MWB

When I went to CNW Marketing's website and read "A Green Automotive Christmas" for myself, I found:

"In CNW Research’s second annual Dust-to-Dust Energy Cost study, only the Toyota Prius among all hybrids provides better lifetime energy efficiency than the auto industry average of $2.94 per mile... For Prius, the cost has come down since the first study by nearly 12 percent to $2.87 per mile

and

"The Hummer H3 SUV, for example, is $2.07 per mile over its lifetime."

The college newspaper article that you linked to quoted $3.25 and $1.95 for the two vehicles. They also didn't bother to mention that the Prius was in fact above the auto industry average, though not by much. Just doing my part as a media watchdog-

And speaking of "Dust to Dust", there's no way a piece of shit Hummer H3 will last 300K--unless you haul it behind your motorhome. It's a GM product, remember? Who's paying these clowns?

Hybrids are the worst of both worlds, no doubt. Fuel cells, however, are another matter entirely, and other alternatives, such as biodiesel and ethanol, are both environmentally friendly and extremely efficient in terms of energy costs. Just because it's "alternative" doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

What's the point of politicizing environmentalism? Not all that's green is liberal, and even if it were, it's still the right thing to do.

one thing is true tho, you can't get something for nothing. The car doesn't get better gas mileage b/c it's super light, aerodynamic, small motor, and so on. It gets high gas mileage cuz of a battery. Batteries are very energy intensive to produce, and to dispose of. The promise these greenjobs are looking for hasn't been fulfilled yet, and I bet you the prious ends up being a disaster when they all start knocking off. And yeah, I know someone with a H2 that's got 150k miles on it, not too many problems. Ms M is right about that part; greenjobs also don't see beyond their noses.

Something for nothing... that's exactly right. We cannot--as of yet--create energy. I heard an excellent interview this a.m. with a guy from the Cato Institute that does believe there's global warming, and that much of it has been caused by humans. But also says that all the so-called solutions (such as Kyoto) do absolutely nothing for the environment in most cases, and harm it in some cases (for example, the idiotic idea that wealthy countries can buy carbon usage from poor countries, which in effect gives the poor countries money to build more coal burning plants...which is exactly what has happened). Libs are idiots, almost always. One need look no further than Gore-bee and all his supporters.

Oh, and the reason why environmentalism is politicized is because the liberal environmental nazis want to impose draconian measures on all of us that A) haven't been proven to work and B) probably cause more harm than good. That's dangerous. The conservatives are at least holding that line. But conservatives are idiots too, don't get me wrong. But the earth is more at peril in the hands of libs than anyone, IMHO. Gore's info is so patently WRONG and all these whackos, like the Babsie Twins Boxer and Streisand, just fall over each other to lick his butthole. And his science is no better than that which proved the earth was flat. As long as these people are leading the charge and the liberals fall lock-step behind it, we're all doomed. We may as well put Rush Limbaugh in charge. That's why it's politicized; the politicians and "activists" with not one lick of valid science behind them made it so.

Hey, Gore invented the Internet. He knows what he's talking about.

Anthropogenically induced global warming is pretty much established fact. It's a stretch to say that ALL of the solutions are ineffective. As I proposed in another thread, simply bringing the rest of the world up to US standards would do far more than imposing stricter standards domestically, in terms of reducing environmental impact. What's dangerous is throwing yours hands in the air and saying "we're fucked no matter what we do, so why bother". If you recall, the Los Angeles basin (and many other urban areas) had air quality alerts on a daily basis thirty years ago. Emissions standards for both automobile and industry have improved the air quality so much that we seldom have hazardous air quality anymore. You don't see Love Canal scenarios anymore, and the industry-financed cleanups and toxic waste legislation have been almost solely responsible for the positive changes. Industry has proven that they cannot be trusted to be self-policing. Draconian measures will never be enacted, but the threat of such will engender a proactive response; whatever watered-down measures that are eventually mandated will probably be a healthy compromise.

Libs are idiots, conservatives are idiots, blah, blah. I'll be the first to concur that Gore's a self-aggrandizing media whore. If nothing else, the libs can be credited with bringing awareness to the situation; that simply wasn't going to happen if the political/industrial complex had its way. Hell, they still aren't admitting global warming even exists. Mock the libs all you want, but realize that if they didn't do the dirty work then absolutely nothing would change. The point is, we need those lib extremists as a counterpoint to the soulless mechanisms that blindly pursue profitability at the expense of of people and the environment. The solutions invariably fall somewhere between the two extremes, and in the interim, the debate forces examination of the facts and reasoning behind each stance. Unfortunately, that's probably about as close to an Age of Reason as we'll see in our lifetimes.

Ah hah! Therein lies at least one "problem"... some people, myself included, do not even see global warming as a problem, whether it's man-made, cyclical, or a combination of both. Again, read my post about what happened with the earth cooled for two years due to a volcano. If man's activities lead to global cooling, it is certain we would be doomed. With so-called global warming, the oceans rise a few feet...big whoop! Seriously, cities must move farther back, boo hoo Babsie Streisand loses her trillion dollar, energy sucking mansion in Malibu. But we will not starve to death. If the earth were entering an ice age, for the love of god, we would all die! We cannot grow crops on frozen tundra. We can, however, grow crops in the godforsaken desert as long as we irrigate it. That's why alfalfa is grown in Yuma, one of the most inhospitably hot climates around.

This is where I think the global warming ninnies need to get off their high horses and find the lemonade; global warming might actually be a BENEFIT; yeah, yeah, fine again; some crane or some really cute tick mouse might go extinct. But HUMAN BEINGS (you know, us... the ones liberals would rather see die than watch a friggin piece of ice break off in the Arctic...priorities people? Priorities?), yes, human beings, might really benefit from a warmer climate. More land to grow crops (uh, like, on Greenland, the way they did 1000 years ago, 1000 years before SUVs and before bad, bad people started to create indoor heat and lighting). More land for human beings to live on. Yes, we should control populations. But walk up to a poor family in Bangalore and tell them which children they should murder--or which of them should never have been born. There are human faces behind sweeping proclamations like "poor people /countries have too many children."

So now we have identified the first major point of contention; liberals do in fact see global warming as a "problem" and many of us actually think this might be a good thing. Should we control pollution? Yes. But that should be an entirely separate argument from global warming as A) the scientific community is in nowhere near as much agreement about the issue as the liberal media makes it out to be; and B), there's probably not a damn thing we can do about it even if it were true and it has been caused by man and C), IT MIGHT BE A GOOD THING.

A) The vast majority of the scientific community is certainly in agreement on the evidence and cause of global warming:

NASA

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report-March 2007

The National Academy of Sciences

While a number of individual scientists have dissented from the mainstream opinion, the only major scientific organization that has offered a differing opinion is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, a group that by default has little knowledge of climatology, and whose objectivity is tenuous at best. The skeptics, meanwhile, show increasingly less credibility:

A key Skeptic admits to being an industry whore

The American Petroleum Institute's strategy memo detailing efforts to undermine the credibility of global warming scientists

B) We can't fix it immediately, but we can start to mitigate the damage. Re: comments in myprevious post regarding smog and Superfund sites.

C) The contention that global warming is inherently a bad thing is not open for debate. Neither skeptics or supporters of global warming theory disagree with this. You won't find any support for your position in the scientific community.

Marla, it has been rumored that Al Gore also invented blue jeans. Waaaaayyy before Levi Strauss... ;^)