Well, maybe we should all kick you in the balls for the size of your carbon footprint.
Consider the eco-conscious automobile par excellence, the Toyota Prius. As it turns out, manufacturing the Prius's battery is extraordinarily carbon-intensive. Paying off this carbon debt through fuel savings will take 46,000 miles, according to Wired. Only after 100,000 miles would the Prius catch up with carbon savings offered by a ten-year-old Toyota Tercel. And the Prius would never catch up with a 1994 Geo Metro XFi.
By now the Prius is a cliche. Tooling around in an ancient, airbag-less deathtrap, by far the greener choice, is not. So one hopes the celebrity avant-garde will start bidding up the price of aging Tercels and Geos and Chevrolet Sprints, tricking them out and inspiring America's Joneses to keep up. Soon we'd see almost-new automobiles sporting faux rust, the better to convince us of their owners' environmental virtue. But somehow I doubt that Planet Green and the world's leading automobile manufacturers will push this line too hard. After all, used car dealers generally don't have big advertising budgets.
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4 comments:
Right On
Yawn. Another non sequitur. A Wired article from a year ago, that compares the carbon footprint "debt" of a new Toyota Prius to that of a ten-year-old Toyota Tercel is meaningless.
Toyota does not build ten-year-old Tercels. Chevy does not build 15 year old Geo Metro XFis.
News flash: No car manufacturer builds used cars. SOMEBODY has to buy the car NEW in order for it to be available to somebody else as a used car 10 or 15 years later.
What's the carbon footprint if I buy a used 2001 Toyota Prius, instead of rushing to the dealer to buy a new 2010?
Flush that Wired article down the toilet, to join the CNW Marketing study that concluded that a Hummer is better for the environment than a Prius too.
anyone that buys a new car sucks at recycling. people are willing to recycle grocery bags, but still NEED a NEW car. forget that thousands of people DROVE to work to manufacture, assamble, and sell that new car.....at best it's economic stimulus - stupid style.
i forgot.....speaking of stupid style, lets put your name on a an open pit nickle mine as a primary contributor. there is a sight to behold greenie!
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