If you’ve been watching the talking heads on TV, not only will hybrid autos and trucks help solve the problems of foreign oil but free of from the grips of global warming.  Politicians, business leaders and even environmentalists have joined together to sing the praises of Hybrid technology.  But it’s all a big lie!

Read for yourself on Toyota’s website:               http://www.toyota.com/about/news/product/2008/05/15-1-prius.html

I was watching the Olympics and heard/saw a Toyota ad saying they have sold and shipped over 1 million hybrids and reduced CO2 emissions by 4.5 Million tons.  According to my results at the Toyota “Build Your Own” site, the hybrid 2009 Camry is $26,569 while the base 4 cylinder gas model is: $19,640.  That is nearly a $7000 difference per car, for a 4.5 ton reduction of CO2 emmissions.  The simple point is that a hybrid cost of over $1,500 per ton of reduced CO2.  The market price of UN Certified Carbon offsets, in London (the most expensive offsets Dec 2013, required by law in EU) closed on August 15, 2008 at: $44, while US voluntary offset credits which sell for $3.80 a ton. 

If you do the math on the hybrid you are buying to fight global warming, you’ll see you are over paying.  In fact, you are paying 34 times more than the highest CO2 price in Europe and nearly 400 times the cost of the of CO2 in the US market for each ton not emitted by your hybrid.  Now i’m assuming that the car itself does emit much less CO2, but that Toyota also accounted for the CO2 that went into building the hybrids, which is an honest representation.  This doesn’t necessarily mean “Don’t buy a hybrid”, it means don’t buy a hybrid to fight global warming, it’s way too expensive

What would $7000 buy? A 1 kilowatt Solar cell system for your home, installed.  That’s about $5000 of cells and a $2000 for tying into grid.  if that system generated 1 kw just 4 hours a day (about 1500 kwh a year) you save 1.5 tons of CO2 (1 ton per megawatt of coal generated electricity) each year of about twice what the Prius saves over a 5 to 7 year lifetime of the car. Meanwhile solar panels have an expected lifetime of 20 to 30 years.

Buy solar power, a windmill or an electric car if you want to fight global warming and leave the hybrid for those who can’t do the math.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 11:23 am and is filed under Green News, Hydrocarbon Electricity, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.