"...Ross..." <rosso@bad-seed.org> writes:
> At 5:28 AM -0800 3/11/01, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote:
> >Hmm, I thought they would now, with our higher electric costs, but
> >that's not clear. But in general, my bias against buying an electric
> >car now is that the cost of electric cars is so high that you'll never
> >recoup the cost.
>
> Is there any room in your equation to account for the potentially
> lower impact of your actions upon our environment and resources? We
> don't *have* to be AdamSmith-ites, looking simply for pleasure. We as
> humans do have the ability to look at systems as a whole and
> recognize long-term effects of our short term actions.
What gives you the idea that an electric (from the grid) car has less
of an environmental impact, even potentially?
> (* Potentially: I'm using this modifier because I don't have figures
> stating that the life time fuel efficiency out ways the impact of
> producing a plastic car with current plastics creation and recycling
> techniques. I would guess that it does considering the infrastructure
> required to support the creation of the car vs. the lifetime
> operation of a gasoline powered vehicle.)
Well, let's just throw that out; ignore the fact that much if not most
of the pollution that a car creates comes from its creation and
disposal, not its operation.
I haven't seen evidence that a car with an offboard hybrid engine
(about 50% coal on average, rest nuclear, hydro, gas turbine) producs
less pollution during its operation than a car with an onboard
gasoline engine.
Produce some and I'll grant you that warm fuzzy feeling. And I'll
thank you for injecting some facts into the debate, too - I'll admit
that I'm being lazy, but that's okay, the entire electric car
discussion is bunk. The backers are banking on the fact that people
get that clean feeling from electricity because they can't see the
dams and the smokestacks.
The fact that there's little thought in the discussion is obvious to
me whenever I see the term "zero emission vehicle", which is a blatant
lie.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.monkey.org/~kra/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:14:03 PDT