Reason's Nick Gillespie Exposes Maher Hypocrisy: Would You Give Up This Show to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint?

Big time

Submitted by shawn. on Sat, 07/23/2011 - 1:08pm.

.....hypocrites

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"balboa loves cop killers"

Submitted by The Vet on Sat, 07/23/2011 - 2:06pm.

"And I mean really really really loves cop killers"

Is that what you were looking for crypto-dummy? You want us to send the tapes of the show to your cop killer loving hideaway as well?

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A house's carbon footprint

Submitted by MPH on Sun, 07/24/2011 - 12:30pm.

This isn't so much a response to the above, as more examples of the apparent failure on the part of people like Maher to actually know what they are talking about that the above reminded me about.

I recall reading an article several years ago in which someone with a brain was explaining the hypocrisy in a recent (at that time) celebrity's bragging on the talk show circuit about how they'd built a 5,000 square foot vacation home, an hour from the nearest grocery store, 6 hours from their "normal" residence, that they planned to use for about 6 weeks of the year. But it was completely self-sufficient, and "totally green". It wasn't hooked up to a city water or sewer supply (big whoop; so it had a well and septic system), and it wasn't hooked into an electrical grid (although the celebrity, or at least the article, didn't mention whether all power was solar; it may have been a diesel generator). The writer of the article, which didn't mention the name of the celebrity, pointed out the following:

- it takes a LOT of resources to build a 5,000 sq. ft. home; it is even more expensive to create a "totally green" one.
- such a large home, to be used only 6 weeks per year, is particularly wasteful.
- a 2 hour round trip for grocery shopping wasn't very economically friendly.
- a six hour trip each way also wasn't particularly economically "green".

The author wondered why the celebrity in question couldn't have made do with a 2,500 foot used house (no new resources used) on the edge of some small town (so the nearest grocery store wasn't an hour away), and was already hooked in to water, sewer, and electric supplies. City supplies tend to be more efficient than well, septic, and solar, over their service life because of economies of scale. For instance, a solar panel, with an expected lifetime of 30 years, takes 7 years of generating power to reach the environmental break-even point for it's production; stop using it before then and the panel was more environmentally wasteful than using the electric grid. For a home that is to be powered just 6 weeks of the year, it will take 60 years to reach the break-even point, double the service life of the panel (there may be ways to increase the panel's service life, but leaving it sitting in sunlight isn't one of them). I wondered why the celebrity couldn't just stay in a five star hotel for six weeks per year. It probably wouldn't have cost more (on an annual basis), and again, since the hotel is already built, and hooked in to city water, sewer, and electric, the environmental impact of the use of that room over the celebrity's life would be lower than the house.

Something that the "limo liberal" seems to consistently fail to consider is life cycle costs (both money and environmental). So you're driving that Prius to save the planet? Over it's lifetime, if the batteries are replaced when they need to be, the total environmental impact of a Prius will be substantially higher than an equivalent non-hybrid car, because producing the batteries is extremely expensive, both in terms of money and environmental impact. For an example of how expensive they can be, when the Insight originally came out, Car & Driver magazine asked GM executives why they weren't building a car like that. The response: the batteries are so expensive that the car's construction had to be heavily subsidized by the Japanese government to make the car affordable; the cheapest way for GM to acquire the battery pack of an Insight was to buy an Insight, remove the battery pack, and throw the car away; that cost less than buying the batteries directly from Honda's supplier. I've seen articles saying that the current Prius's battery pack will cost $4,000 to replace, plus the cost of labor and recycling. And you can bet that the batteries won't be replaced, because replacing the batteries when they wear out, and all rechargeable batteries wear out, will cost more than the car will be worth at the time. So when the batteries die, the Prius owner will be dragging around 600 pounds of dead weight, which will be hurting the car's milage instead of helping it. And to get people to buy Priuses, they are still heavily subsidized to get the cost down to the $25K mark. Only the Chevrolet Volt, which starts at $40K, has a MSRP that doesn't reflect a subsidy (because the buyer gets a subsidy, rather than the manufacturer). A car's purchase price is, in general (when you're not talking about rare production models, like Ferrari), a good yardstick for estimating the environmental impact of its construction. So a Volt has, on day one, an environmental impact about triple of, say, a Toyota Corolla. Then, over the approximate life of the car, you'll need to replace the batteries 3 times or so (another $12K, so $52K total). So the Volt owner starts off with a deficit of $40K compared to the Corolla owner. That will take 300,000 miles to make up, even if the electricity generated to recharge the Volt's batteries has zero environmental impact. And that's also about 50K miles more than the typical car's life span. So yea, try to save the planet by purchasing hybrids, and see where it gets you. Recent studies even suggest that totally electric cars (at least, battery powered ones) are also worse for the environment than gasoline powered ones.

Want to save the planet? Work on getting more nuclear power plants (no pollution), solar production (where sunlight it used to boil water to generate steam to run a steam turbine), fusion power, and use them to produce hydrogen gas from sea water to be burned in an internal combustion engine (which is very cheap to make and totally recyclable) rather than the often talked about "fuel cell" (which is very expensive to make), and you'll be getting somewhere. But all the current talk about hybrids and battery powered cars is just a large load of feel-good crap.

You've all got it right. "Limo liberals" want the rest of us to sacrifice so that they can continue to live their extravagant lifestyles without the environment being ruined. The "limo liberals" unspoken slogan: Please recycle, so I don't have to.

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