Cheap, Clean, and Green Preview

Here is the first three paragraphs of a 13 page paper I wrote for my Sustainable Energy course at the University of Utah this last spring. Below these paragraphs is the link to the .doc Word file available for download, view or save. Enjoy!



Cheap, Clean, and Green


As a global citizen, car ownership is one of the most resourcefully irresponsible and socially divisive means by which one can accommodate daily needs. Licensed or not, our love affair with the car is a marriage in many senses. Cars give us mobility, comfort, speed, and convenience; they mirror our status, and provide at least a small glimpse of privacy in an increasingly crowded world. But the price we pay is too high.
Car crashes are the top killers of children in the United States and account for a total of 1.3 million deaths worldwide every year. Problems have continually emerge since the introduction of the horseless carriage - from immense health care and maintenance costs to societal isolation and finite resource depletion. Is it any wonder why our dependency, even our addiction, is still so strong? At some point in the last 100 years, the love affair with the automobile has become a dysfunctional relationship. Cities are no longer centered on human life and natural movement, but parking spaces, garages, maintenance and repair shops, high-speed thoroughfares, expressways, and gas stations. In a world where one-sixth of all people in industrialized countries are employed by or bolster the automobile industry, is there any escape from the trappings of our modern car-obsessed culture?
Needless to say, automobiles contribute countless detriments to international populations from sprawl to the division of socioeconomic classes, but the following dissertation seeks to focus on the most efficient alternative means of transportation all ready to take the place of the heading-out-the-door automobile: the bicycle.

Read the rest here!

And in .pdf form here

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