- cross-posted to:
- videos@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- videos@lemmy.world
What began as one oil shock has now multiplied into three separate catastrophes – an oil shock, a shipping shock, and a refinery shock – each triggered by a different war in a different part of the world, culminating into a global catastrophe that’s already hitting.
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#1. Don’t become a journalist if your name is Max Fisher. That’s a charter boat captain name. When life names you Mr. Lemon, sell lemonade.
#2. The best time to buy an ebike if you can is yesterday. Both cost and demand are probably going to spike, alongside the cost of car repairs. Having 50-80km of guaranteed 20-32kmh mobility, especially with 60-80kg of cargo, is collapse insurance. We’ll all have to reconfigure our lives to adapt to the Certified 1929 Moment, and the versatility of an ebike eases you into that transition to solarpunk hobo.
Or just get a regular bike
That’s still better than walking, but consider the coming secondary crisis. A historic El Nino is going to put extreme pressure on global food supplies. The fuel crisis is compounding all elements of that. Agricultural inputs, transportation costs, trade route and labour availability- food production is getting a double whammy that will probably result in widespread famine. That’s coming on the back of an economy where every local foodbank has been rationing/restricting access for four years of silent recession.
Calories are going to become really expensive no matter where you are. Do you want to spend those on transportation or on something else? Especially if I’m biking with cargo or uphill, that’s quickly exhausting and range-limiting. The collapse insurance an ebike gives you is that you can charge it off a solar panel and go 1/3rd faster than your normal comfortable pedaling speed while using 70% of the effort or a throttle. It’s easier to use on days where cycling sucks, and it expands the number of opportunities you have across a larger range than you’d have with a normal bike. Right now I bike commute 20km a day to do an intensely physical job in the desert sun for 10 hours and it’s still comfortable enough to be preferable to my car.
Maybe all the flat, paved roads will be car-less enough that riding bikes on them will be feasible. Right now I have to use a crisscross pattern of gravel trails and roads to avoid taking the main road into town because it’s a 1.5 lane highway with an alternating passing lane that people love to speed on and dangerously weave through traffic. Would be a million times easier on the energy I spend if I can just use the paved roads over the hilly gravel.
The old world (car infrastructure) is dying and a new world (bike lanes) is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters (cheap but unusable bikes).
All the local bike infrastructure came out of the 1970s oil crises and recession. I think we’re going to have a similar kind of induced demand moment. Unfortunately it will also coincide with a time where 90% of bike components come from China and are shipped on diesel platforms that rely on lots of other petroleum products. Getting a decent bike at a decent price will be a lot harder by the time the roads are empty. We’re at the high water mark of global supply chains until the Iran War ends within 2-3 weeks of starting.
Not trying to do a bazinga tech bro thing, but could those ebike parts be 3d printed? Any DIY kits if we can’t get parts shipped in?
The frame is at least easy to build domestically and you can throw together an ebike from conversion kits, but batteries/electronics/finished bikes seem like they’ll be vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and price shocks. Right now if you buy a finished bike at the low point in its pricing, you stick the manufacturer with a 2-5+ year warranty that will probably be way more expensive for them. Scrambling to assemble one when you need it might leave you with an unreliable bike and the replacement costs being on you. A normal bike isn’t made for the extra stress an ebike experiences from the weight and speed.
the push bike vs ebike thing is about how far you can go and whether the exertion puts you off riding the bike or not. on one level it’s an ableism thing, on another it’s a deliberate ignorance of usage statistics.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
