I'm going green- buying a Hummer

Arrgh.... just when you thought it was simple:  Good Guy?  The Toyota Prius.  Bad Guy? The Hummer.  Easy.  Or at least it was until people make you start thinking about it.


Now, I'm from California, so except for our Governator who, at last count, had several Hummers, most folks scoff at them.  We can't even look at their owners in the eyet when they pull up next to us at the gas station.  We just look down and pretend to be lost in thought while we fill up our BMWs.

So, I'm going along just fine, then this group decides to do a cradle to grave analysis of the two cars.  This report, called 'Dust to Dust' is cool.  This is what is does - it finds the total energy necessary to:

Plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables.

How cool is that?  Suddenly my life is simple again.  Just read the report, then I'll know just what car to buy.  To make it simple the good folks at the research place translated all the research into what they called the dollars per lifetime mile.  That's the energy cost per mile averaged over the lifetime of the car (full report here).  So, lower cost = good car, higher cost = bad car.

They researched 280 different cars and SUVs.  Lowest cost per mile?  SMART, Ion, Focus, Cavalier and Wrangler.  All at about .65 per mile.  Highest?  Rolls-Royce, Phaeton and Maybach at about $14.00 per mile (what the Hell is a Maybach?).  Prius was number 140 at $2.29.  The Hummer H3 was number 155 and costs $2.32 per mile.   And, surprise, surprise the Honda Accord Hybrid comes in at number 263 at $4.22 per mile, surpassing the biggest Hummer and about every other huge SUV.  In fact all the Hybrids - Camry, Highlander and Mariner came out worse.

(for those that are counting there are 139 car owners that are currently being looked down on by Prius owners that can lift their heads high)

The major reason for the Hybrid's poor showing is the batteries, and the pollution associated with their production and disposal.  Apparently almost all the nickel that goes into the Prius' batteries comes from a plant in Sudbury Ontario.  In fact, the plant has caused so much environmental damage to the area around it that it's 'dead'.  So dead that NASA that can use it to test moon rovers with no fear of running into a living thing. 

It's bad enough that the nickel is apparently killing everything around the plant but it's then shipped off in container ships to Europe to be refined.  Then it goes to China for some more processing, then to Japan.  Finally the finished batteries are sent to the United States.  How environmentally friendly is all that?

Now granted you've got to pick your foes.  The Hummer costs way more at the gas pump.  And maybe we should buy the Prius since we can probably depend on the Nickel coming from Canada whereas who knows about the oil from Saudi Arabia.  Or, maybe we shouldn't buy the Prius at all because it's not American.  Trouble is there's too much to think about, and what with all the politicians mucking up the water with one-liners, it's just a mess.  Bottom line?  Buy a three-year-old Honda Accord, or hitch hike to work.

On that note I'll leave you with something entirely off topic. 

This is a video submitted to a Colbert Report video contest.  The challenge was to take blue screen footage of a rather boring McCain speech and see if you could make it amusing.  My vote?  Whoever did this has way too much time on his or her hands