[SustainableTompkins] Hybrid parade: Efficiency does equal emissions reductions

[Shawn Reeves]

Several days back, Andy wrote:
>  Don't be fooled... While buying a Prius allows for lower tailpipe
>emissions, don't assume that makes it instantly better. Do you know how much
>energy goes into mining nickel for Prius batteries from Sudbury, Ontario?

Whoa, whoa, whoa....Let's settle this with another simple, 
back-of-the-envelope calculation. I'm not going to type everything 
out this time, but anyone that can do arithmetic should be able to 
follow.
Conservative average lifetime of car: 100k miles
Gas over lifetime: 3k if Prius, 5k if typical car, 10k if Hummer
Price spent on fuel, assuming conservative $3/gal: $9k Prius, $15k if 
typical, $30k if Hummer
Savings in fuel cost for Prius over typical: $6k
Now, do you think that $6k worth of energy goes into the production 
of one Prius? Let's see...
Take aluminum, a very energy-intensive metal.
Cost to make enough aluminum from bauxite just to produce about 8 cans: 1kWh
Mass of Mug Root Beer can in my bag of returnables: 13g
Electricity you can buy with $6k: 30MWh
Amount of aluminum you can make with 30MWh: 3Mg, or 3 tons.
Amount of aluminum, nickel, and other energy-intensive metals in a 
Prius (a guess): 300kg.
That "Sudbury" argument isn't even close to being right, off by about 
a factor of 10! But, since it appeared in an episode of Boston Legal, 
half of America believes it. TV screws the environment again.
If you didn't figure out the answer to my question above, it is 
"Nope!" I venture about $6k went to labor, $1k went to shareholders 
and other financial stakeholders, $1k to embedded energy, $30k to R&D 
(at current cumulative production; this will, of course, go down as 
long as people don't get scared by the naysayers), and $8k to parts 
suppliers not including embedded energy.

Oh, and one more thing: Did you know that the steel they use to make 
Chevy Venture Vans and almost every car, is roughly 10% nickel (and 
even more chromium)? So, even if the Sudbury argument held true for 
the Prius, it would damn the heavier vehicles even more. Can anyone 
say "Chrome, me? Yum!"?

It's a nice sentiment, not to want to buy and dump things; but, if 
you look at CFLs and HE washing machines, and now hybrids, it saves 
energy to replace, not to be anti-consumerist just for 
anti-consumerism's sake.
Andy does point to something that trumps all of this, car-sharing. 
But, he should have fairly compared 7 people in the van to 4 people 
in the Prius, not cheat by having only one person in the Prius. Then 
the comparison would be 182 people miles per gallon for the van, and 
160-220 pmpg for the Prius, depending on how heavy those people are. 
The Prius, with it's auto-idle mode etc. would be better for the air 
in downtown Oneonta, but at the pump, about equal.
I'm always sorry to sound so pedantic, but there are just so many 
claims and sentiments out there that aren't backed up. It's hard for 
a physics teacher to watch them go unanswered, but I wish I could be 
more of a coach than a pedant.
Whether it's global climate change or peak oil, we're all noticing 
that personal economies (how much mileage does this car get that I 
can buy for myself, how much money will it save me?) must give way to 
global economies (our atmosphere, water, land, hydrocarbons, are 
finite; as part of the entire population, how much impact am I 
allowing all of us to have?). Sad, bad news for Adam Smithians and 
anti-Communists.

-- 
-Shawn Reeves
shawn at energyteachers.org
http://energyteachers.org