June 19th, 2010 · 1 Comment
Well, well, what an interesting idea.
Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (pictured), has – we are told – written to the energy secretary asking that the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) competition be extended to include gas as well as coal projects.
The committee is saying that efforts to tackle global warming require reducing emissions from electricity generation to almost zero by 2030, which should rule out new conventional gas-fired power stations after 2020.
I fear that Richard has missed a little trick here. Yes, of course it’s insane, yes, of course it’s economic warfare against us by our own rulers. But there’s still more to it than that.
For carbon capture from gas is a great deal simpler than carbon capture from coal.
You see, to get the carbon out of coal you’ve got to first burn it then try to capture the CO2. This isn’t easy.
However, to capture the carbon out of natural gas you don’t need to burn it first. What you do is strip the carbon out (natural gas being CH4) and then burn the hydrogen. Or, if you wanted to be sensible, you’d run your H2 through combined heat and power systems running on solid oxide fuel cells (it really is only a coincidence that my favourite metal, scandium, is used in such fuel cells).You can then, at least I assume you can, burn the C to get CO2 and thus you get a pure stream of CO2, not something you need to capture in any difficult manner. Just a pipe on the outlet of the furnace or turbine.
And, absolutely best of all, it’s not actually clear that this will cost anything to do. That it might not cost anything is lovely, while the uncertainty over the cost isn’t of course. And that’s where I think it gets interesting.
BP (yes, that BP) has been touting a scheme to test this for years. Up at Peterhead (which, purely by chance, is just down the road from St Andrews, the home of Europe’s leading researcher into scandium based solid oxide fuel cells. Serendipity or what?). Let’s take natural gas from a N Sea field. We’ll strip it, burn it and pipe the CO2 down into a near end of life oil field. This gets rid of the CO2. At least, we think it does, but this is something we’re testing, see?
That CO2 then brings up the last oil in the field….nothing very unusual about the basic idea, all sorts of things are pumped down wells to bring up the last bit. CO2 is novel but then this is an experiment, see?
Now yes, pumping CO2 about has a cost: but getting up oil that we couldn’t get up any other way is a benefit, a source of income. One covers t’other. Well, maybe, but this is an experiment, see?
So, why hasn’t the experiment been done? Well, there’s that pesky thing called the tax wedge. We’re almost certain (certain to within the limits that BP is willing to take a flier on it) that the value of the oil coming up plus the electricity generated covers the cost of getting rid of the CO2 (I don’t know whether this is including a credit for disposing of the CO2 or not, sorry, perhaps I should).
However, BP must pay quite large royalties to The Treasury on each barrel of oil they bring up. This is of course right and proper: Ricardian Rents should be captured by the State, not individual actors. However, oil royalties are high enough that at current levels they mean that the post tax value of the oil does not cover the costs of getting rid of the CO2.
So, what BP asked was, look, this oil that is only going to come up if we bury the CO2….can we pay less tax on that oil please? It’s not, after all, a loss to The Treasury: if we don’t get the reduced tax rate then we’re not going to do the experiment, the oil will stay underground for ever and the Treasury will get nothing.
And what was Gordon Brown’s answer?
Well, yes, you can guess can’t you.
No.
So, experiment undone, technology untested, and all because the Laddie loves more tax. Even to the extent of not collecting more tax in aggregate because it would mean lowering a tax rate.
Which brings us back to Adair Turner. It is already possible to test this idea while at the same time increasing revenue to The Treasury. All that has to be done is to offer a lower royalty rate to those already willing to conduct the experiment.
No, I’ve not gone and looked at his proposals in detail: but I’d be willing to bet reasonably large sums that he ain’t. OK, here’s his letter. I’m right!
He says that we should “fund”, ie spend more of the money we haven’t got, a gas CCS project. Instead of increase the revenue we get to cover the amount of money we haven’t got by lowering a marginal tax rate.
Which is, of course, why having Adair Turner poncing about at the head of yet another quango is such a damn bad idea.
Could we please all get with the program? Yes, of course, economics teaches us that free lunches are very rare and precious things indeed: but the most common place to find them is not in getting government to do something, it’s in getting government to stop what it’s already doing.
Sunday, 20 June 2010
UN considers review of alleged carbon offset abuses
Clean Development Mechanism carbon offset scheme faces fresh criticism over dubious emission reduction projects
Andrew Donoghue for BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 June 2010 09.53 BST
A Nasa graphic showing the extent of the ozone hole over Antarctica - critics of the UN's carbon offsetting scheme say it is increasing ozone-depleting chemicals.
The UN has confirmed that it is considering a formal review of its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) after a new report leveled fresh criticism at the high profile carbon offsetting scheme.
A coalition of green groups working under the banner CDM Watch yesterday tabled a formal request calling on the UN's climate change secretariat to overhaul the CDM and crack down on alleged "gaming" of the system that has allowed some firms to benefit from increasing their greenhouse gas emissions.
The controversy surrounds companies which currently receive carbon credits for capturing and destroying the powerful greenhouse gas HFC-23 - a by product resulting from the production of the refrigerant gas HCFC-22.
CDM Watch has alleged the way the CDM is structured means that chemical gas manufacturers based in China and India and South and Central America have been incentivised to increase the production of HCFC-22 and HFC-23 as they can then earn Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) carbon credits, which can be sold into carbon markets such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
Lambert Schneider, a former member of the UN climate change secretariat's Methodologies Panel and one of the original designers of the CDM system, has joined the ranks of its critics. "The amount of HCFC-22 production and HFC-23 generation appears to be mainly driven by the possibility to generate offset credits rather than other factors," he said.
Speaking to BusinesGreen.com, CDM Watch director Eva Filzmoser said the CDM iniative was creating perverse incentives that ran counter to its original goals of promoting more sustainable activities.
"The essence of our complaint is that we accuse the CDM Project of massively inflating HCFC-22 production," she said. "We would like to see the UN respond to this concern by amending the methodology that is in place at this stage."
According to Filzmoser the CDM is not the right place to deal with the destruction of HFC-23. "We think it should all be dealt with under the Montreal Protocol [covering ozone depleting gases]," she said. "Until this happens we think the CDM incentives need to be lowered as they are much too high at the moment."
The Montreal Protocol dates back to 1987 and aims to phase out the use of ozone depleting chemicals, including several groups of halogenated hydrocarbons.
David Abbass, public information officer at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, told BusinessGreen.com that the UN is considering the evidence of abuse of the CDM system and will adjust its safeguards if necessary,
"A request for revision of the methodology used in these projects is now with the CDM Executive Board's Methodologies Panel," he said.
He added that there were already safeguards in the existing CDM project assessment methodology designed to prevent abuse of the system. "Specifically, no new plants can qualify to earn credits and the amounts that can qualify are pegged to historic production levels," he said. "The question now is whether the safeguards need to be adjusted or added to. That's what the Board will be looking at."
The CDM board is due to discuss the issue at its next meeting from the 26 to 30 July.
However, CDM Watch maintains that the abuse of the system is widespread and endemic and will not be easy to correct. "There might be some projects out there that are not flawed but they are hardly even countable let's say," said Filzmoser. "If a rule incentivises abuse you are much more likely to see that abuse than if the framework tries to set in place measures that would avoid gaming the system. Unfortunately industry always wants to get more money."
Andrew Donoghue for BusinessGreen, part of the Guardian Environment Network guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 June 2010 09.53 BST
A Nasa graphic showing the extent of the ozone hole over Antarctica - critics of the UN's carbon offsetting scheme say it is increasing ozone-depleting chemicals.
The UN has confirmed that it is considering a formal review of its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) after a new report leveled fresh criticism at the high profile carbon offsetting scheme.
A coalition of green groups working under the banner CDM Watch yesterday tabled a formal request calling on the UN's climate change secretariat to overhaul the CDM and crack down on alleged "gaming" of the system that has allowed some firms to benefit from increasing their greenhouse gas emissions.
The controversy surrounds companies which currently receive carbon credits for capturing and destroying the powerful greenhouse gas HFC-23 - a by product resulting from the production of the refrigerant gas HCFC-22.
CDM Watch has alleged the way the CDM is structured means that chemical gas manufacturers based in China and India and South and Central America have been incentivised to increase the production of HCFC-22 and HFC-23 as they can then earn Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) carbon credits, which can be sold into carbon markets such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme.
Lambert Schneider, a former member of the UN climate change secretariat's Methodologies Panel and one of the original designers of the CDM system, has joined the ranks of its critics. "The amount of HCFC-22 production and HFC-23 generation appears to be mainly driven by the possibility to generate offset credits rather than other factors," he said.
Speaking to BusinesGreen.com, CDM Watch director Eva Filzmoser said the CDM iniative was creating perverse incentives that ran counter to its original goals of promoting more sustainable activities.
"The essence of our complaint is that we accuse the CDM Project of massively inflating HCFC-22 production," she said. "We would like to see the UN respond to this concern by amending the methodology that is in place at this stage."
According to Filzmoser the CDM is not the right place to deal with the destruction of HFC-23. "We think it should all be dealt with under the Montreal Protocol [covering ozone depleting gases]," she said. "Until this happens we think the CDM incentives need to be lowered as they are much too high at the moment."
The Montreal Protocol dates back to 1987 and aims to phase out the use of ozone depleting chemicals, including several groups of halogenated hydrocarbons.
David Abbass, public information officer at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, told BusinessGreen.com that the UN is considering the evidence of abuse of the CDM system and will adjust its safeguards if necessary,
"A request for revision of the methodology used in these projects is now with the CDM Executive Board's Methodologies Panel," he said.
He added that there were already safeguards in the existing CDM project assessment methodology designed to prevent abuse of the system. "Specifically, no new plants can qualify to earn credits and the amounts that can qualify are pegged to historic production levels," he said. "The question now is whether the safeguards need to be adjusted or added to. That's what the Board will be looking at."
The CDM board is due to discuss the issue at its next meeting from the 26 to 30 July.
However, CDM Watch maintains that the abuse of the system is widespread and endemic and will not be easy to correct. "There might be some projects out there that are not flawed but they are hardly even countable let's say," said Filzmoser. "If a rule incentivises abuse you are much more likely to see that abuse than if the framework tries to set in place measures that would avoid gaming the system. Unfortunately industry always wants to get more money."
Obama's liberal critics find their voice
We on the left have been in numb denial about President Obama's failures. But as the crises pile up we can't remain silent
Clancy Sigal guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 June 2010 14.00 BST
Until President Obama's first ever Oval Office address-to-the-nation the other night BP's chief executive Tony Hayward was winning the booby prize as "America's most clueless man" for his gaffe-prone TV interviews. But Obama is gaining fast. His self-exonerating speech, full of sparkling generalities and with no hint of frank accountability for his administration's culpability in the nation's worst environmental disaster, was like the man himself, bloodless and emotionally detached from the human costs of an oil invasion that's now spreading from Louisiana to Texas, Florida and as far north as the Carolinas.
Instead, to cover his impotence to cope with the seemingly unstoppable 60,000 barrel a day spillage, and his deference to BP he's appointing – what else? – one of those tired old wheezes, a "tsar" to oversee the Gulf spill effort and a "commission" to investigate its causes which by now are well known by everyone except the clueless White House. Don't they listen to their own scientific advisers?
Tony Hayward must feel a little relief that the spotlight on him as a 24-karat fool shifted momentarily on Tuesday night to our do-nothing-except-make-war president.
But the dogs are waking up and barking in the night.
Until BP's blowout in the Gulf eight weeks ago the American left (what there is of it) trailed poodle-like after Barack Obama, refusing to criticise, let alone, attack "our guy in the White House". We had worked our butts off for his election, and now we were punched out or perhaps felt we had nowhere else to go – and isn't it nice for a change to have a president who can parse a complicated sentence? Any lingering doubts we had were stifled after one scary look at Obama's yowling enemies – racist and crazy about Palin – which was enough to send us whimpering back to our kennels.
But like tiny buds of spring little fragile flowers of dissent are springing up all over the place, sometimes unexpectedly. I live in West Los Angeles, an incubator for the Obama-voting intelligentsia. A few days ago I drove past an ultra-liberal private academy in Santa Monica for the children of affluent Obama-ites, and the lawn sign in big letters proclaimed a snide reference to Obama's dismal failure get a handle on BP's environmental crime. Garry Trudeau's daily cartoon Doonesbury, which bashed Bush for years, now satirises the Obama presidency for its incomprehensible torpor in the national emergency. "The White House grows more passive every day," a Doonesbury character says in a dig at No Drama Obama's habit of lofty detachment.
Once faithful Obama retainers like syndicated columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich are turning on the president for his crushing indifference to the simple human predicament of the disaster's victims. Even TV's Keith Olberman, until now virtually an Obama PR man, complains that the Oval Office speech "was great … if you were on another planet for the past 67 days". And Rachel Maddow, until now a fervent Obama cheerleader, has criticised his way-off-the-mark speech.
George W Bush gave the (false) impression, fostered by his flacks, of actually liking ordinary people. Obama prefers photo ops to human contact, such as the ridiculous posed pictures of him earnestly examining "tar balls" washed ashore in LaFourche Parish and promising Gulf residents, "I'm here to tell you that you are not alone. You will not be abandoned, and you will not be left behind" – only to promptly leave for a Chicago vacation.
He's not only tone deaf but also growing hostile to public criticism. Indeed, Obama goes after whistleblowers with more punishing venom than ever did George W Bush who whined about leaks but did not indict. In Obama's 17 months in office he has outdone all his Oval Office predecessors in going after anyone in government who dares spill the beans to the media. For example, instead of ordering court-martials for the army helicopter gunmen who murdered unarmed Baghdad civilians – a video shown worldwide by Wikileaks – the young GI leaker, 22-year old Bradley Manning, has been arrested, and the Pentagon cops are frantically trying to smoke out, and shut down, Wikileak's Pimpernel-like founder, Julian Assange. I did not think it possible, but our President Obama has an even thinner skin than Bush.
With each passing day, as crises pile up, from out-of-control unemployment to the Gulf to Gaza to the failed Afghanistan adventure, the underlying liberal authoritarianism of the Obama White House becomes clearer. We, Obama's "liberal base", of which I'm a charter member, were in numb denial that our former community organiser, who elicited such an outpouring of love from his vast network of volunteers, is actually just another Illinois pol – but with a better vocabulary.
But the dogs of dissent are waking up and starting to howl.
Clancy Sigal guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 June 2010 14.00 BST
Until President Obama's first ever Oval Office address-to-the-nation the other night BP's chief executive Tony Hayward was winning the booby prize as "America's most clueless man" for his gaffe-prone TV interviews. But Obama is gaining fast. His self-exonerating speech, full of sparkling generalities and with no hint of frank accountability for his administration's culpability in the nation's worst environmental disaster, was like the man himself, bloodless and emotionally detached from the human costs of an oil invasion that's now spreading from Louisiana to Texas, Florida and as far north as the Carolinas.
Instead, to cover his impotence to cope with the seemingly unstoppable 60,000 barrel a day spillage, and his deference to BP he's appointing – what else? – one of those tired old wheezes, a "tsar" to oversee the Gulf spill effort and a "commission" to investigate its causes which by now are well known by everyone except the clueless White House. Don't they listen to their own scientific advisers?
Tony Hayward must feel a little relief that the spotlight on him as a 24-karat fool shifted momentarily on Tuesday night to our do-nothing-except-make-war president.
But the dogs are waking up and barking in the night.
Until BP's blowout in the Gulf eight weeks ago the American left (what there is of it) trailed poodle-like after Barack Obama, refusing to criticise, let alone, attack "our guy in the White House". We had worked our butts off for his election, and now we were punched out or perhaps felt we had nowhere else to go – and isn't it nice for a change to have a president who can parse a complicated sentence? Any lingering doubts we had were stifled after one scary look at Obama's yowling enemies – racist and crazy about Palin – which was enough to send us whimpering back to our kennels.
But like tiny buds of spring little fragile flowers of dissent are springing up all over the place, sometimes unexpectedly. I live in West Los Angeles, an incubator for the Obama-voting intelligentsia. A few days ago I drove past an ultra-liberal private academy in Santa Monica for the children of affluent Obama-ites, and the lawn sign in big letters proclaimed a snide reference to Obama's dismal failure get a handle on BP's environmental crime. Garry Trudeau's daily cartoon Doonesbury, which bashed Bush for years, now satirises the Obama presidency for its incomprehensible torpor in the national emergency. "The White House grows more passive every day," a Doonesbury character says in a dig at No Drama Obama's habit of lofty detachment.
Once faithful Obama retainers like syndicated columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich are turning on the president for his crushing indifference to the simple human predicament of the disaster's victims. Even TV's Keith Olberman, until now virtually an Obama PR man, complains that the Oval Office speech "was great … if you were on another planet for the past 67 days". And Rachel Maddow, until now a fervent Obama cheerleader, has criticised his way-off-the-mark speech.
George W Bush gave the (false) impression, fostered by his flacks, of actually liking ordinary people. Obama prefers photo ops to human contact, such as the ridiculous posed pictures of him earnestly examining "tar balls" washed ashore in LaFourche Parish and promising Gulf residents, "I'm here to tell you that you are not alone. You will not be abandoned, and you will not be left behind" – only to promptly leave for a Chicago vacation.
He's not only tone deaf but also growing hostile to public criticism. Indeed, Obama goes after whistleblowers with more punishing venom than ever did George W Bush who whined about leaks but did not indict. In Obama's 17 months in office he has outdone all his Oval Office predecessors in going after anyone in government who dares spill the beans to the media. For example, instead of ordering court-martials for the army helicopter gunmen who murdered unarmed Baghdad civilians – a video shown worldwide by Wikileaks – the young GI leaker, 22-year old Bradley Manning, has been arrested, and the Pentagon cops are frantically trying to smoke out, and shut down, Wikileak's Pimpernel-like founder, Julian Assange. I did not think it possible, but our President Obama has an even thinner skin than Bush.
With each passing day, as crises pile up, from out-of-control unemployment to the Gulf to Gaza to the failed Afghanistan adventure, the underlying liberal authoritarianism of the Obama White House becomes clearer. We, Obama's "liberal base", of which I'm a charter member, were in numb denial that our former community organiser, who elicited such an outpouring of love from his vast network of volunteers, is actually just another Illinois pol – but with a better vocabulary.
But the dogs of dissent are waking up and starting to howl.
Bogotá's Ciclovia could teach Boris Johnson how to run a car-free capital
Ciclovía keeps cars off the streets in the Colombian capital and brings rich and poor together - if only for a day
It's a bright Bogotá morning and I'm sprinting, standing up out of the saddle pushing hard on the pedals to cross La Septima (7th Ave) and 19th street, normally one of the most nightmarish junctions in this traffic-swamped, car-crazy town. But I'm doing it for a laugh, not to escape quickly, as today's a Ciclovía.
Ciclovía is a weekly, city-wide, car-free day in Bogotá that puts 76 miles of roads, including La Septima – the city's main commercial centre – off-limits to cars. It's been running since 1974, and offers a brilliantly bonkers insight into this wild Andean capital.
More than 2 million people come out every week to cycle, hang out, flirt, pose and eat on the street. It's transport policy in a Critical Mass dreamworld, and the weekly event makes Boris Johnson's once-a-year cycling ambitions for London look like the lily-livered, business-loving, small-thinking, can't-do claptrap they truly are.
Three out of four lanes in La Septima (7th Ave) are closed and today are filled with elderly strollers in superfly shades carrying massive radios listening to tango, children scrambling round on toy bikes, punks on skates, stern-faced Lycra warriors on $5,000 Treks, moody goth skateboarders and, fabulously, one man and his pitbull in matching leather harnesses, panting in unison.
And all along the sidewalk, you can buy mangoes, coconut juice, salpicon (a delicious fruit slurry) as the guys selling mystery-meats-on-a-stick fan their embers with their baseball caps. In public parks there are free yoga and aerobics classes, known as the Recrovia. Today in the National Park, there was what looked suspicously like a vast and riotously good-humoured three-legged race.
Ciclovía's impact has spread far and wide, with similar events all over Latin America, but here it's had an unintended but very welcome consequence: social integration.
"Ciclovía is one of the few places where Colombians of different classes mix," says Mike Ceaser, who owns a bike rental business, Bogota Bike Tours. "You've got a lot of poor people and very few rich, here. Rich and poor only meet as workers and employees in Colombia - janitor and bank manager, maid and home-owner. But the Ciclovía is democratic. Here, everyone's on a bicycle, mixing, meeting on an equal level," says Ceaser, a former journalist who set up his bike shop here last year when the US newspaper industry started cutbacks.
In Latin American cities, class and wealth define everything, with galaxy-sized gaps between the dirt poor and the astronomically wealthy, and here it's no different. Bogota's income division is north-south. The rich live in the north, and the poor in the south, but people switch territories during Ciclovia. Cycling in Bogotá does not carry the eco/health/lifestyle cachet it does in the UK – if anything, it's seen as a poor man's way to save money on bus fares. Wealthy Colombians won't commute to work as they think it makes them look poor. But everyone loves the Ciclovía.
Any cyclist wanting a good look round Bogotá should stop by Ceaser's shop in the old colonial heart of Bogotá, La Candelaria, where he has around 40 bikes and helmets for hire and expert tour guides on call. It's a fantastic way to see the city - safe, easy and affordable. Today, I covered 10 times the ground on two wheels as I would have done by foot, or taxi, or bus. As I pedal, smiling Colombians laugh at the tall gringo in the biggest, yellowest helmet they've ever seen, panting and purple-faced as the altitude takes its toll: Bogotá is the world's third-highest capital city, at 2,640m above sea level.
Don't worry if you hit a spot of bother on your bike, though. The route is attended by hundreds of paid guardians carrying medical kits and bike tools. (When the call first went out for the guardians, just 20 CVs were received. When the city authorities rebranded the job as Bikewatch guards, after Baywatch, asking for athletic and active people to apply, they got 1,500 CVs, says former city official Enrique Peñalosa in this great film).
Be aware though - bike theft is rife, and bike parking spots are few and far between - and even when they look official, you may not be able to lock and leave, as Ceaser recalls on his blog.
The city also has a vast network of bike lanes - though they are in a pretty poor state and are often used by sidewalk vendors to sell anything from scavenged mobile phone parts to barbecued corn on the cob. And the Ciclovía's main route is under threat: the mass transit bus service, Transmilenio, may expand into some of the roads where the cyclists currently reign.
But it seems to have luck, albeit of a grim variety, on its side. A few years back a Bogotá senator, Fernando Castro, tried to move the hours of Ciclovía to run it from 5am to 12 noon, cutting back the most popular hours with the public. During the senate hearing arguing for the move, in a scene straight out of a magic realist novel, the car-loving, chain-smoking senator keeled over at the dispatch box and died later that day.
If a city as busy and poor as Bogotá can close its roads every Sunday of the year, and every one of the dozens of holidays enjoyed here, why can't London, or Manchester, or Liverpool, or Glasgow or Cardiff or Newcastle? Is it so radical a concept to promote healthy, non-polluting, silent forms of transport that bring people together, rather than locking them behind airbags and safety glass, for just half a day a week? Must we measure everything so drearily in pounds lost to business?
I guess revolutions are best left to the Latin Americans.
It's a bright Bogotá morning and I'm sprinting, standing up out of the saddle pushing hard on the pedals to cross La Septima (7th Ave) and 19th street, normally one of the most nightmarish junctions in this traffic-swamped, car-crazy town. But I'm doing it for a laugh, not to escape quickly, as today's a Ciclovía.
Ciclovía is a weekly, city-wide, car-free day in Bogotá that puts 76 miles of roads, including La Septima – the city's main commercial centre – off-limits to cars. It's been running since 1974, and offers a brilliantly bonkers insight into this wild Andean capital.
More than 2 million people come out every week to cycle, hang out, flirt, pose and eat on the street. It's transport policy in a Critical Mass dreamworld, and the weekly event makes Boris Johnson's once-a-year cycling ambitions for London look like the lily-livered, business-loving, small-thinking, can't-do claptrap they truly are.
Three out of four lanes in La Septima (7th Ave) are closed and today are filled with elderly strollers in superfly shades carrying massive radios listening to tango, children scrambling round on toy bikes, punks on skates, stern-faced Lycra warriors on $5,000 Treks, moody goth skateboarders and, fabulously, one man and his pitbull in matching leather harnesses, panting in unison.
And all along the sidewalk, you can buy mangoes, coconut juice, salpicon (a delicious fruit slurry) as the guys selling mystery-meats-on-a-stick fan their embers with their baseball caps. In public parks there are free yoga and aerobics classes, known as the Recrovia. Today in the National Park, there was what looked suspicously like a vast and riotously good-humoured three-legged race.
Ciclovía's impact has spread far and wide, with similar events all over Latin America, but here it's had an unintended but very welcome consequence: social integration.
"Ciclovía is one of the few places where Colombians of different classes mix," says Mike Ceaser, who owns a bike rental business, Bogota Bike Tours. "You've got a lot of poor people and very few rich, here. Rich and poor only meet as workers and employees in Colombia - janitor and bank manager, maid and home-owner. But the Ciclovía is democratic. Here, everyone's on a bicycle, mixing, meeting on an equal level," says Ceaser, a former journalist who set up his bike shop here last year when the US newspaper industry started cutbacks.
In Latin American cities, class and wealth define everything, with galaxy-sized gaps between the dirt poor and the astronomically wealthy, and here it's no different. Bogota's income division is north-south. The rich live in the north, and the poor in the south, but people switch territories during Ciclovia. Cycling in Bogotá does not carry the eco/health/lifestyle cachet it does in the UK – if anything, it's seen as a poor man's way to save money on bus fares. Wealthy Colombians won't commute to work as they think it makes them look poor. But everyone loves the Ciclovía.
Any cyclist wanting a good look round Bogotá should stop by Ceaser's shop in the old colonial heart of Bogotá, La Candelaria, where he has around 40 bikes and helmets for hire and expert tour guides on call. It's a fantastic way to see the city - safe, easy and affordable. Today, I covered 10 times the ground on two wheels as I would have done by foot, or taxi, or bus. As I pedal, smiling Colombians laugh at the tall gringo in the biggest, yellowest helmet they've ever seen, panting and purple-faced as the altitude takes its toll: Bogotá is the world's third-highest capital city, at 2,640m above sea level.
Don't worry if you hit a spot of bother on your bike, though. The route is attended by hundreds of paid guardians carrying medical kits and bike tools. (When the call first went out for the guardians, just 20 CVs were received. When the city authorities rebranded the job as Bikewatch guards, after Baywatch, asking for athletic and active people to apply, they got 1,500 CVs, says former city official Enrique Peñalosa in this great film).
Be aware though - bike theft is rife, and bike parking spots are few and far between - and even when they look official, you may not be able to lock and leave, as Ceaser recalls on his blog.
The city also has a vast network of bike lanes - though they are in a pretty poor state and are often used by sidewalk vendors to sell anything from scavenged mobile phone parts to barbecued corn on the cob. And the Ciclovía's main route is under threat: the mass transit bus service, Transmilenio, may expand into some of the roads where the cyclists currently reign.
But it seems to have luck, albeit of a grim variety, on its side. A few years back a Bogotá senator, Fernando Castro, tried to move the hours of Ciclovía to run it from 5am to 12 noon, cutting back the most popular hours with the public. During the senate hearing arguing for the move, in a scene straight out of a magic realist novel, the car-loving, chain-smoking senator keeled over at the dispatch box and died later that day.
If a city as busy and poor as Bogotá can close its roads every Sunday of the year, and every one of the dozens of holidays enjoyed here, why can't London, or Manchester, or Liverpool, or Glasgow or Cardiff or Newcastle? Is it so radical a concept to promote healthy, non-polluting, silent forms of transport that bring people together, rather than locking them behind airbags and safety glass, for just half a day a week? Must we measure everything so drearily in pounds lost to business?
I guess revolutions are best left to the Latin Americans.