I first heard about this from my wife and I thought to my self, “How could the Prius, a favorite amongst environmental Hollywood Superstars, be bad for the environment? Could the Hummer actually be better for the environment?”
Well, the answer to the second question is yes, and the reason lies in the answer for the first. The Reader’s Digest version is that construction of the Prius requires more total energy than the Hummer, but not only that it causes more environmental damage.
…the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.The nickel is then shipped to Europe where it is refined. Next stop china where it is further processed. From China the nickel travels to Japan where the batteries for the Prius are constructed. Finally the batteries are shipped back to North America where they are installed in the Prius. Wow… this doesn’t sound very environmentally friendly.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.
When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.It appears as if the Prius is a wolf in sheep’s clothing which confirms two things I’ve always known; 1. Appearances can be deceiving. 2. The Hollywood Elite do not have the answers to all life’s problems.
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Hummer
Environmentalism
2 comments:
from the Wikipedia talking about Sudbury, Ontario, Canada and the nickel mines in particular. The whole piece can be found here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Sudbury%2C_Ontario
During the Apollo manned lunar exploration program, NASA astronauts trained in Sudbury, to become familiar with shatter cones, a rare rock formation connected with meteorite impacts. However, the popular misconception that they were visiting Sudbury because it purportedly resembled the lifeless surface of the moon dogged the city for years.
In the late 1970s, private, public, and commercial interests combined to establish an unprecedented "regreening" effort. Lime was spread over the charred soil of the Sudbury region by hand and by aircraft. Seeds of wild grasses and other vegetation were also spread. In twenty years, over three million trees were planted. The ecology of the Sudbury region has recovered dramatically, due both to the regreening program and improved mining practices, and in 1992 the city was given the "Local Government Honours Award" by the United Nations, in honour of its innovative community-based strategies in environmental rehabilitation. More recently, the city has begun to rehabilitate the slag heaps that surround the Copper Cliff smelter area, with the planting of grass and trees.
This post is foolish. Anyone with a thrid grade education could research the validity of this claim( and the article it came from) and figure that out. Aligning Prius ownership with Hollywood is foolish as well.
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