Glen Dean over at his eponymous blog has pointed out an article that takes the Toyota Prius - the gas-electric hybrid that supposedly gets up to 60 mpg - has a downside. The article makes the unlikely claim that the Hummer is more environmentally-sound than the Prius!
They actually make a pretty good case, check it out:
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer
that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already
noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel.
The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This
plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding
environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test
moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and
Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the
plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario,
becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.
“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants
and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace
energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a
British-based newspaper.
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Read the full article here - this particular source is a college report, but I've read the same thing multiple places.
The problem is, the sources have been blogs (likely rightwing, but not exclusively). Anyone have more info from a more reliable source?
13 comments:
tag! you're it! i hope you'll play "8 random things". here are the "rules"
feels strange asking you to play but i'd love to read your 8 random things!
Ya know, I'm probably just not that interesting that you'd want to know 8 random things about me. UNLESS, the random facts don't have to be reality-based!
Can you sort them out?
1. My only out-of-country trip was to Nicaragua
2. My only out-of-body trip was to Maryland
3. My favorite books of the Bible are probably Acts and James
4. My favorite non-existent book is Play Mandolin like Chris Thile in Two Easy Lessons!
That's the best I can do, only four random facts (two of them fictional) and I'm already bored...
I can't find it Dan, but there is something out there that I've read regarding this issue which shows that the Prius isn't as bad as they make it out to be. It's not without it's environmental drawbacks, but it's not so bad that they should all be dumped and replaced with H2's.
Dan, you helped me expand my vocabulary today. Eponymous. I think I will use that word in the future and act like I have always known what it meant.
On this subject though, even if the batteries really don't cause as much damage as the article says, I think it is still more practical to buy a small "regular type" car like a Toyota Scion or Corolla. The gas mileage really isn't that much different and they are a lot cheaper. Or better yet, walk or commute if you can, carpool, take mass transit, etc.
Glen makes a good point, one that the president of Toyota has made himself, which is that the Prius' advantages in gas savings don't make up for it's higher initial costs until 5 or 6 years of driving.
You're welcome, Glen. Always glad to assist with the eructation of brobdingnagian verbiage for my omphalopsychite companions in the blogosphere.
Just don't use your neophytic erudition to be contumelious.
And thanks for the info about Toyota's president, Eben. You have a source for that?
Never mind. I get what you were saying. I thought you were suggesting the president was saying that the environmental damage in cisn't outweighed by its benefits for five years.
I think that the TV news magazine South Park had an episode last season about the environmental dangers of hybrid cars. People who bought them released dangerous amounts of smug into the air, which threatened to combine with waves of smug moving in from Hollywood to create a perfect storm.
Oh, I imagine my bike emits all sorts of smug, if we're going to start measuring that...
Yikes, that's certainly a sobering bit of exposition. We tend to focus so much on the particulars of fossil fuel consumption, since there are so many drawbacks -- environmental, geopolitical, economic -- that we can forget about the havoc being wrought by the countless other industrial processes that our lifestyle depends on.
The bicycle idea is a good one, although many people don't have the flexibility of choosing exactly where they want to live and/or work. Motorcycles have much better gas mileage than a car, but I don't know how they do as far as pollution.
Another thing too is I don't think mass transit necessarily needs to be funded by the local government. I don't want to get into a debate about if it should or should not, but I think over time there will be a market for multiple mass transit systems as gas prices go up.
"although many people don't have the flexibility of choosing exactly where they want to live and/or work."
Who is it that doesn't have a choice, I wonder? That's not a smart aleck response, but a sincere question.
I understand that the more poor and limited educationally (and here, I'm not talking about school education necessarily, Eleutheros) one is, the more there might be limitations.
But for most of us, aren't our limitations mostly self-imposed, chosen?
On the mass transit, I think a case can be made for gov't funding, but let's at the least agree to quit subsidizing motorists (as we currently do in myriad ways) with gov't dollars.
I'd suggest that if we did that, mass transit WOULD suddenly shoot up to being more affordable and desirable and, if we so chose, we could consider transfering some of the billions (trillions?) of dollars that we currently subsidize motorists with to mass transit, at least for start up costs.
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