pollution, soil depletion, groundwater and glacier loss, biodiversity and habitat loss, ocean acidification, and the list goes on.

A realistic leverage point for one-planet living: more compulsory vacation in the rich world

This article in System Dynamics Review advocates requiring more vacation time as a tool to decelerate growth in humanity’s ecological footprint. The idea is logical enough, but politically very hard if you ask me. The only way it might be politically possible is in the wake of a crisis, like a famine or sudden shift in climate, that is big enough to be a major wakeup call to the rich countries but small enough that it doesn’t kill a big fraction of humanity (which would decrease our ecological footprint footprint of course, but at an obviously horrible cost.)

As envisioned by Keynes in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, reducing work hours could make sense if it is done in parallel with productivity and wealth increases, and policies that address a fair distribution of the new wealth created by those productivity increases. This brings us back to trying to steer economic and technological growth in a more sustainable direction, trying to at least postpone and limit the next crisis, but having some ideas on how we might take advantage of the next crisis when it happens, while hoping it is not the one that wipes us out.

Mr. Money Mustache

I always enjoy Mr. Money Mustache‘s advice on living a less consumptive lifestyle. Warning: I will try to keep this blog family friendly and profanity free, but occasionally I may judge that omission of profanity would diminish comedy effect, and we can’t have that.

You have two kids, and yet you drive around in a BRAND NEW GAS GUZZLING LUXURY RACING BUS. The 2006 Honda Odyssey is not a vehicle for an indebted mother to use to drop the kids off and then head downtown. It is something a hopelessly spendy multimillionaire might use to shuttle around six pampered passengers on a cross-country roadtrip while hauling a trailer full of supplies. For two kids, you use a Toyota Yaris or similar. That will cut your gas bill down by 50%.

Your husband appears to be driving alone and not even a multimillionaire himself, and yet he has a TWIN-TURBO SIX PASSENGER RACING FARM TRUCK!!! Holy shit, brother, how many heads of cattle and pigs are you hauling on that roundtrip, while simultaneously carrying international heads of state in the stately cabin? That is a fucking ridiculous vehicle for ANYONE to drive except the rarest breed of Farmer/Diplomat, and I’m betting none of them also hold jobs as Structural Engineers.

So you’ll be selling that, and walking to work. For those rare times you drive, you can ask to borrow the wife’s manual transmission Yaris hatchback. You are also permitted to buy a used mountain bike, and if you’re REALLY getting serious with the carpentry, a 2001 Ford Ranger pickup, 2 wheel drive 4 cylinder manual longbed. You may weld a 12-foot lumber rack to it in order to outperform the your current clown truck.