Electric cars may not be so green after all...

by Ben Webster

ELECTRIC cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found.

An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.

The British study, which is the first analysis of the full lifetime emissions of electric cars covering manufacturing, driving and disposal, undermines the case for tackling climate change by the rapid introduction of electric cars.

The Committee on Climate Change, the UK government watchdog, has called for the number of electric cars on Britain's roads to increase from a few hundred now to 1.7 million by 2020.

Britain's Department for Transport is spending $66 million over the next year giving up to 8,600 buyers of electric cars a grant of $7700 towards the purchase price. Ministers are considering extending the scheme.

The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.

Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.

Greg Archer, director of Low CVP, said the industry should state the full lifecycle emissions of cars rather than just tailpipe emissions, to avoid misleading consumers. He said that drivers wanting to minimise emissions could be better off buying a small, efficient petrol or diesel car. “People have to match the technology to their particular needs,” he said.

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Trash collectors won’t pick up energy-saving bulbs

by George Arbuthnott

Councils across the UK are refusing to pick up low-energy lightbulbs from homes as they contain toxic mercury, which gives off poisonous vapours.

But confused consumers are putting the new bulbs – classed as hazardous waste – in their dustbins when they burn out, potentially putting the safety of thousands of binmen at risk.

Previously, the public disposed of traditional lightbulbs, used in Britain for 120 years, in a domestic bin.

However, they are being phased out under a European Union ruling and are being replaced with energy-saving bulbs, many of which contain mercury.

The Unintended Consequences of Environmentalism

by Larry Bell

Just as everything humans have done in the name of industrial progress hasn't been kind to the environment, it shouldn't be assumed that everything is bad either. Yet the modern-day environmental activist movement tends not to see it that way.

[But the fact is] as civilizations have evolved, so have sanitary conditions. Life expectancies have more than doubled since times when raw sewage was heaped upon the streets of grand Greek and Roman empires and plagues and famines devastated rural populations.

There are big differences between the responsible environmental stewardship ideals that most of us subscribe to, and the moralistic, anti-development, obstructionist activism that exemplifies much of today's environmental zealotry. Often premised on pseudoscientific rationale, publicized through expensive ad campaigns and lawyered up for battle, private and public green activism is asserting ever-expanding, and sometimes hazardous, influences over broad aspects of our lives.

The beginning of the environmental movement is conventionally associated with a virtual flood of reaction to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring after it first appeared in 1963. The book called attention to the thinning of eggshells among certain bird species, which threatened their existence, along with alleged toxic problems throughout the food chain attributed to crop spraying of the pesticide DDT. These claims are clearly credited with a prohibition against DDT use in the U.S. since 1972, and a similar ban in Europe.

The U.S. DDT prohibition was issued in a decision by then EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus following a long hearing on risks and benefits of the material. But after calling 125 witnesses and reviewing 9,362 pages of testimony, Judge Edmund Sweeney, the appointed hearing examiner, had actually concluded that alarm was unwarranted: First, DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man; second, DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man; and third, the use of DDT under the registrations involved does not have a deleterious effect on fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.

The World Health Organization pleaded at the EPA hearings that DDT was very beneficial in fighting malaria in many parts of the world and should not be banned, stating that withdrawal of its use would be "... a major tragedy in the chapter of human health." Still, due to threatened European trade restrictions against countries that used the chemical, African nations terminated use of the effective mosquito pesticide for malaria control.

Since that time death rates from the disease have increased dramatically, and are now estimated to be between 155,000 and 310,000 annually, according to data collected at 41 African sites from 1997 to 2002. The vast majority of these victims are desperately poor, including large numbers of young children and elderly who are especially vulnerable.

Read More about DDT, Acid Rain, Light Bulbs, Mercury, Nuclear Power, Oil & Gas...

The Global Warming CO2 Scam

15 spectacularly stupid predictions from Earth Day 1970

by Ronald Bailey

Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

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