Bitch Kitty Racing

Hybrid vehicles are often dismissed, the argument being that the slightly higher fuel efficiency is not worth the premium paid at purchase. Reducing fuel consumption is not the point of a hybrid vehicle; reducing carbon emissions is.

Miles per gallon are measured by the car companies using a government-mandated driving course. On the city course, the car is started, driven, and stopped in a way that resembles city traffic conditions, stoplights, and speeds. The engine is running the entire time, even when the car is stopped at a light. It’s not doing any work, so it’s using minimal fuel, but it’s using fuel nonetheless. A hybrid vehicle will not run it’s engine when stopped. Again, the car is not doing any work, so the fuel savings are minimal, but the lifetime carbon output is reduced, which is the point of the hybrid vehicle.

Do hybrids save the planet? The answer to that question lies in the carbon output of the battery manufacturing and disposal process. While America loves the electric car and the green stamp applied to all vehicles labeled “hybrid,” unless the batteries themselves have a zero-carbon life cycle, the answer is probably much closer to no. Batteries are wonderful devices that can be recycled again and again, but unfortunately that requires an input to the system: water and power. Where does the power come from? Electricity. How is the electricity produced? By and large, from plants that burn fossil fuels such as coal. Even moving the batteries from place to place produces carbon. Heavy trucks must carry loads of batteries all over the country from the plants that make them to the plants that use them to the plants that recycle them. Even the additional carbon created manufacturing the trucks needs to be added into the equation.

Prima facie, it seems incredibly complex. It is. Our climate is changing, and the inertia that change contains we have created over the last 5,000 years of civilization. The Sahara desert, for example, is widely believed to be the product of deforestation. Easter Islanders disappeared because of deforestation. London’s infamous smog problem is cited as far back as the year 1272 A.D. due to the wood burned to heat homes, and was made even worse by the cheaper sea coal used when the wood became scarce. More recently, British Columbia had billboards reassuring their public that they only cut down three percent of their forests per year.

It was the advent of fossil fuel use that really accelerated carbon emissions, however. Fossil fuels have been buried for 167 million years. When we dig them up and burn them, we are releasing all that carbon into our environment, where it will take another 167 million years to find it’s way back home. Other byproducts of fossil fuel burning are nitrous and sulfur oxide gasses (SOx and NOx), both corrosive enough to destroy forests and even stone; causes of asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis; promoters of smog; and degraders of water quality. China is rapidly increasing it’s number of coal-burning power plants, and only in 2000 enacted any emission standards at all. In America, diesel emission standards were only enacted in 2005. Marine vessels currently produce more SOx than all the world’s cars, trucks, and buses combined.

Hybrid cars are a good idea. They are a good idea because they raise awareness of the problem of carbon (and other) emissions in our young people today, and will hopefully inspire them to create, innovate, and invent more solutions tomorrow. Hybrid vehicles are a giant signal that multinational corporations are aware that we the people would like to continue looking at trees, swimming with dolphins, living by the water instead of in it, and generally continuing to breathe. As more “green” products are marketed to us, the more aware we become, the more we want to do to improve things. It’s a positive feedback loop, and it’s about damned time.