Eco Rant

Oregon based CNW Marketing Research has done two years research on the environmental impact of motor vehicles and the results will astound you. There was an article in the NZ Herald motoring section yesterday 25th November reporting on Toyotas new Lexus RH 400h SUV (4 wheel drive for those that live in West Auckland or if you live in London, known as a Chelsea tractor) which has a V8 and two electric motors (it is a Hybrid like the Toyota Prius). My cousin Nick in England has just bought one and I had a ride in one when we were over there. It is a very nice car and has all the gadgets. The question though is “are Hybrids saving the environment?” Toyota’s New Zealand MD Bob Field was claiming that the government should put a carbon tax on cars.

In the

a number of film stars are driving Toyota Prius hybrids (J Lo, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Leonardo de Caprio) and waxed in eloquently about how they are doing their bit for the environment. Now anyone who believes the dribble that issues from these peoples mouths is probably also dragging their knuckles on the ground. They are after all trained actors; trained to perform like monkeys. Plus while they might drive these cars around LA, when they fly to New York they fly on private jets that guzzle 2750 gallons of jet fuel. Brad Pitt’s recent trip to

Namibia

used 11,000 gallons one way. Pitt would have to drive his Prius to the moon to compensate for this one trip alone.

So what’s all of this got to do with the CNW report? Absolutely nothing; it’s just to show how hypocritical some of these people are, and I have not even mentioned politicians yet. The report is 458 pages so if you a copy let me know.

CNW’s study is a total environmental dust to dust study; it does not just look at fuel consumption which is all politicians and film stairs understand about the environment. The study takes into account fuel consumption but also manufacturing costs of all of the parts and assembly of the vehicle, plus the energy used in the research and development plus the energy used by the workers to get to the factory. It also takes into account the cars durability and how well is can be recycled. If you don’t look at all of these energy costs then you are being intellectually dishonest. Standard fare for politicians I hear you say. When you can change laws retrospectively taxing things for environmental reasons is child’s play.

So which are the greenest cars? Well the ones painted green of course! Sorry very weak joke. In the study the Toyota Scion xB a small car sold in the US is best (looks like a very square van), the Toyota Varis is second and the Range Rover Sport is third (yep sure is). In the UK the best is the Jeep Wrangler. The “dust to dust” energy cost of the Toyota Prius is 5 times that of the Toyota Yaris. The Range Rover Sport is 25 percent greener that the Prius. The Lexus RX400h is worse than the Range Rover.

The worst car is the Maybach (a big limo car made by Mercedes) followed by the VW Phaeton (another big limo) followed by the Rolls Royce Phantom; the worst 4 x 4 is the Porsche Cayenne.

Hybrids are not as green in the “dust to dust” costs because some of their key components are not so durable and so must be replaced earlier and cost more to dispose (think electric engines and batteries). They also have very high research and development energy costs, more complicated to manufacture and use metals such as lightweight steel that requires more energy to make and is harder to recycle.

If you concerned about the environment the basing car purchase decisions solely on fuel consumption alone without looking at the greater environmental impact shows that you are either (a) uninformed or (b) shallower than a bird bath.

Many SUV’s do well because they are easy and cheap to manufacture, they use simple easy to manufacture steel and last a long time. A Prius is good for 100,000 miles before major parts need to be replaced whereas a Land Cruiser is good for 300,000 miles.

In 1992, Al Gore the man who was cheated out of becoming the next President of the United States by senior citizens in Florida who did not know who they were voting for anyway (and gave the world a new phrase –“the hanging Chad”) said America was running out of space to dump and bury rubbish. Now I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but anytime a politician opens their mouth you had better be careful. They have a find a cause to champion so they can get votes; it does not matter whether they believe in the cause, it’s not the engine but the starter motor if you know what I mean.

So how did Big Al come to believe this? Well an environmental report by the EPA (Environmental in the US said this would happen. The EPA has since admitted that the report was based on false data. So there is plenty of room to store rubbish in the ground. You could store all the US rubbish for the next century in Ted Turners (founder of CNN) Flying D ranch in Bozeman Montana and still have 50,000 acres left for the Bison. But aren’t landfills dangerous with chances of leachate contaminating water supplies and methane gas leaks. The EPA in the US estimates that there will be 5.7 deaths from cancer from landfills in the next 50 years. Bear in mind we are not talking about nuclear waste landfills here. 47 states in the US ship some of their garbage to other states and 45 states import the stuff. I suggest in NZ that Auckland ships all of its waste to Wellington which could help them extend the length of the runway and create a decent airport.

Another so called problem is that we will run out of natural resources if we do not recycle. So is this true? Of course not, do you think I would mention it if it was?

Lets consider trees, you plant seeds and they grow. You then chop them down and grow new ones. New forest growth exceeds consumption of paper and wood by a factor of 20 every year over what the world consumes. Temperate forests in North America, Europe and Russia have expanded in the last 40 years. It is true that tropical forests are reducing by 1 percent a year, often caused by governments not respecting private property rights. The point is more recycling of paper and wood will not help tropical forests.

Well three times in the 20th century the U.S. Department of the Interior predicted that oil would run out in the next 15 years and of course it never did happen. And why is this? Because new reserves are being found all the time and it might not be at $10 a barrel but it is oil we can use.

Oil is running out or so the media would have us believe. The truth is there is a limited amount of cheap oil (sub $US40 a barrel) but there are reserves that are viable when the oil price is higher. At the moment oil is trading at $US59 down from a high of $US78 in July. These are the lowest prices in two years. In Alberta in Canada there are oil sands from which oil can be extracted through an expensive process and as long as oil is between $US40 and $US50 a barrel it is profitable to extract it. Alberta sits on top of the largest oil deposits outside the Arabian Peninsula with 300 million recoverable barrels of oil and more than another trillion barrels that hopefully can be recovered as technology improves. Now you never hear any of this in the mainline media, all you hear is all the drama and doom and gloom.