Hummer greener than Prius?

[clyde]

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/edito...asp?NewsID=188

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.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.

[dan]

http://forums.carmudgeons.com/showthread.php?t=7686

[lupinsea]

I sent that article to a coworker who's a major Prius fanboi. There's been virtually no more talk about the Prius in our office.


He still abhors Hummers, though.








Of course, so do I.






















Because, it's obvious Jeeps are better.

[lemming]

i eagerly await the consequences of embracing any battery-based solution, especially one that is the equivalent of 1500 D cell batteries per car.

it smells like MTBE to me.

[Sharp11]

I don't have any info or data to refute the article, but a couple of questions come to mind:

How do they get a 100k life span for a Prius and a 300k life span for a Hummer? Is it the battery that dies after 100k? If so, then it can be replaced, otherwise, there's no reason a Prius shouldn't last as long as any other car on the road.

More important, what percentage of the factory in Canada's production of batteries is dedicated to Toyota and its Prius? One percent, ten percent, one eighth of one percent? He seems to be blaming all of the by-products of producing nickel-based batteries on Toyota.

And what other kinds of batteries are produced there?

Perhaps the author has a beef with batteries, specifically those containing nickel and therefore any number of products which have undesirable chemical byproducts should be on his hit list: vacuum tubes, printed circuit boards, power supplies etc.

Anyway, just throwing some devils' advocate questions - I'm not a fan of hybrids for many reasons, but I don't accept anything written these days on face value.

Ed

[dredmo]

Originally Posted by Sharp11

How do they get a 100k life span for a Prius and a 300k life span for a Hummer? Is it the battery that dies after 100k? If so, then it can be replaced, otherwise, there's no reason a Prius shouldn't last as long as any other car on the road.

Yes, but then another village burns as the nickel is produced for the new battery.

[lemming]

bring up circuit boards, vacuum tubes and so forth. that's pretty fair. but those manufacturers don't hide behind "green friendly" commercials. you're mixing the metaphor and confusing the argument with things that are far from analogous.

this'd be like AMD claiming "green chips" when these chips would represent less than 5% of their annual chip output and get good press for it at Intel's expense. so a bunch of limousine liberals join hands across hollywood boulevard to sing happy trails and embrace AMD the company and point fingers at Intel the evil corporate nemesis.

you start to muddle the argument by naming all of the things that also have nickel and cadmium does not detract from the truth that these are still found in the Toyota products at a supremely high level compared to their fully gasoline-based peers. my math is that a large concentration of the aforementioned heavy metals divided by a very small number equals a very large number = Toyota Prius relative heavy metal content.

[Sharp11]

Originally Posted by lemming

bring up circuit boards, vacuum tubes and so forth. that's pretty fair. but those manufacturers don't hide behind "green friendly" commercials. you're mixing the metaphor and confusing the argument with things that are far from analogous.

this'd be like AMD claiming "green chips" when these chips would represent less than 5% of their annual chip output and get good press for it at Intel's expense. so a bunch of limousine liberals join hands across hollywood boulevard to sing happy trails and embrace AMD the company and point fingers at Intel the evil corporate nemesis.

you start to muddle the argument by naming all of the things that also have nickel and cadmium does not detract from the truth that these are still found in the Toyota products at a supremely high level compared to their fully gasoline-based peers. my math is that a large concentration of the aforementioned heavy metals divided by a very small number equals a very large number = Toyota Prius relative heavy metal content.

You're assuming Clyde's article, which contains no source links, and which is easy to find just about everywhere right-wingers congregate on the web, is somehow correct - that it has an "argument" to present.

In fact, it's a student newspaper opinion piece from a marginal Ct party school, copied almost verbatim from another source (an issue of plagiarism is raised elsewhere).

I'm surprised Clyde would've bothered posting this, frankly

Anyway, I found this at greenhybrid.com

I sent this letter:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob_Wilson
> http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/edito...asp?NewsID=188
>
After checking with the editor, I understand they will review but may or may not elect to publish this rebuttal:

Dear Editor,

Chris Demorro's opinion piece, "Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage" suffers from a lack of fact checking. He claims ". . . their ultimate 'green car' is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America" copied from a flawed _Daily_ _Mail_ article without at least fact checking the environmental record of the Inco Sudbury Canadian plant, http://wwww.inco-sudbury-airquality.com/.

Frank Javor, Superintendent, Health and Environment, CVRD Inco Smelting Operations e-mailed their annual emissions data going back to 1974, 23 years before Toyota sold their first Prius. Since then, INCO has made a 90% reduction in SO(2) and INCO emissions continue to go down.

Chris failed to check the amount of nickel used in hybrid batteries, about 200 pounds per vehicle or 30 million pounds for 150,000 existing Prius versus the annual Canadian nickel output, over 380 million pounds. Nickel production is driven by the vastly larger market for stainless steel and other high temperature metals.

Failure to fact check is compounded when the flawed CNW Marketing report is cited while the "Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment", http://www.ilea.org/lcas/macleanlave1998.html, from Carnegie Mellon University, reports 73% of the energy used comes from operation, not manufacturing. Only CNW Marketing makes this false claim and compounds the error by using dollars instead of Joules, an energy unit. Those who have read the CNW Marketing report can confirm a large number of false claims including assignment of shorter vehicle lifetimes to hybrids, excessively development costs, false recycling claims, and a claim that hybrids are "a style.' This last lie suggests that if someone had a gas-only Camry and a hybrid Camry, they would drive the gas Camry even with $3/gal gas because the hybrid is "a style."

An opinion piece that states the opposite of the facts and data is deliberately misleading to the point of propaganda. Hybrids aren't for everyone but in this case, Chris failed to fact check and at best, his piece was misleading.

Robert J. Wilson
Sr. Network Engineer
The author of this student newspaper piece replied via an e-mail and plans to do some fact checking. So I sent him a copy of Frank's e-mail with the graphs. I also volunteered that I'd over estimated the amount of nickel in a Prius battery and suggested he contact Toyota North America to get the facts and data. Sad to say but he'd assumed the "Daily Mail" article and the CNW Marketing reports had been fact checked.

It was a 'learning' experience for the kid and hopefully, he'll be a little more circumspect in the future.

Bob Wilson

Like many of the right wing hit pieces out there, this one really raised my suspicions, so a little google search goes a long way


Ed

[clyde]

Originally Posted by Sharp11

I'm surprised Clyde would've bothered posting this, frankly

just passing on from slashdot

Anyway, I found this at greenhybrid.com

And with a name like that, you know that they're objective about their hybrid veggies. :cookoo:

[lemming]

i wasn't assuming much about the article other than it highlights a future debate about the environmental friendliness of hybrid vehicles.

exactly how does one go about recycling 1000 D cell batteries?