Are you Green?, HA! Options

[naro914]

HA, I have to share this....

I was in the back of my building doing a few tweaks to my race car Papa Smurf. Running it up and down, etc. (2.2 high compression 6 cyl engine, headers to megaphones...) Then I went over to the 69 911 and had to change the piece of cardboard underneath because it's soaked in oil (next project). I was on the phone with another guy regarding my street 914 "Huey" and the fact that it's running very rich and needs some carb adjustments....

So I come back to my computer and get a spam email asking "Are you Green? How is your Carbon Footprint?"

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/lol-2.gif)

Uh....kind of like Bigfoot's....

[Lou W]

Not sure if this is true but I have run into it a couple of times from different reports and different angles but they all essentially say the same;

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 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.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesnt end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce nickel foam. From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

Wait, I haven't even got to the best part yet.

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius arch nemesis.

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.

I wonder whats gonna happen when these batteries in these cars when need to be replaced and the owners can't afford them? I also wonder who will take the old batteries?

[Todd Enlund]

I wonder whats gonna happen when these batteries in these cars when need to be replaced and the owners can't afford them? I also wonder who will take the old batteries?

Oblivious owners will just continue to drive them, as non-hybrids, getting 20 MPG because of the ballast that they are carrying.

Top Gear did a test... they put the Stig in a Prius, and had him run laps around the test track. Jeremy followed in an M3. IIRC, the Prius got 19 MPG during the flogging, and the comparatively leisurely pace for the M3 netted 24 MPG.