Athletes and Students Issue Challenge to Olympics

The Olympic motto may just be adding a fourth line: Faster, Higher, Stronger…Cleaner? 

Canadians are being invited to summon their Olympian ideals and join Project Blue Sky. The goal? One billion human-powered kilometers logged before the closing ceremonies of the Paralympic Games in March 2010.

It’s essentially an online carbon offset project. In conjunction with the Vancouver games, ordinary people alike are encouraged to join Canadian athletes in using Blue Sky’s widget. It logs distance walking, cycling, transit riding, hurdling – basically any travel that’s not driving or flying. 

The project was masterminded by Canadian Olympic Committee’s Athlete Council and Masters students at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. After consulting Offsetters Clean Technology Inc. – official Carbon Offset Supplier of the Olympics for the website’s CO2 calculations – the company joined as a sponsor.

The website is billed as a “meeting place” for athletes and participants. Like other networking sites, registration is necessary but free. You can track your favourite participating athletes, share photos, and compete in the CO2 footprint event. Like golf, smaller numbers win. 

That said, you don’t have to visit the site every time you want to add a km or two. You don’t need to register in order to submit your own man-powered kilometers, and the widget can be moved to other social networking pages.

Membership does have its privileges, though. Athlete profile pages list their favourite movies, artists, and most importantly, why they were motivated to join the Blue Sky Project.

No cars, no problem?

From biofuels to fuel cells, public transit to a host of government programs, there are any number of ways for Canadians to reduce vehicle emissions, which represent 25 per cent of our country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Or we stop driving cars altogether.

For some Canadians, the thought of abandoning their beloved vehicles is enough to invite blind rage. After all, in the second-largest country in the world, geography is hardly on our side, and our cities aren’t always built for human feet. But in June, BC celebrated pedestrianism with the fourth annual Car-Free Vancouver Day. Closing selected streets in Canada’s third largest city, the day involves a series of festivals celebrating a car-free lifestyle. It’s a “no cars allowed” concept as old as a neighborhood block party, though not necessarily welcomed with the same warmth you’d hope for from your neighbors.

But where Vancouver’s one-day event is a voluntary party with an added benefit of reducing traffic, across the Pacific, China is preparing to remove forcibly remove vehicles for an even greater festive purpose.

In the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing has instituted a unique plan to reduce vehicle emissions, requiring even and odd-numbered licensed cars to drive on alternating days. With the city already well known for its dense air pollution, to the point that any Olympic event lasting longer than an hour may be cancelled due to air quality concerns, Beijing’s vehicle restrictions will take place along with other measures like banning further construction during the games. It’s an interesting notion to literally halve the amount of vehicles on the road, but in a culture where driving has become a potent status symbol, taking Chinese cars away from their drivers may be no easier than it is to separate Canadians and their beloved gas-guzzlers.