Not Easy Being Green
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Environment: Feeling a bit smug about owning that hybrid? Better rein in that contempt for those who still drive primitive conventional cars. It seems that a Hummer is more ecologically friendly than a Prius.
Yes, the Hummer will burn much more gasoline and discharge more emissions than a Toyota Prius driven the same distance. But a car’s ecological footprint — if we may twist an environmentalist phrase — is more than just fuel mileage.
Hummer: Is this demon machine actually a friend of the environment?
The feature that makes the Prius such a draw for the environmentally conscious is really its weak spot: the battery. Like all hybrid batteries, it’s of the nickel metal hydride variety. The nickel for the Prius is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at a plant nearby. Toyota buys 1,000 tons of nickel from the plant each year.
So far, so green? Maybe not. The landscape around the plant at the city’s edge alarms environmentalists. Some eco-activists blame the bleak, lifeless countryside near the facility in part on its 1,250-foot smokestack that belches acid-rain-causing sulphur dioxide.
‘Sudbury remains a major environmental and health problem,’ says David Martin of Greenpeace Canada. ‘The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high.’
But there’s more. From the Sudbury plant, the smelted nickel is shipped to Europe, where it’s refined in Wales. Next, it’s sent to China, where it’s manufactured in nickel foam. The nickel is then moved to Japan, where Prius batteries are made.
But the long, fossil-fuel-burning journey doesn’t end there. After the batteries are placed in the Prius, some of the nickel is round-tripped back to North America while some is shipped to Europe in cars sold outside Japan.
This useful information comes not from the investigative efforts of the mainstream U.S. media that allegedly exist to keep the public informed; it’s brought to us by Chris Demorro, an enterprising reporter with the newspaper of Central Connecticut State University, The Recorder, and London Mail reporter Martin Delgado.
While the Prius digs a deep environmental rut, the Hummer H3 plods on with a much lighter touch. An H3 costs $2.07 per lifetime mile to operate in environmental terms, while the Prius costs $2.87. Figures are courtesy of CNW Marketing, which rates cars on the combined energy needed ‘to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage.’
Then there’s the expected life span of the Prius: 100,000 miles, or a third of the Hummer’s, says CNW. Toyota would have to go through the same ‘build, sell, drive and dispose’ process three times for three Priuses to provide the same amount of service provided by one H3.
We know some hybrid owners buy them for the fuel mileage and are not obsessed with global warming. But that doesn’t mean a hybrid is necessarily a good choice, especially after the EPA lowered the 2008 model’s fuel efficiency rating. The hybrid king of mileage actually gets a city-highway average of about 46 mpg, down roughly 16% from earlier ratings.
If mileage and economy are the top concerns, then better choices might be Toyota’s Yaris or Corolla, conventional-engine cars that get nearly comparable mileage with no hybrid price premium.
We’re not trying to disparage hybrids in response to environmentalists’ demonization of SUVs. Consumers should be free to drive whatever they want. We’re merely providing some little-known facts — and wondering just what other ‘green’ alternatives being pushed on the public are not so green after all.
Labels: Global Warming Myth
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