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Thread: Me & My Hybrid - NYT article

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    Default Me & My Hybrid - NYT article

    Me & My Hybrid article in New York Times 9:27 AM
    Me and My Hybrid
    By OLIVER SACKS

    Published: March 25, 2005
    The New York Times

    DRILLING for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not only an attack on what little remains of this country's wild places; it makes no sense in terms of numbers. We do not know how much oil lies beneath the refuge - at best, it has been estimated, it will fuel our gas-hungry culture for only a few years - but we can easily calculate what a few simple conservation methods would achieve.

    Fuel cells and a hydrogen economy being still some way in the future, I recently traded in my Lexus 300 ES sedan for a six-cylinder Honda Accord hybrid. My new car performs as well or better than the previous one, but gives nearly double the mileage for a gallon of gas. Doing a rather average amount of driving in a year - 20,000 or 30,000 miles - I find that I am saving 500 to 1,000 gallons of gas. True, I had to pay a premium for the car (about $3,300 more than the equivalent gas-only model), and my trunk space is a bit reduced, to make room for the battery. But I will make up the extra cost in gas savings in a year or two, I have the convenience of filling my tank only every 500 miles and, more important, I can now drive while enjoying the feeling that I am being economical with fuel and adding half as many pollutants to the atmosphere.

    There are some 200 million cars and light trucks on the road in the United States, and if even half of them saved as much fuel as I do now, the total savings would be huge: 50 billion or more gallons of gas a year. This is equivalent to 1.2 billion barrels of oil, about half the entire annual production of oil in the United States and a fifth of what the most reasonable estimates hold can be recovered in total from the Alaska refuge.

    There are many ways to save energy, but few are as easy as this. We need to do a great deal more to encourage all kinds of conservation, but especially alternative-energy vehicles, which can contribute enormous oil savings and reduce pollution with no change in lifestyle. Yet the current federal tax incentive for them - a $2,000 deduction this year, and $500 next year - expires entirely by the end of 2006. A first step on the path to a rational energy policy is to reinstate this incentive and increase it.

    Other countries have found more creative ways to entice buyers. In Britain, for example, clean vehicles can be exempted from the fee paid by other vehicles to enter congested areas of London during rush hours. Imagine if New York City had a free Green Lane on its bridges and tunnels.

    I love the quietness of my hybrid in town, the way the main engine turns off whenever I come to a stop (and this is often in New York City traffic), and there is only the nearly silent electric motor ticking over. I love it when I climb a hill, or have to pass another car, and the electric motor kicks in to assist the gas engine, a bonus of power without any additional fuel demand. And, above all, I love it when, in the city or on the highway, the green ECO sign on the dashboard comes on, and the car is giving me better than 40 miles to the gallon. I know ECO stands for economy, but I like to think it stands for ecology too.

    Oliver Sacks is the author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "Awakenings

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    Default Re: Me & My Hybrid - NYT article

    OK Oliver, give us your address so the state of NY can send you a tax bill for the gasoline road tax you're avoiding. Also, border mexicans thank you for all of the battery lead dust and sulfuric acid fumes which was dumped into their environment (and blown across the Texas border) to manufacture your batteries. Also, your feelings about the true costs of operating a hybrid vehicle may be a bit different when you wind up paying $2,500-$3,000 two or three years down the road to have your batteries replaced (with 30% of that being for NY hazardous waste disposal i.e. the old lead battery plates). Hopefully you won't get another $2,000 federal tax credit at the expense of other taxpayers like myself to pay for replacing your batteries like you did to buy your batteries for you in the first place.

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    Default Re: Me & My Hybrid - NYT article

    Yea...and as we discussed previously, gas taxes are TOTALLY paying for road taxes. The general fund (paid for even by non-driving taxpayers) don't do anything. RIIIGHT!

    You can charge hybrid owners the "externalized" cost of battery pollution and related environmental impact when petroleum users are sent a bill for the secondary costs of pollution, spills, leaks, infrastrucutre, public space destruction, eyesore, etc. such as:

    Costs of health effects from pollution

    costs of cleaning up "major spills" such as Valdez

    Costs of cleaning up groundwater (polluted by tank leaks, spills, etc)

    Costs of maintaining road to/from faciliteis

    Costs of emergency crews needed to support oil rigs and other faciliteis

    Costs of military and political efforts to protect the oil supply

    Cost of propaganda budgets to convince public of Administration opinion

    Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that more than 25 percent may be leaking or will leak within the next 3 to 5 years.[51] Cleanup is costly: the state of Texas has estimated its cost of cleaning up leaky underground storage tanks (cleverly termed LUSTs) at $2.5 billion, for instance. California has at least 30,000 known USTs; environmental lawyers working in the private sector estimate that half of their practice deals with oil and gas UST issues.[52] In one horrific 1988 incident, over 700 thousand gallons of diesel fuel spewed into Pennsylvania's Monongahela River from a collapsed storage tank.

    At the federal level, these have included Superfund, LUST, and oil spill taxes. These taxes are no longer being collected, although balances exist in each fund.[54] Moreover, a good part of the funds goes toward assessment studies, research, and lawyer fees rather than restoration.[55] And the funds devoted to contaminated sites pay only for costs of cleanup, not damages manifested by lower crop yields, medical bills, and the like. Superfund does not even apply to petroleum products - benzene, a known carcinogen, will not qualify contaminated gasoline stations as Superfund sites.[56]


    Fees typically do not come close to paying for petroleum-related damages. Legal remedies are a potential alternative to fees: private citizens have some recourse to the courts if they suffer injuries due to petroleum contamination. Yet causation is hard to establish.[58] And people often have no one to sue. Those injured by a LUST, for example, may find that the tank belonged to an independent dealer who bought from several distributors, then went bankrupt. Those who do win lawsuits often gain only injunctive relief - stopping further damages - rather than gaining compensation for damages that have already occurred.

    How much are U.S. residents affected by ocean oil spills? The Valdez incident may just be the tip of the iceberg -- more than one-third of all petroleum products transported by oceangoing tankers pass through U.S. waters. 64 And the Valdez was exceptional: many spills probably go unreported and unattributed. As a result, most of the cost of ocean oil spills is likely borne by everyone but the responsible parties. Delucchi estimates the cost of oil spills as $2.4 to $6.0 billion a year in current dollars[

    Some researchers have couched their results in monetary rather than morbidity terms. Air pollutants such as ozone and nitrous oxide, substantially generated by motor vehicles, cause an estimated $2 billion to $4 billion loss in U.S. crop yields annually, for instance.[77] One study estimated that the costs of ozone alone generated by motor vehicles -- in terms of health effects, lost labor hours, and reduced agricultural yields -- came 8.3 cents per gallon of gasoline (in current dollars). That translates into more than $9 billion a year. 78 Others have calculated the cost of illness, premature death, reduced visibility, lower agricultural production, and damage to materials at $25 billion to $240 billion (current dollars) per year.

    Conclusion From the various studies reviewed, we extracted a range of estimates for environmental and health costs of $25.5 billion to $267 billion. Our best-guess estimate is $30 billion, which translates to 11.5 cents per gallon. This figure gives little weight to the costs of global warming.

    Source:Institute for Local Self Reliance...an independent group that in 1978 RAIN magazine described ILSR as an organization that "puts hard numbers on soft dreams". In 1993 United States Senator Paul Wellstone called ILSR "one of this country's leading practical thinkers in the area of sustainable economic development".

    http://www.ilsr.org/carbo/costs/truecosts3.html

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