Plug-in cars are not necessarily greener than conventional cars
 

The unveiling of the new Prius, and its half-mile range EV-mode, brought this topic to the front of my mind. More electric range means carrying around more batteries, which isn't always greener:

Green Car Congress: Study: Meaningful GHG Benefit from PHEVs Requires Low-Carbon Electricity

I attended a lecture given by one of the authors of that paper. The additional weight of the batteries drives up the car's energy consumption, and the environmental impact of manufacturing the batteries is also a consideration. Worse, the CO2 emission from (American) electric generation means that you're hardly reducing your carbon footprint by plugging in your PHEV.

I think we should pursue all research avenues, but it's clear we should focus on reducing the carbon intensity of our electric generation (in America, at least) before we spend a lot of money on plug-in and electric cars.

Once the electric car becomes a commercial reality (within ten years), the electric SUV will follow. If we respond by installing more coal-fired power plants, then we've taken a big step backward.

Abolish gasoline taxes. Replace them with carbon taxes. Only then will the market make an educated decision about which technologies are the best choice.

I concur, sir. Carbon taxes would probably work, if implemented gradually (START NOW!!!).

I pay a bit extra on our electric bill for our utility to buy electric output equal to my consumption from a wind farm here in MO. Last year the people and businesses participating in the option bought electricity equal to the annual output of 8 of their utility scale wind generators. (they have like 54)
I look at it as investing in the future, on everyone's behalf. The extra cost isn't that much for us, since we conserve electricity it only costs about $120 per year extra, an average of $10 per month.
We recently passed a law in MO that requires the utilities to get 10% from wind power within 10 years. A good step. The bummer is they put a price cap on it, no more than 1% higher electric rates. I think 2-3% would be more do-able, without putting them out in the cold. Now I fear the utilities will just fight it.

Yeah, that is true. But with things like the link below happening. I'm hoping this won't be the case for too long.

U.S. is Now the Biggest Wind Power Generating Country | EcoRenovator.org

I would believe this when someone gives me the average carbon output of a power plant per kwh required to drive a car a mile and compares that to the average carbon output of that same car if it had no batteries and a gas motor. I'm thinking the electric car is still better to be powered by the utility than a gas car powered by a poor efficiency motor... but that's just speculation.

Hi,

I have always heard that even with the coal generation plants, and with transmission losses, that electric cars are still more efficient than ICE cars. Obviously, it would be much better to use local PV or wind or something like biogas -- any renewable resource would greatly improve things.

This is a chicken-and-egg situation -- we need to get the electric cars into place, and also work to get off of "old carbon" energy. Both are important, and just because one is "ahead" of the other, does not mean that we should not do one until the other catches up!

why point to coal as the power source? why not Nat Gas? cleaner than coal - we have a lot of it.
we cannot make 1 step to 0 carbon - have to make gradual steps.
I would venture that if you could look at the CO2 output of a Gas car and the same "per mile" of an electric car . Electric wins.
move to more Nat Gas / Wind / GASP even Nuke and the gap gets bigger.

plus if you look at Ratings for the PHEV's - just compare to the "ratings "of what we drive now and compare to what we actually get.

I definately agree that we need both vehicles that use LESS energy (more efficient) and create less carbon.

The downside to coal generation is that it DOES make lots of CO2 and mercury gets put into the atmosphere. I am also not real comfortable with strip mining and other techniques that wreck the countryside.

My electric car is powered by renewable energy from landfill gas and wind generation.

Coal-powered SUVs at NOT the answer!

We all need to work towards both conservation AND renewable options.

It's just wrong. Even if all electricity was generated from coal, it'd still be more efficient. An electric generating plant has thermodynamic efficiency around 50%, line & charging losses are about 10%, while you get some energy recovered from regenerative braking. Compare that to the maybe 20% average (because it rarely runs at the most efficient point on the BSFC map) of a typical straight-IC engined car, and you come out ahead.

Then figure that only about 50% of US electriciy comes from coal. About 20% is from somewhat cleaner natural gas, while the rest is nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, solar, and so on - all CO2-free sources, and you're even further ahead.

The most important point, though, is that having a bunch of electric cars (either full electric or PHEV) out there is going to create a need for new generation. Individuals will do things like install solar panels to charge their electric cars, and excess can go to the grid to displace existing fossil plants. Anything done to reduce fossil generation automatically improves the transportation sector.

A gridlock line of cars on the freeway with no engines running or emissions sounds way better than a bunch of autos idling and going nowhere.

Electric is 90% efficient, much more than gas.

Vehicles need to be made smaller and lighter with better aero's.

Consumers would demand this with the correct education.

Unless someone decides to crush them all, and keep propagandizing 'safety' .

greener
 

As I understand it,the long-term vision is Lithium-ion,with very high energy density( greater range or lighter weight/mile/kilo.),in abundant supply,totally recyclable,and powered eventually by renewable energy.---------- Eliminating current waste do to inefficient electric loads reveals that the US already has extreme over capacity,so no new plants actually need to be built if we go after waste.---------- Between coal and tar sands there's about 260-billion barrels of crude oil equivalency within US borders,and as tension grows over roller-coaster oil prices,there will probably be great political pressure to exploit it,with dubious regard to environment.The EPA can say all they want,but when the middle class starts setting up guillotines on the Washington Mall,legislators are probably going to back off.------------- Taxes and limits don't work 'til there's a Pearl Harbor,Concord Bridge,USS Maine,USS Vincennes,or something.-------------- Electric plug-ins can immediately take advantage of off-peak generation,lower dependence on foreign oil,displace pollution to generation facility,provide zero-emissions potential when alternative-renewables are involved in grid.I think they will be part of the bridge into emerging capital markets.I'll remain optimistic about them.Many challenges.

Sealed-lead acid batteries are 99% recyclable.
NiMH is 90% recyclable.
Lithium variations batteries are entirely non-toxic and are 85% recyclable (and rising). Lithium is highly reactive, so it has to be recycled using cryogenic shredders.
The rest of the battery types are equally recyclable, but not many companies bother.

There's nothing particularly pollution-heavy about manufacturing or recycling batteries.

With modern coal power plants the ecological footprint is just as small as a hydroelectric plant. Coal is only a dirty power source if it is transported and processed lazily. Under current US standards well-maintained modern coal power plants produce a minuscule amount of localized pollution.

I've seen coal power plants in China and the bulk of the pollution is caused by the poorly handled transporting of the source coal. It's brought to the power plant in uncovered rail cars and trucks, so the loose soot is allowed to escape into the surrounding areas.


If you still doggedly refuse to believe that power plants are clean, then why is the smog in Los Angeles so bad, while there are no commonly known areas that have smog from power plants?

But, even if power plants produced an equivalent amount of pollution, that pollution could be moved away from densely populated areas where it isn't causing negative health effects.

My utility company (Pacific Gas & Electric) claims 50% of my electric power is generated by renewable resources. Plus I can augment that at home with a renewable energy source of my choice. 100% of the fuel that my gasoline powered car uses is non-renewable, and I don't foresee that changing for the better in the car's lifetime. My common sense sez that despite the inefficiencies, all electric is the way to go.

To those who requested additional citation, check out the full report of the study I mentioned. It's available at ACS Publications - Cookie absent .

You should read the section on Battery Production to get an idea of the current state of battery energy densities. E.g. they used a figure of 250kg of Li-ion batteries for a PHEV with 90km (56mi) range. It would take a 2 gallon gas tank to deliver the same range.

That's with Li-ion. Tried-and-true NiMH have one third the energy density, so they'd require 750kg (!) of batteries, plus additional batteries that would be required to haul around all that extra weight and bulk.

I feel the above-cited work supports their conclusion: PHEV (and presumably EV) GHG benefits require lower-carbon electric generation. Alternatively, it would require battery or fuel-cell technology that currently looks like sci fi.

All-electric will be the way to go, but only after we've switched our electricity generation over to renewable sources. It's currently more than two thirds fossil fuelled, and your mom's electric minivan is going to run on whatever is offered by the grid. Hey, why not move a little farther out into the suburbs? Electricity is cheap, and we've got about 100 years of coal left in the ground.

Hi,

The reason we need to talk about coal, is that we get a majority of our power from coal, here in the USA. It's just about the dirtiest way to make electricity.

http://ecomodder.com/forum/attachmen...1&d=1232167388

There is what clean coal does for you. To get an idea of the scale of destruction. The rocks at the bottom of the valley that look sort of big are very large. Some of them are the size of a car. There is a rock truck on the top of the mountain that can't be seen at the resolution the picture is uploaded. It is one of those huge trucks that the sidewall of the tire is the height of a full size truck and it can't be seen in the picture it is so far away.

That valley used to be about a mile longer than it is now and I remember a huge rock on the top of the mountain that used to be back there that was called Indian rock. It had really old Indian carvings on it as well as random people carving their names on it. Earliest date I can remember seeing was 1820. The day the permit was granted they sent a dozer to the mountain and destroyed everything, all natural rock outcroppings that are supposedly protected as well as the historic stuff like Indian rock and indian/normal graveyards. They do things like this that way nobody bothers protesting the permit since everything is already destroyed.

So I figure the carbon, mercury, and radiation being dumped into the atmosphere is nothing compared to the land being destroyed locally here as well as the sludge ponds that they fill up and they always 'accidentally' spill when they are full. The fines are cheap(if they have to pay them) compared to the cost of proper disposal of the large volume of incredibly toxic waste in those sludge ponds.

coal
 

captainslug,with respect to coal,I believe the contemporary theme is that without effective CO2 sequestration( of which the efficacy of such has not yet been demonstrated),the atmosphere simply cannot support the additional carbon load projected from coal oxidation.-------------- Global climate change is a fact.Man-made CO2 had been quantitatively associated with it,and the scientific community is convinced that without locking up CO2,we'd be putting a gun to our head if we continue to use coal as we do.--------------- The gentleman who was hired by the Republican Party to write the position paper casting doubt about the accuracy of science of anthropogenic CO2 emissions,and their link to climate change,has apologized for his propaganda-for hire,and now admits that global climate change is real and its affected by man made CO2,however remains proud of how powerful his propaganda was,and how effectively it delayed any action.None of this is good news for coal-producing states.-------------------- Power plants operate cleaner than ever,however its the CO2,not particulates,soot,or smoke thats at issue.------------------ With respect to Los Angeles,their pollution is photochemical,cooked from Nitrogen Oxidfes from their cars,and trapped in the L.A.Basin,and held there by inversion layers which hold the gases close to the ground.It has nothing to do with power plants.

Perpetuating myths or misunderstandings about the efficacy or relative cleanliness of power generation options will only further delay adoption of Battery-Electric Vehicles.

You have to fess up to that now and weigh the risks and benefits of either shifting more transportation to being powered from the electrical grid, or leaving them as ICE drive trains that continue to produce pollution at higher levels than the grid would.
No, no it's not. At least not in the causation chain that is commonly suggested. The temperature records do not in any way show a causation between industrialization, global CO2 emissions, and temperatures records.

Global Meteorological trends are also far too complex for any single factor to be penultimately decisive. The natural ecology of this planet produces infinitely more CO2 than we ever possibly could.
Global warming as caused by us is not "fact".

And you need to learn how to use paragraphs.
You kind of just proved my point for me.
The emissions of power plants are far less toxic than the emissions of ICE motor vehicles. And the relative efficiency between fuel consumed, emissions produced, and energy output is not even comparable.

No matter what kind of power plant you are talking about, ICE drive train vehicles produce more emissions per KWh. And you're arguing about one particular type of power plant that accounts for only half of the power produced. And even though it accounts for half, that's still a half that's cleaner than any internal combustion engine made today.

What is there to argument here? This is a step towards lowered emissions. More money put towards the production of electricity also means more money towards researching and building more efficient power plants.
I don't think we were talking about irresponsibly high-impact land-clearing, but localized effects of power plant emissions or coal transportation.

captainslug -

Hmmm, I wouldn't call it "high-impact land-clearing". I think Coyote X was referring to "strip mining". Also, that doesn't sound true to what you wrote earlier :


CarloSW2

What about inground coal fires burning all around the globe....

Coal fires - Encyclopedia of Earth

myths
 

captainslug,I think we need to clarify our vocabulary.With respect to CO2,"clean coal"remains an oxymoron.It is the carbon dioxide which is feared the most from coal-fired powerplants.Coal-gasification,or hydrogenation using I.G.Farbenindustrie Akteingesselschaft technology is also considered a dead end,as to water use,manpower,and cost barriers,as well as their CO2 implications.--------------- Their exists no myth with repect to Global climate change,and there is no climatologist or head of state who would today argue against its reality,and its association to anthropogenic CO2.It's your freedom to believe what you want,but I would offer that your current belief construct,is a fabrication of a journalistic prostitute,hired by the hydrocarbon lobby to fabricate this reality.-------------- The tip- off for this,is that this individual who fabricated the "myth" admitted to it on national television,has recanted,and says now that he firmly believes that what all the (tree-hugging,commie,pinko,faggot,environmentalists ) climatologists claimed is correct and bonafide by good science.-------- I personally harbor no ill will nor animosity towards coal-producing states nor the entire coal infrastructure.I do take personnally any threat to where I live for the sake of greed,avarice,and venality of a minority of drug users who'd plunder the entire planet for the sake of a buck.------------- I'll be happy to subsidize R&D of clean coal technology with my tax dollars and I hope they can make it all work.It would surely buy the planet some time,while we figure out if we're pro-life,or pro-a-few-people's -life,or pro-no-life,or whatever's honest.It's about the carbon dioxide.

Hmmm... I may have misunderstood the point that the OP was trying to make. It sounded like the OP was saying that the Plugin Hybrid EV generated more GreenHouse Gasses (GHGs) than a conventional ICE vehicle. However, that wasn't what I got out of the linked article. Instead, the linked article seemed to be saying that PHEVs would only marginally reduce the life cycle GreenHouse Gasses (GHGs) when compared to non-Plugin HEVs.

That seems to make sense... the PHEV is not going to have a significant impact on GHGs compared to HEVs unless the source of electricity is low carbon.

Summary of the findings in graphical form below. Interesting to see how much E85 improves GHGs on a conventional ICE.

http://bioage.typepad.com/photos/unc...7/samaras2.png

You're flat-out wrong about that. Part of the problem is that you're looking at it backwards, seeking evidence of warming and trying to correlate that to CO2. (Or not, as the case may be :-)) The science works the other way around, though: we know (because it's been measured & computed in umpteen different ways) what adding CO2 to the atmosphere will do. If we keep on doing it until the effects are undeniable, it will be too late to stop, and we'll all be in trouble.

For a simple analogy, say you've got your home furnace on a timer, so that it runs 12 hours a day and keeps your house at a comfortable temperature. Then you add a layer of insulation to the roof: don't you suppose the house is going to get warmer? Do you have to wait around until it gets uncomfortably warm before you think you have "proof"?

Where on earth did you hear power plants are 50% efficient? The best of the gas turbine combined cycle plants are 43% efficient. To get 50% you'd need a Carnot engine - which nobody has ever figured out how to make. Most simple Rankine-cycle plant are about 37% efficient.

Transmission efficencies decrease with distance, but generally vary between 15% and 40%.

Here in Indiana, an electric car is a coal-fueled car as our electricity portfolio is 98% coal.

If you believe the Global Warming thing you must offer people a workable alternative and right now the only workable large-scale zero carbon alternative is nuclear. If you believe in the Global Warming thing the only feasible response is to build and commission thirty new nukes each year for the next forty years.

And my previous statement was talking about the power plants themselves, not coal mines.
Coal is used for more than just fuel. The same is true with petroleum.

The scientific community does not function on consensus. Theories require testing with a published methodology, and the results of the test have to be interpreted. Science is about testing and retesting. Not about arbitrarily deciding what is right or wrong.

There are PLENTY of scientists that disagree. Which is good considering it was only a handful that decided for the world that Global Warming was "a reality".
.: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.
http://www.dailytech.com/Sea+Ice+End...ticle13834.htm

There's a prevalence towards fear-mongering and poorly conducted research that does nothing to increase understanding of climate science.
No, but you would have to be measuring more variables than simply atmospheric temperatures and you would need to measure over a wider period of time.
While CO2 levels have increased between 1960 and 2005, we can't say with any certainty that we're the cause, because forests have also been increasing in size in the past 150 years.

Ocean temperatures disagree with atmospheric temperature records. But at the same time the acidity levels of the oceans has been increasing. And magnetic pole is shifting. And sun spot and solar wind activity have been increasing.
And cloud coverage percentages have a much more direct impact on global surface temperatures than greenhouse effects.

Global Warming is an oversimplification of what is a much more fascinatingly complicated system. While the greenhouse effect is real, there's presently no real certainty as to how directly anthropogenic CO2 production affects climate change over time.

Am I saying pollution is good? No.
I'm just not inclined to believe that the Global Ecosystem is so incredibly delicate that everything that happens within it is somehow our fault. It's wiped out entire populations without our intervention in the past, and is capable of doing so on it's own. It's adaptive and an extra few degrees won't bring the whole system crashing to a halt.

The world didn't end during the Holocene period. Nor did it end during the little ice age.

Where the heck do you get this BS? There are many threads of evidence that prove beyond any shadow of doubt that the excess CO2 comes from fossil fuels. Some of them, such as isotope ratios, take a little science to understand, but the simplest one just takes basic math and a little web searching. You can quite easily find figures for the amount of coal & oil extracted over the last century, Figure out how much CO2 burning them creates, and how much that would increase atmospheric CO2 concentration. Then compare your number to the actual measured increase.

As for that baloney about forests increasing, I think that- if you're being honest - you're confusing a small, localized increase in the northeastern US (due to changing population patterns as people moved west) with the entire world, which as a whole is undergoing severe, ongoing deforestation.

Most of those either have no effect, or one too small to measure, but in any case they're irrelevant: their effects will only add or subtract a tiny bit from the effect of CO2. It's rather like asking whether the geese that brought down that airliner had fleas or not, and then claiming that the fleas were really responsible.

Depends on what you mean by certainty. Send a boulder bouncing down the side of a mountain: it's not certain where it's going to land, whether it'll set off a landslide, or how big the slide might be, but it's damned sure not going to roll uphill. All the anti-AGW arguments amount to various ways of claiming that the boulder's not going to roll, or if it does, it's going to roll uphill.

Global severe deforestation? Nope. Only the countries that are undergoing land-clearing have recorded high losses of forestation in the past 10 years.
http://ifs.nic.in/rt/misc/fwstats04/table16.pdf
The United States and Canada have more forest land than they did 150 years ago. Partly because of Theodore Roosevelt and the Park service, but also because the logging industry at the same time shifted to tree farming instead of clearing natural forests.
Today, none of the wood or paper products you buy are made from natural forestation. They're made entirely from trees grown specifically for producing wood products.
Really? Volcanoes worldwide have and continue to have the power to directly alter cloud coverage percentages. In 1883 the Krakatoa eruption was large enough to directly alter global average temperatures by just over 1C.
Volcanic winter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
And historically, solar activity directly tracks with global temperature averages.
Has man caused climate change? - physicsworld.com

The vast bulk of Global Warming research I've seen in the past 4 years has worked very hard to hinge itself on only one or two variables, while ignoring the contributions of everything that goes into the system. No individual factor is all-powerful. You have to view them as a combined whole.
Not all of the research is hooey. But many climatologists have complained that a great deal of climate research has been left on the wayside because only research that includes "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" in it will get funding.

40 years ago the scientific "consensus" was that we were slipping into an Ice Age. And that was the prevailing politically popular opinion then.

If you want to paint me as a pariah or a luddite, fine. That's what's happening in the scientific community right now. What I want to make clear is that it's not practical or even sensible to assume that THE WHOLE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY unanimously agrees with such a young and inadequately tested theory.

All I'm guilty of is having a subscription to NewScientist, which has had many articles discussing both the merits and demerits of modern global climatology.

For your consideration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onDbT...8B0F7&index=54

And what percentage of the planet is that? Most of it, excepting small parts of the US and Europe.

This is an example of cherry-picking, taking two selected data points, drawing a line through them, and calling it a trend. You pick the starting point 150 years ago, when most of the Northeast had been deforested, and claim that the increase since represents the growing forests. Why not start from a century or two earlier, before all the forests were cut down?

This is a flat-out lie. Any summer you're in this area (the Sierra Nevada), I can take you out and find some ongoing logging operations in natural forests. And if it were true, I'd hardly think that converting the county into tree farms counts for much. It will take many centuries to get some of the previously-logged areas, such as the upper midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc) back to something resembling their natural state, even though some parts now have scrub growth replacing original forest.

And who said otherwise? But two things you need to remember about volcanos. First, they're pretty hard to overlook, so we'd know if one or more affected climate. (And their effects are predictable: see for instance climate model predictions of the effects of the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.) Second, their effect are transient on the timescale of climate. A major eruption can change things for a year or two, then the dust & sulfates settle out, and things go back to normal.

Another lie. As has been pointed out many times, there was one scientific paper (soon refuted) that raised the possibility, and a few scare-type articles in the popular press as a result. Nowhere near either a scientific consensus or a prevalent popular opinion - and I was there at the time :-)

Those silly engine-driven cars!
 

NEW BOOK PRESS RELEASE

In the 1960s the U.S. Congress created the Department of Transportation (DOT), with authority to control many aspects of the transportation. One of the new Department's first acts was to develop legislation supporting urban transport. But basic problems remained, and indeed grew faster than the population, and faster than the gross national product. More families became multi-car families, driving more trips each, and less alternative transports were available to greater portions of our population.
President Clinton, to improve urban travel, agreed in 1991 to support $-billions for yet another program of development. His introduction of funding of magnetically-propelled transport systems came at a time when it had become apparent that further development of the road-only traffic systems would lead to catastrophic climatic damages, as well as increasing world land use, with its accompanying social disruption.
The test center in Pueblo, Colorado set out to develop a vehicular system that made use of magnetism. The system made use of magnetically elevated mass-transit vehicles. But they were then propelled by mighty aircraft-like IC. engines! Other work produced wheel-less vehicles that maintained a separation from the road with an air cushion. All these developments were taken into use, providing mass-transits that left the internal engine supreme for the car.
The pollution problem continued unabated.
By the start of the 21st century, another problem of global proportions was gaining public attention, caused by the emanation of sundry pollutants into the atmosphere and commonly named Global warming.
As the third world develops, and scramble to join the automobile rat-race, the damage done universally to the Earth has dramatically increased. Probably the major source of the damage today is atmospheric reflection, Global warming, more accurately, Global Climate Change.
Making some use of the upper limits has become (relatively) simple with photovoltaic generation of electrical power. And because the Linear motor – the work-horse of the Amcar system – drives vehicles using direct current electrical power, this system is intrinsically more efficient than AC uses of the power generated from solar sources (about 30% more efficient). Global leaders called for a variety of half-measures including the ‘carbon tax,’ but
The pollution problem continued, unabated.
Not only do present cars release greenhouse gases, but the dust from tires, typically hydrocarbon and silica pollutants, remain in the lower atmosphere for indefinite periods.
Other health-related problems, of carcinogens and agricultural losses are also improved by Amcars. This system eliminates them as it is a wheel-less vehicle, taking the Linear Motor from its common use on the factory floor. Amcars offer a different practical use for it, as the ‘Guideway.’ A second patent from the 1920s, the ‘Merger,’ allows the wheel-less vehicles to glide smoothly from their course on one Guideway to another, use electro-magnetism to speed their vehicle on. Riders can choose their path, time and destination.
Finally, with developments in major solar power, of up to 6kWh/square meter/hour, from Photovoltaics of the end of the 20th Century, the whole system can be powered by renewable energy. Amcars requires no roads, very little carbon fuels and works best when the vehicles are not quickly obsolescent. Read ‘The Power Play to End the Car.’[ISBN 978-1-60693-139-4]

Paraphrasing the poet.

KTUU.com | Alaska's news and information source | Gore ice sculpture unveiled in Fairbanks

I met a traveler from a frozen land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless carbon legs
Stand in a glacier. Near them, on the snow,
Half sunk, a shatter visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Al Gore, Warmer of Warmers;
Look on my works Ye Mighty and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level snows stretch far away.

My apologies to Shelley for haggling his iambic pentameter but the opportunity was too delicious.

I'm pretty sure I watched that episode when it was on showtime (right channel?)

Oddly enough, I just watched all three clips of it... (it was an hour long show, with about 29 minutes of footage.. damn commercials.)

While I agree with several points in the show there are other things that I don't necessarily agree with. One of which is that recycling is worthless... what they're actually saying there is that MASS recycling is worthless. That might be true, and I'm not prepared to test the validity of the claims against anything else.

What is not "bull ****", as they so eloquently put it (several times), is that PERSONAL recycling actually does save money. If you're recycling things on your own, not using a mass recycling agency to do it for you, you are saving money which would otherwise be spent on those same things. This is the EXACT reason I've mostly limited my pet thread to techniques for the re-use of every day items.

As far as you guys arguing back and forth - the world is going to end in 2012 anyway... why bother wasting the average 2 minutes to post each time?

If Penn and Teller were publishing a series of research papers instead of an entertainment program, and their conclusion wasn't foregone from the title of the series, then they might be a credible source for such information. As it stands, they've presented as fact the opinions of two dissident scientists who disagree with what is the scientific consensus: recycling has net positive effects on the environment.

See National Recycling Week - Recycling Statistics and Research: Is Recycling Worth it? - Popular Mechanics for a readable analysis of the environmental impact of recycling. Recycling paper reduces the amount of land needed for tree farms, which should free up space for old-growth forests. It saves landfill space, which admittedly isn't a precious commodity. Recycling promotes widespread public awareness of environmental issues, and recycling saves energy overall. So keep on recycling; you're saving the planet, even if you're not saving the government money.

That depends. Saw some real-estate signs a few miles from my place, in an area of sagebrush-covered (at least before last summer's fire) hills & canyons that is rather less attractive than the landfill site a few miles away was before it became a landfill. Two-acre parcels, $175K. That comes pretty close to precious in my book.

I'm pretty sure he was referring to space already deemed "landfill" space. Which is not in short supply, for the exact reasons that were pointed out both in Penn&Teller's presentation, and as a matter of public record.

The entire city (ok, not the whole thing, but a large percentage of it.) of Elmira, New York, is built on top of an old landfill.

Currently, Companies like Waste Management are finding "greener" ways to dispose of all that trash, both using incineration (with smoke scrubbers, of course) and methane absorption. The thoughts about landfills that people had in the 70's and 80's ARE NOT what is true anymore. Landfills aren't the huge masses and large expanses of trash and dirtyness that they may have been before I was born, and as a matter of fact, they are their own recycling operation, and always have been, it just happens on a much larger scale, over a longer period of time.

By the way, I don't care where the land is, or what's on it. 175K for 2 acres is BS. There is no land that is worth *purchase price* nearly 10 years of the average person's salary.

Re: gas vs electric. At least moving the smog out of the city improves the respiration for all city folk, especially the kids who run around outside and have to walk to school along gridlocked roads. Cyclists would agree.

The people in the country can choke instead.

Really though, would the world really notice if all vehicular journeys, of all types, were cut in half?

How about a light rail (monorail) city with driverless coaches where you swipe a debit card and step into your own private/or shared cubicle. CCTV to stop the taggers and vandals. Scan your embedded ID chip. A computer would then tell you if your body is too acidic and needs alkalizing. And if you've been on the weed...Thought Crime...