Hybrid Calculations

[ouij]

Finally someone has decided to do the hard econometric number-crunching on whether getting a hybrid car saves you money.

The conclusion, surprisingly, is not really:

it is painfully obvious that existing hybrids lack the ability to make up for their steep prices with gas savings. While a hybrid would present significant savings over something like

Comments

[ouij]

Environmental costs are indeed very difficult to calculate. You bring up an excellent point about battery toxicity and possible costs for disposal/recycling. But there is the case to make that at least battery waste is concentrated and thus easily-contained.

In contrast, tailpipe emissions waft everywhere. There is an emerging academic literature on the public health costs of local atmospheric pollution, which presumably increases with the total amount of petroleum burned. NOx, unburned hydrocarbons, and fine suspended particulates, added up over thousands of tailpipes, makes for some pretty potent smog in many places of the world. DC is a pretty clean area in this regard; when I left London, I felt like I'd given up smoking. Manila is even worse.

From a public policy point of view, there's a fair amount that can be said about the desireability of hybrid cars. But it should be a small part of a much larger, integrated transportation planning and land use strategy. Sadly, we're not seeing very much of the latter, especially not in our area.

[stemware]

You know, you bring up an interesting point there - battery waste can be concentrated. I was thinking about this concept this morning as a matter of fact.

Before we started removing lots of resources from the earth's crust, there were deposits of minerals and other here and there, some of them toxic such as oil. There really is no difference between having an iron ore deposit in northern Michigan and having a junk yard in Texas.