The truth about hybrids

As gas prices creep higher and higher, lot's of people are tempted to buy a hybrid car to save on transportation costs. No problem there, but hybrids are more expensive than their gas-guzzzleing analogs. So what explains their popularity? Pompous, environmental ideology, that's what. What you sanctimonious, Goreacle-worshipping blow-hards don't realize is that the carbon released into the atmosphere as a result of manufacturing the "Eco-friendly" nickel batteries used in hybrids is huge.

Here's an exerpt from a study detailing the energy costs of vehicles from concept to disposal...

The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and melted at nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province's massive Georgian Bay.

Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to Wales for refining, then to China, where it's manufactured into nickel foam, and then onto Toyota's battery plant in Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-to-finish journey travels more than 10,000 miles — mostly by container ship, but also by diesel locomotive.

But it's not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining, manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene from the depths of hell.

On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it's considered a duplicate of the Moon's landscape.
"The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid down off the hillside," David Martin, Greenpeace's energy coordinator in Canada, told the London Daily Mail.

"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."

In terms of energy-efficiency from concept to disposal, the Prius costs $2.94/mile while the Hummer2 costs $1.95/mile.

It turns out, you silly, self-righteous, envoro-zealots, that the Hummer you loathe so much leaves a far smaller carbon-footprint than your Prius that gives you so much self-satisfaction. If you drive a Prius, you'd better contact the Goreacle post-haste, and get a second job to pay for idiotic carbon-offsets, so you can sleep with pride at night, comforted by the knowledge that you're doing your part to save the world from man.

This is one of Canada's strip mines where nickel is mined. I suppose it's OK to strip-mine somebody elses' back yard as long as the result is you getting to drive around smugly gloating about how you're saving the world and everybody else isn't.

Do you "greenies" really care about polluting the environment, or is it really just about the sense of smug superiority it gives you over everybody in your imaginary "green" world?