Hummer more environmentally friendly than hybrid Prius?
The Globe and Mail had an article on Friday (July 27, 2007) claiming the environmental impact of a Hummer is less than for hybrids such as the Toyota Prius.
Needless to say, a lot of heads are turning (and being scratched). I decided to take my head and hands over to Google and do a little search on the topic, and it appears there's an "inconvenient truth" about the Globe and Mail's article: the research it's based on is apparently riddled with inaccuracies and out-of-date data and has already been debunked by several academic and industry groups, and in other newspapers as well (for example, the Washington Post.)
Here's one particularly informative post:
The original article is an opinion piece for a small college newspaper (The Central Connecticut State University Recorder) and has been re-worked for papers all over the western hemisphere. The whole article is garbage.
1. Take the "spitting distance" mileage, for example. The new EPA combined mileage put the Chevy Aveo at 26 mpg, the Toyota Prius at 46 mpg. So I guess 20 miles more per gallon is "spitting distance."
2. The "Dust-to-dust" study is from a marketing firm, not a science journal. It arrives at an artificially high cost for the Prius by assigning it an arbitrary lifespan of 100k miles, and a Hummer 300k miles. There's Prius being used as cabs that have 200k on them now: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8839690/
And, insofar as a car lasting, what car do you expect to repair less? A Toyota Prius or a GM Hummer? You can check Consumer Reports for the answer to that one. A good analysis of the flaws in dust-to-dust is available at: http://www.truedelta.com/blog/?p=48
3. The Sudbury info is seriously outdated, and the comment about moon buggies (like, when did Nasa test moon buggies — early 1970's) ought to have given the author a clue. Sudbury was polluted by a century of mining (1870 on). In fact, some of Sudbury's nickel went into making the Statue of Liberty. Currently, the mine is owned by INCO (not Toyota), and produces 100,000 tons of nickel a year, of which Toyota buys 1% (1000 tons). Nickel, by the way, is primarily used to make stainless steel. The Mail on Sunday newspaper, which ran the story the college article is a thin re-write of (visible here http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/... ), used a stock photo from 1994 to illustrate the pollution (visible here http://www.photoboy.com/bin/Cklb?vmo=1173985067754 ). There were, of course, no Prius in existence or being manufactured in 1994.
Sudbury is no longer as polluted, as INCO and the city have planted over 8 million trees there since 1979. The best history online of the Sudbury devastation/reforestation comes from GM Canada (the trees were all cut down in 1871 to help rebuild Chicago after the fire), and it provides telling photos of some of the reclamation from 1979 to present.
http://www.gmcanada.com/inm/gmcanada/english/about...
The acid rain problem David Martin of Greenpeace is talking about in is the situation pre 1972. INCO on regreening and SO2 emissions
http://www.inco.com/development/community/profiles...
So, looks like there's not much of a leg for the Globe and Mail to stand on here. I'll leave you folks one last article (link) on the topic. Happy reading!
- Adam King's blog
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Comments
Well done!
The more I research, the more I find the dirty fingers of large corporations or foolish individuals (liars and dupes, respectively) deliberately muddying the waters of truth.
We really need more honest media. Following are some quotes from the Text of Gore Speech at Media Conference. Whether you like Gore or not (I do, generally), he makes some painful and brutally honest points, and I believe that what he says applies to us, too.
"I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.
"[The Founding Father's] faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well- informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.
"And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.
"It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.
"The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." ... The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.
"The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part.
"Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news.
"And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people."
Brian Gordon
Nominated Candidate, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca
Green Party of Canada
Trained Presenter
An Inconvenient Truth
People - Planet - Prosperity
Thanks Adam for this Work!
Priuses have been used as cabs in Vancouver and Victoria for as long as they have been available in the Canadian market. Taxis typically drive 10 times the distance per year as an average car -- so taxis build up very high mileage, very quickly.
It's not unoommon for cabs to have 350,000+ kms on them -- and Prius have done very well as taxis -- in fact one of the surprising findings is that taxi owners don't have to replace the brakes as often as in non-hybrid cars becasue the electric engine does a lot of the braking.
The only old-line traditional car companies -- GM, Ford and Chrysler -- are six years behind Toyota in hybrid development. In fact the market cap of Toyota is greater than these three companies added together -- so the market knows what is happening and has a very dim view about Detroit auto companies strategies.
GM and Ford have the highest average CO2 emissions of any major global car companies. So when you're in this position what can you do?
Well, you sue California to prevent it from putting in place mandatory fuel efficiency standards. You lobby on Parliament Hill and Capitol Hill against fuel efficiency standards. You claim its techincally impossible to improve fuel efficiency -- although other car companies already have.
With a story like this you have to ask who is behind it? Who funded the "research?" What's the list of clients that the supposed "independent" research firm has had in past? Has the research been "peer reviewed?"
The purpose of such studies is to slow the growing tide of customers who are rejecting old-auto company's because of their terrible response to the climate crisis.
Nickel and battery life
Hi
Havent read the Globe article so must tread warily,....
The analysis I have seen making the Hummer have less of a carbon footprint than the Prius is because the nickel batteries require the mining of nickel in Canada, the export to Wales to be refined, shipped to Japan to be made into batteries, that are then shipped in vehicles to be sold in Canada,... and the shelf life of the batteries are about 100K. Therefore 3 batteries required in the 300k lifespan of a Hummer.
The bottom line is that Prius and other technolgies will not save us from the hard choices we ultimately have to make for real change.
Yes, Andrew, I believe that
Yes, Andrew, I believe that the article made a point of this, saying that the transportation of materials was a large part of the unfriendliness of the Prius batteries. However, this ignores the idea that, given a large enough market for the Prius in North America, Toyota would open production here which would cut the impact of all that transportation.
The line in the article that I really objected to was that they accounted for the average yearly mileage driven by owners of different vehicles. So essentially, us "Greenies" who just generally drive less in whatever vehicle, are contributing to the poorer rating of our vehicle of choice.
Thanks Adam, for driving your Hummer through those large holes in the article.
Glenn Hubbers, P.Eng.
Newmarket-Aurora
www.hubbers.ca
Not my vehicle of choice!
The hybrid is not my vehicle of choice! I refuse to own an automobile, but if I did, I suspect that I would buy a compact diesel like a smart car. I think that we need to differentiate the hybrids from other cars for specific applications and not see them as universal panaceas. I think that they are probably a very good choice for taxicabs and delivery vehicles because they produce so much less smog-producing chemicals than other vehicles and because these applications put so many miles on the cars. In contrast, I think a cheaper and more fuel efficient hi-efficiency diesel used in a car co-op in conjunction with public transit and bicycles is the best option for the average user. The very few people who should live in the countryside (as opposed to people who work in urban areas and commute) would have other needs, but there are so few of these people that they would be pretty much irrelevent.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
Living in the countryside
Gareth Davies
Nanaimo-Alberni EDA
Parksville, BC
Bill, you said, "The very few people who should live in the countryside (as opposed to people who work in urban areas and commute) would have other needs, but there are so few of these people that they would be pretty much irrelevent."
I just totally fail to understand what is meant here. Could you help me on this? Do you mean that only certain people would be allowed to live in the countryside and that because there would be so few they would be irrelevant?
Gareth
BTW My wife and I never owned a car until we were thirty as neither of us could drive and didn't have a licence. In those days (early sixties) we were all in the same boat, but had at our fingertips a good bus and train service between our town and Cardiff and anywhere else, otherwise we did a lot of walking. It was quite social, meeting people on the train for 30 or 40 minutes, who you didn't meet otherwise. We went away to South Africa for 3 or so years and when we returned to Britain the Railway staff had changed their uniforms to that of railway staff in Europe, which was upsetting in some way, they had changed the fathom and millibar (both already metric) into metres and centimetres, but the biggest shock was, everyone had a car and TV! No one had a garage! Later the currency went metric and the EEC beckoned.
There were so many new cars on the road that two-way streets became one-way streets and cars parked on both sidewalks. The changeover from non car-owning populace to car-owning populace was that quick, just a couple of years. Public transportation soon took a big hit. I admire you for refusing to use a car, which must sometimes be difficult for you at times.
: )
Greener thoughts make greener people!
People living in the countryside
Bill, you said, "The very few people who should live in the countryside (as opposed to people who work in urban areas and commute) would have other needs, but there are so few of these people that they would be pretty much irrelevent."
I just totally fail to understand what is meant here. Could you help me on this? Do you mean that only certain people would be allowed to live in the countryside and that because there would be so few they would be irrelevant?
Canada is overwhelmingly an urban country in that most Canadians live in towns and cities. The largest number of people who do live in the countryside probably commute to the city to work. If we lived in a genuinely sustainable society I simply cannot see how this commuting could be allowed to continue. With that part of the population removed from the equation, then I suspect that the remaining people who actually work in the countryside (lumberjacks, farmers, miners, trappers, scientists, etc) could drive quite energy inefficient things like SUVs but there would be so few of them that the impact would be negligible. (Although when I was in the countryside most folks drove things like Buicks.)
Environmental issues are all about percentages. If a small number of people create a relatively large mess the impact can be less than if a large number of people create a relatively small mess.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
Write a letter?
Are you going to write a letter to the editor to rebutt?
----
http://www.julienlamarche.ca - julien.lamarche@gmail.com
The 4 electoral systems: http://preview.tinyurl.com/5hzoxl
Prius battery life
I looked into purchasing a Toyota hybrid recently, and the battery is designed to last the life of the vehicle, which is considerably more than 100,000 km. Hundreds of thousands is more like it. I have heard talk from Victoria cab drivers that Toyota recently gave a cabbie a new Prius in exchange for his Prius taxi that had 1,000,000 km. And the batteries are recyclable.
Brian Gordon
Nominated Candidate, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca
Green Party of Canada
Trained Presenter
An Inconvenient Truth
People - Planet - Prosperity
Take my challenge
Great debate, if you have to drive a car try these tips.
http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/2331#comment-1640
John Paul Appleman
ADFW FGPA