Worldwatch Wants You to Think
January 18th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Worldwatch asks a challenging question:
One car gets 46 miles per gallon, features fancy accessories, and sports two engines with a combined 145 horsepower. The other car reportedly gets 54 miles per gallon, runs on a diminutive 30-horsepower engine, and is positively spartan in its interior trimmings. The first is a darling of the environmentally conscious. The latter is reviled as a climate wrecker. These two vehicles are the Toyota Prius and the newly unveiled Tata Nano, dubbed “the people’s car.” Is there a double standard?
January 18th, 2008 at 4:45 am
It certainly seems like a double standard. The rich developed nation can have automobiles, albeit more green than the much vilified SUV, but the poor developing nation should not utilize this technology, but instead use public transportation or bicycles.
January 19th, 2008 at 4:06 am
Interesting how we of the Golden Billion have determined that the third world should limit their use of fossil fuels in their pursuit of Health, Education, and Welfare, while pseudoenvironmentalists jet around the world to tropical paradises (why not to the poles, eh?) determining how they are going to increase the distance between them and most of the world in terms of economic viability. Indeed, even the term “Green” is a delusion, as without CO2 nothing would be green on Earth, and although there is nothing based in reality that shows increasing CO2 will be bad, all we *know* about it is that it will increase the food supply to said third world.
January 20th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Patrick Johnson writes in by email:
“In reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear several years ago, I was struck by a passage in which a clueless, pompous celebrity blathers away about the industrialized nations’ responsibility of preventing the up-and-coming nations from repeating the industrialized nations’ mistakes. When pressed, the celebrity finally blurts out the unvarnished truth: We must prevent the Third World from attaining our standard of living – the planet simply cannot sustain it. We got ours; they can’t have theirs. “Surely, Michael, you (over)exaggerate for dramatic effect”, I thought. “This guy is more caricature than character.”
But after reading the World Watch article, and the various reactions, it appears I thought wrong, and Crichton did not exaggerate.
That said, if I thought global climate had much sensitivity to a trace gas, I would welcome an additional several million cars – even tiny efficient ones – as another contribution to the postponement of the next glaciation, perhaps buying us enough time to figure out what’s really going on with this 3 million year Ice Age; and maybe develop some long term coping strategies.
But since that is clearly not the case, the problems and benefits related to the Nano – excepting impacts on fuel supplies world-wide – will be mostly regional: They will have to deal with additional pollution (and it won’t be pretty). They will have to develop the arterial infrastructure to handle millions more personal vehicles. They will have to develop the means of getting fuel to millions more vehicles. And the health care expansions to handle the increased injuries (and lung diseases). And the expanded militaries to protect their oil supplies . . . and so on.
Come to think of it, there is one Western mistake that the developing countries could avoid: The unholy alliance of government & the auto-makers which took place early in Twen-Cen. If the governments of these countries were to stoutly refuse to get into the road-building business; if the transportation sector was forced to carry its own freight, so to speak, the marketplace would quickly favor the most efficient modalities. Just a guess, but I doubt that personal vehicles could compete in the crowded urban, and long-distance markets.
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Parting thought regarding the Prius: I’m slogging through the “Dust to Dust” study. I don’t have the background to do more than follow the debate, but so far, CNW’s (the study’s author) arguments are the most reasoned. I would welcome other reactions – start here: http://cnwmr.com/ Also, see article in the Telegraph here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1YourView&xml=/motoring/2007/06/30/nosplit/mfprius30.xml“
January 21st, 2008 at 9:39 pm
If the governments of these countries were to stoutly refuse to get into the road-building business; if the transportation sector was forced to carry its own freight, so to speak, the marketplace would quickly favor the most efficient modalities.
Excellent comment by Patrick Johnson.
And yes, there is a double standard at work here, and kudos to Worldwatch for point it out. Our analysis does not end with the apparent hypocrisy of enviros, however, because as it turns out, they basically are correct to worry about the environmental damage that is done when consumer markets face resources that are no effective owned or priced – which of course is the fundamental problem that plagues development.
Regards,
Tom
January 25th, 2008 at 10:23 am
“If the governments of these countries were to stoutly refuse to get into the road-building business”
we would all soon be walking (not to mention starving to death).
January 26th, 2008 at 1:06 am
Hi Roger,
“Parting thought regarding the Prius: I’m slogging through the “Dust to Dust” study. I don’t have the background to do more than follow the debate, but so far, CNW’s (the study’s author) arguments are the most reasoned. I would welcome other reactions -…”
I probably won’t have time to look at this in detail, but:
“This is a general-consumer report, not a technical document per se. It includes breakdowns
of each vehicle’s total energy requirements from Dust to Dust but does not include issues of
gigajuelles,…”
So these are people purporting to do an energy study, and they can’t even spell gigajoule? Not a good sign!
“The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but
all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario,” Martin told the British
newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains “a major environmental and health problem.
The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high.”
I don’t know much about the Sudbury nickel smelter, but I do know copper smelters. Many of the copper smelter stacks in the U.S. (e.g., the RTZ/Kennecott smelter in Utah, Asarco in El Paso) were installed when the plants had much, much higher sulfur dioxide emissions than they do now. It was not unheard of in the late 1960s and early 1970s for a copper smelter (with a reverberatory furnace) to emit 1,000,000 tons per year of sulfur dioxide. Now, numbers are something like 10,000 tons per year…and as I recall, the RTZ/Kennecott smelter has sulfur dioxide emissions less than 1,000 tons per year. That can be compared to a big coal plant without scrubbers that might emit 100,000 tons per year.
In other words, the height of the stack of a smelter may have virtually nothing to do with magnitude of sulfur dioxide emissions at present, because the stack may have been installed when sulfur dioxide emissions were much higher than at present.
There are engineering professionals who specialize in life cycle assessment. If CNW can’t even *spell* “gigajoule,” (and rely on “Greenpeace’s energy coordinator in Canada for their environmental analyses), I doubt they have such expertise on staff. That obviously doesn’t guarantee that their analysis is flawed, but it doesn’t bode well.
January 26th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Further on CNW’s competence, I notice that in their comparison they give the Prius a lifetime of 100k miles, while they give the Hummer 300k miles.
My Toyota Corolla has over 100k miles and it’s like new.
I suspect getting a Hummer to last 300k miles would be a challenge…
Or, does CNW generally throw their stuff away when the batteries die?