"Green" technology has never poven to be green.
A Prius is the latest example...
I stumbled across an article concerning the emergence of hybrid vehicles and potential environmental damage that these vehicles cause. There was a study called “Dust to Dust” performed by CNW Research which is a privately funded research organization. There were some staggering conclusions born of this report and the environmental activists have launched a firestorm campaign to discredit the findings.
One example of environmental responsibility is the Toyota Prius. Because of the popularity of this vehicle as a banner of responsible environmentalism, the study specifically studied the energy cost of owning a Prius. This study used real world fuel efficiency data and over 3,000 data points concerning pre-production, production, operation and disposal costs to generate an over all cost per mile in energy of each vehicle.
What the study revealed is that owning and driving a Toyota Prius for 100,000 miles is more environmentally destructive that owning and driving a Hummer for 300,000 miles. Shocking? It really was to me too, but their data seems sound upon further investigation.
One of the things considered in the manufacture of the Prius is that it operates on nickel based batteries that will have to be replaced at times over the life of the vehicle. The nickel is mined and smelted in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and is an environmental disaster. I quote from a commentary about the “Dust to Dust” report:
“The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.
Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then onto Toyota's battery plant in Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-to-finish journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by diesel locomotive.
But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining, manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur-dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene from the depths of hell.
On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate of the Moon's landscape.
"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told the London Daily Mail.
"The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario," Martin told the British newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains "a major environmental and health problem. The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high."
This is the unseen cost of these hybrids that some would have us ignore. There are more, but that one fact serves as a fine example. The study concluded that the cost per mile of the champion vehicle for environmentalism, the Prius, was $3.53 per mile average with a maximum of $4.08. This is surprising when you consider that my Ford F-150 full sized truck scored and average of $2.47 per mile and a maximum of $2.73. My wife’s Ford Expedition was a heavy hitter at an average of $3.16 per mile and a maximum of $3.40, but I am glad to say it was the lowest in all the of the large SUV class. Still that's less than the cost of the most championed savior of the planet in the automotive industry, the Toyota Prius. (All information in this paragraph is taken from medium and maximum cost per mile table beginning on page 288 of the “Dust to Dust” PDF file.)
Don’t buy the lie. We do not know enough about the process that goes into the development and production of these newer technologies to full evaluate their impact on the environment. We are being sold a bill of sale based on pseudo-science and driven by an agenda from Toyota that is anything but good for this country or this planet.
"What a long strange trip its been"
Read more:
http://forums.motortrend.com/70/6618120 ... z11WlPuqxK
The government has NEVER created wealth, it only takes it, and redistributes it.
If "Greenines" really wanted to help the plantet, they would sterilize every female in Bangledesh.....
Population: 164 million
Area: 55,000 Sq. Miles
Population density: 3,000 people per square mile...
Yea, no shit. Want to get laid? Go to Bangledesh. The Beatles did!
Canada has
Pop: 33 Million
Area: 4 million Sq. Miles
Population density: 8 people per sq. mile.
The US should limit Blacks and Mexicans to 4 kids each... and I'm being real fukin' generous right there....
The problem isnt resources and poultion.... its friggin' people.