I wish I could report that “environmental reasons” were behind my decision to start commuting by bike. But the real motivation was much simpler: I’m a cheapskate and biking saves money.

Yet three years and some 24,000 kilometres after switching from the train to the bike, I’ve discovered a number of useful fringe benefits beyond being frugal and reducing greenhouse gas: the daily exercise from the 40-km round trip each day puts me in a good mood, makes me healthier, liberates me from the hassles of semi-reliable train timetables and makes me a bit lighter as well.

No matter how lousy or stressful or full of irritations the work day might have been, by the time I’ve arrived home on the western fringe of Berlin from the city centre after an almost always enjoyable 50-minute bike ride, I feel transformed back into a happy human being. It’s magic.

Rain is a pain. And strong headwinds can be annoying. But even if I get soaked I still usually arrive home with a smile on my face — unperturbed even if some @&%?”$! motorist nearly ran me off the road. In the morning on the way to work, the bike ride often transforms my sleepy head into one spinning with ideas.

I got the idea, for instance, for this feature (click here) on the way to work one morning while backed up behind more than 40 other bikers at a traffic light. Peter Kupisz, the friendly lawyer quoted in the story, told me he thrives on the feeling of the wind blowing in his face. “On some days it feels sort of like I’m galloping on a horse through the middle of the city,” he said. I know exactly what he means.

The only drawback to my cycling habit is that I usually have to switch to the train when roads and bike lanes turn icy or are covered with snow in January and February. Being locked up in packed train carriages is not exactly conducive to being in a good mood by dinner time — so my family looks forward to March even more than I do. “Why don’t you ride your bike to work?” is a comment I sometimes get from my wife during those winter months. What she actually means is: “You’re in a rotten mood, go away!”

What I’ve noticed over the last two years is that the number of bike commuters has been growing steadily, and not just during the summer months. The main boulevard through the centre of Berlin is sometimes packed, seriously packed, with hundreds of cyclists on their way to work. It’s an amazing sight and reminds me of scenes from the 1979 movie Americathon when everyone in Los Angeles is riding bikes on the freeways instead of cars because the world has run out of oil.

Admittedly, what makes this bike commuting in Berlin all a bit easier is the good fortune that we have a shower in our building. It would certainly be a bit more difficult without that.

This being the environmental blog, I decided to figure out how much CO2 saved by riding the bike about a total of 8,000 km per year. If I drove the car that distance instead it would be about 1,280 kg of CO2, according to this online carbon footprint calculator . If I took the train, it would be about 320 kg of CO2 per year. On bike, the calculator says it’s 0 kgs of CO2. But I’m not sure how to quantify any accidental emissions of methane.

Reducing CO2 is obviously a noble aim, but the more important saving is to my bottom line. If I were to drive the 8,000 km to and from work in a car each year, it would cost about 730 euros and use 560 litres of fuel. If I were to buy an annual pass on the train, it would cost 670 euros. Aside from the occasional flat tyre, biking doesn’t cost anything after the initial investment.

If any further arguments on behalf of bike commuting were need, I could mention the calories burned. This calculator estimates 880 calories burned per journey — or about 1,500 calories per day. One final advantage: in Germany, the tax laws allow you to write the distance of your commute off your taxes. So, incredible as it may seem, I actually get paid by the government, or more accurately by other taxpayers, for biking to work. It doesn’t matter if you drive, bike, walk or hitchhike to work. The annual tax writeoff for a 40-km commute is about 1,400 euros.

More and more people in many places around the world seem to agree that biking is the way to go, as my colleague Chang-Ran Kim noted in her blog (click here). As much as I liked the film Americathon, I just hope the bike lanes don’t get too crowded too soon. Getting stuck in a bike traffic jam might just wipe that smile off my face by the time I got home.

PHOTO: Erik Kirschbaum on his bike to work REUTERS/Claudia Roszak

In Germany, where many consider their cars sacred and most politicians on both the left and right refuse to consider tampering with the unlimited speed on the Autobahn for fear of hurting the car industry, the leader of the Greens party said it is high time for the country to join the rest of the civilised world and put an upper limit on Autobahn speeds — if for no other reason than to cut CO2 emissions

“The speed limit on German motorways will happen because it has to happen,” Cem Oezdemir, co-chair of the environmental Greens, said in an interview (click here for full story). “There will be an Autobahn speed limit as soon as the Greens are in power. We simply can’t afford it any longer to ignore any chance to reduce CO2 emissions. The interesting thing about a speed limit is that it would have an immediate impact on emissions. It would also save money, save lives and reduce the number of horrible injuries resulting from high-speed accidents. When you think about, it all the arguments speak in favour of a speed limit.”

Oezdemir, 43, said that aside from the powerful car lobby — which opposes a speed limit for fears it would damage the marketing mystique of carmakers like Porsche, BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen — there are precious few reasons for letting cars continue drive at speeds of up to 200 kph and more: “The only argument against it is the pre-modern masculine dream of racing their cars at high speed.”

A study by Germany’s environmental protection office (Bundesumweltamt) found that a speed limit of 120 kph would lead to a 9 percent reduction in Germany’s CO2 emissions — practically overnight. It would also cut emissions of other pollutants by up to 28 percent. Greenpeace estimates that Germany could cut its CO2 emissions by some 40 million tonnes by 2020. There are speed limits of 130 kph on about half of Germany’s 12,000 km of motorway network. On unlimited sections cars often travel at speeds of up to 200 kph and some even reach 290 kph.

Some environmentalists reckon that CO2 reductions from cars worldwide could be even more substantial over the longer term. If consumers around the world were to stop buying the heavy, powerful cars built to race on German motorways and instead buy smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient cars that aren’t built for such high speeds, emissions would not only be cut in Germany but in many other countries as well.

Germany, the world’s sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, likes to think of itself as a leader in the fight against climate change. But is that just hot air? Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a former environment minister, has ruled out a speed limit: “It will not happen under me,” she said

As a number of foreign leaders have pointed out how can a country that refuses to introduce a speed limit to make a significant cut in its greenhouse gas emissions be taken seriously?

PHOTO: Cem Oezdemir, co-leader of Germany’s Greens party. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

Last year’s horrendous China earthquake may have big, lingering effects on the atmosphere. Mudslides after the deadly May 12 quake in Sichuan province are likely to trigger a release of carbon dioxide equal to 2 percent of the world’s current carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion, geophysicists say.

“Mudslides wipe away plants and topsoil, depleting terrain of nutrients for plant regrowth and burying swaths of vegetation. Buried vegetable matter decomposes and releases carbon dioxide and other gases to the atmosphere,” according to a statement ahead of a report in American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The gases, along with nitrous oxide, another major greenhouse gas, should spew into the atmosphere over a number of decades, according to the report due out on March 4.

(Reuters picture taken January 23, 2009)

Every once in a while you run into someone with so much energy that you find yourself wishing you could plug something into them to tap a bit of that excess power. On a dark, cloudy December afternoon, I spoke to Frank Asbeck, the chairman of SolarWorld and dubbed the “Sonnenkoenig” (Sun King) by a leading newspaper in his native Germany for turning an idea (mass use of photovoltaic) into a multi-billion euro corporation with 2,500 employees — in little over a decade.

Asbeck, 49, easily the most entertaining chief executive I’ve met in Germany, lit up the room with a 90-minute surge of ideas, witty comments and untempered optimism about solar power — a delightful respite from the economic doom and gloom of the current era.

But what especially interested me about him was his trip a day earlier to the Vatican, where he donated 2,400 photovoltaic panels worth 1.2 million euros that will produce enough electricity for the equivalent of 100 households (300 Megawatt hours) each year. So I asked: “Did you donate the solar panels to the Vatican because:

A) you’re a good guy
B) it was an advertising gimmick for solar power in general or
C) it was an advertising gimmick for SolarWorld.”

Asbeck answered: “First of all, I am a good person. And, secondly, we’re glad to do advertising in general for solar power because it’s a good thing and, thirdly, we did it as a gesture of thanks for a bit of inspiration I got from Pope John Paul II six years ago.”

Asbeck explained that the original idea to cover the 5,000-square metre roof of the Vatican’s Papal audience hall next to St. Peter’s Cathedral came in 2002 when he presented Pope John Paul with a sample solar cell made from sand (raw silicone) in the course of a general audience. “I showed him a solar cell and mentioned that we were able to produce energy from sand and sun,” Asbeck said, smiling at the fond memory. “And he said to me ‘God can do everything’. That gave me tremendous motivation to think more deeply about this photovoltaic technology and that we could be doing a whole lot more with it than we were. So as a small gesture of gratitude for that inspiration we installed the beautiful solar system.”

It all sounded very sincere from this extraordinarily energetic character. But, in this day and age, I still found myself wondering if his motives were truly genuine or not. What do you think?

Kenyan blogger Juliana Rotich is the editor of Green Global Voices, which monitors citizen media in the developing world, and is a regular contributor to this page. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone. 

 The use of SUVs by UN staff in Nairobi is rankling some bloggers. They are posting pictures on their blogs, and have even created a flickr pool called ‘Kick The Habit’. The title of the set of pictures borrows from UNEP’s (United Nations Environment Program) campaign from June of this year, which encouraged ‘countries, companies and communities’ to reduce their CO2 emissions.

The blogger on Sukuma Kenya started the flickr pool in June, after he noticed that many UN vehicles in Nairobi were SUVs, and felt that the UNEP campaign did not communicate how it was reducing carbon emissions while it was asking individuals to ‘kick the CO2 habit’.

On the 27th of October, the Journalist-blogger Nick Wadhams noticed a yellow Humvee with United Nations vehicle plates. He posted a picture on his blog, noting a recent report about the United Nations procurement scandal.

Is it any surprise that Saturday’s Nation newspaper contained this item: “The United Nations office in Nairobi may have lost Sh10 billion in procurement and administrative scandals over the past three years, an internal audit report has revealed.”

Sadly, this kind of thing was a common story when I covered the U.N. Maybe all that money is going to banana yellow Humvees (the picture at top left is of a Humvee at a show in New York in 2003)

Earlier this month, Nick posted an update after confirming that the yellow Humvee seen in Kenya did belong to a UN employee.

PS: I was driving on James Gichuru Road the other day, climbing the hill as it approaches Wayaki Way, and what should I see hurtling in the opposite direction? You guessed it, the B.Y.H! I caught only the briefest of glimpses of the driver (was that you, Charles?), and considered turning around and following him. But there were two other passengers in our car, one of whom happened to be an eight-month-old baby who was angry about being 45 minutes late for a one-year birthday party. Next time, Charles! Next time!

PPS: In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that we drive a 1989 Mitsubishi Pajero, which, to be honest, probably gets worse gas mileage than Charles’ Humvee. At the moment, there is a problem with the injector pump and it spews a lot of black smoke. Working on it!

Commenting on the post, the blogger Baba Mzungu makes the point that NGO’s often use 4×4s as they travel to remote areas, but he takes issue with the fact that the Humvee is driven by an ‘IT guy’ in Nairobi( an urban area that is hardly the beaten path).

As a representitive of an NGO who travels off the beaten track (and let’s face it, some of the beaten tracks aren’t fantastic), I can see the argument for using a 4×4. But an IT guy? In Nairobi? Driving the biggest bl00dy tank available?
Don’t think so.

The Sukuma blog posts a humorous rhyme about the UNEP campaign and continued sightings of UN 4×4 vehicles. The rhyme was penned by Ed of African Works blog.

“Isn’t it a bummer
when you buy yourself a hummer
and some prat puts you down on the net!
Global warming’s just for fairies
the science about it undoubtedly varies
and most of its apologists are wet.
So even though I work for UNEP
I am rightly proud of my rep
as an aging but highly sexed eco czar
in a oversized gas guzzling toy of a car”

The sightings of SUVs appear to be continuing, as the blogger on NairobiKoll chimes in on the Sukuma blog with a link to a picture they took recently.

For a copy of the full report on the UN procurement scandal, the blogger Kenyan pundit made the PDF available for download on her blog.