OPINION/COMMENTARY

Hummer Beats Hybrid

CNW Marketing Research Inc. spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables. To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, it was translated into a "dollars per lifetime mile" figure. That is, the Energy Cost per mile driven. The most Energy Expensive vehicle sold in the U.S. in calendar year 2005: Maybach at $11.58 per mile. The least expensive: Scion xB at $0.48 cents. While neither of those figures is surprising, it is interesting that driving a hybrid vehicle costs more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version. For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civic at $2.42 per mile....


Free-Market Environmentalism Turns 15

With Earth Day having just passed and environmental awareness peaking, it seems appropriate to highlight another important environmental anniversary. Fifteen years ago, an academic publisher quietly released Free Market Environmentalism by Terry Anderson and Don Leal. At the time, few mainstream environmentalists or politicians saw the book. But, since its publication, free-market environmentalism (FME) spurred a quiet revolution in environmental policy. Now its views and policy approaches are starting to be taken seriously in policy circles. FME ideas seem counterintuitive. Take private property rights. Most believe a successful environmental policy and private property rights cannot coexist. But incorporating those self-same rights actually can (and does) help the environment....

To protect and conserve

One controversy roiling the evangelical world is to what extent Bible-believing Christians should be environmentalists. Recently, a group of prominent evangelical leaders, including mega-pastor Rick Warren, launched an environmental movement, urging the National Association of Evangelicals and evangelicals at large to make saving the earth—not just saving the world—a major priority. But other evangelical leaders, such as Charles Colson, opposed the initiative. Now the NAE has put environmentalism on the shelf. But the debate continues, often stirring up enough heat to contribute to global warming (see "Greener than thou," April 22). A big part of the problem is that the current environmental movement has been hijacked by the far left. Go to a Green Party rally and you will find environmentalism being used as a stick to beat up on capitalism, Republicans, and Western civilization. Read the Green Party platform and, amidst the calls to save the earth, you will find the whole agenda of today's socialists, feminists, gays, abortionists, and pacifists. More seriously, today's environmentalism reflects a neo-pagan worldview. Loving nature passes over into worshipping nature. There is, in fact, a new environmentalist religion, the worship of Gaia, the ancient name for the earth goddess. According to its tenets, just as every living organism, including the human body, consists of millions of distinct living cells, the earth is a living, even conscious organism. Each of us, as well as each animal and species and ecosystem, is a cell in the body of Mother Earth. Much of today's environmentalism is also, quite literally, pro-death. For many of the most zealous environmentalists, earth's biggest problem is overpopulation....

Moonshine Mirage

The U.S. should emulate Brazil's "energy independence miracle" declared headlines, editorialists, environmentalists and policymakers all throughout the first half of 2006. The Brazilian "miracle" was achieved in part by substituting ethanol (produced by fermenting sugar cane) for gasoline (made from imported oil). Let's look at the elements of the Brazilian miracle and see if it is possible for the United States to replicate it. First, Brazil's economy is one-tenth the size of ours, and Brazil's motor fleet is about 100 vehicles per 1,000 people. Brazil's cars and trucks consume about 15 billion gallons of motor fuels annually. Also, Brazil produces 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, enough to fulfill about 90 percent of the country's daily requirements. Finally, Brazil produces 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol from sugar cane and blends it with gasoline in a 20 percent ethanol/80 percent gasoline mixture to burn in flex fuel automobiles. In contrast, there are 765 vehicles per 1000 people in the U.S. consuming about 150 billion gallons of gasoline per year. The United States already produces about 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol (about the same as Brazil) which meets only about 3 percent of U.S. transport fuel needs. The U.S. pumps about 5 million barrels of oil per day domestically and imports another 15 million barrels daily. Replacing one-third of our gasoline consumption with ethanol, as Brazil has done, would reduce oil imports—but "energy independence" would remain a mirage. One bushel of corn yields about three gallons of ethanol. In 2004 U.S. farmers harvested 11.8 billion bushels of corn. In other words it would take the country's entire corn crop to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol, an amount equal to about one-fifth of the gasoline Americans currently burn each year. This would also leave no corn for food and some residues for feed. Burning food for fuel raises some interesting moral questions in world in which 800 million people are still malnourished. Assuming that it would be undesirable to turn our entire corn crop into fuel and feed residues, growing another 12 billion bushels of corn for ethanol production would require plowing up an additional area double the size of the entire state of Illinois. So ethanol produced from corn is not the answer to drastically lowering U.S. oil imports....