It can be a little frustrating to do what is right for the environment, even if you are totally committed to this noble cause.

Prius hybrids for example are supposed to be this good alternative vehicle that you can ostensibly even partially fuel with solar power, at least if you have solar panels at your house, you can use them to collect power that you use to charge up your car. BUT, what about the nickel that is used in the production of this “green” car? Or the way those solar panels were manufactured for that matter?

Whether you are a Prius owner so you can cut down on gas consumption for moral reasons (the ongoing war to seize this limited fuel source from the Middle East), or for ecological reasons, that fuel is extremely polluting to the air in a normal automobile combustion engine or both, Toyota Priuses appear to have failed in actually being a “green” product.

Sadly, the way these vehicles touted as “green” are being manufactured, actually causes huge environmental damage. Because companies are obsessed with profits at all costs, they say, here’s a car that can help the environment by using less gas (selling point), but then that same company mines nickel and totally hurts the environment in that area where it is mined, and then they ship this nickel all over the world back and forth and back across the sea as part of the manufacturing process, and they use all that fuel to do that– that their product, the hybrid is supposed to be saving– just to build it. So before this vehicle is even driven, it’s already wasted a massive amount of fuel just getting built in the first place! And then there is the environmental damage mining the nickel causes. Which is extensive.

To explain, “The Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

‘The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,’ said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.”

Then, as I stated earlier, “The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery.” Yeah, pretty much sounds like an epic fail.

Yeah. We really need to get active, if you care about the environment and doing right by it, then you need to dig for the info, it’s not that hard, but we cannot just accept what these big companies tell us, because they are lying. I’m not saying the people who work there are lying, that’s what is so insidious about these companies, no ONE person is accountable for these misrepresentations, so it’s up to us. We’re not that busy to educate ourselves, we just have to take it on, and it can be very empowering.

What was the point of these vehicles in the first place anyway? To ween people off of gas? I mean if we are going to go green let’s not pussy-foot around, what’s the answer? How about a new fuel. One that doesn’t need to be seized from across the world by military force, or drilled from a pristine essential part of the planet’s ecosystem like the Arctic. Here’s a beautiful one in that is totally sustainable in that it grows, we can grow it, it is: Algae

And there is a ton of info out there about its ongoing development as a fuel source. One of the most obvious benefits is that it is a plant, so it can actually potentially reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming. I’m going to research this new fuel this week and report back about my impression of this exciting and hopeful new truly green fuel source, and feel free to do the same yourself. And have a great week !

“We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance, algae – you’ve got a bunch of algae out here. If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we’ll be doing alright. Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America.” ~ President Barack Obama at the University of Miami

*Sources:

Prius environmental fail details (in quotes) from Motortrend Forum article by: Chris Demorro

Barack Obama quote from Washington Times

Photo by: Grant Hutchinson via flickr CC license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Here in Detroit the DTE (power co.) is doing a program where they come and pick up old polluting nasty ol energy inefficient fridges and air conditioners. And so they say they will actually give you money for them, or a rebate for something– that part wasn’t clear from what I read. So ima take them up on that for the “ecohouse”. This house came furnished including a yuckie fridge down in the basement that still lives and it’s brother air conditioner and they both are begging to be put out of their misery so I’m so down with DTE coming and taking them away.

In this program the appliances have to still work, and you have to be a DTE customer, but they seriously break these warn out household appliances and recycle them all the way. I’ll post again after they pick up, with a story and hopefully photos. In the meantime enjoy the inspiring video ! They tearin it up ya.

PEACE

and… happy Easter