Hybrid Cars and Liberal Hypocrisy

Eco-friendly mining for hybrids.

Personally, I hate hybrids.  From a free market perspective they are stupid as people only buy them when their costs are underwritten by taxpayers (development costs, carpool lane passes, EPA tax credits, etc…).  They also let people believe they are “saving the planet” when they really aren’t.

In fact, it takes a lot of energy to build the “hybrid” part of a hybrid car.  The metals are mined in different places across the globe, shipped to various places to be refined and turned into batteries, then the batteries are shipped to be put into cars and finally the cars are shipped to dealerships.  Also at one point those batteries will need to be recycled which will involve even more input energy.  Plus hybrid cars typically are lighter weight (thus more dangerous in a crash) and have tires that don’t have very good traction or handling characteristics.

Aside from all of those reasons it seems as though there is yet another reason hybrids are silly: the upcoming shortage of the stuff needed to build them:

Electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods.

That makes Toyota’s market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world’s dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand swells.

Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. One promising U.S. source is a rare earths mine slated to reopen in California by 2012.

Among the rare earths that would be most affected in a shortage is neodymium, the key component of an alloy used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Focus, as well as in generators forwind turbines.

Jack Lifton, an independent commodities consultant and strategic metals expert, calls the Prius “the biggest user of rare earths of any object in the world.”

Each electric Prius motor requires 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of neodymium, and each battery uses 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum. That number will nearly double under Toyota’s plans to boost the car’s fuel economy, he said.

As China’s industries begin to consume most of its own rare earth production, Toyota and other companies are seeking to secure reliable reserves for themselves

Bright, shiny objects for the Eco set?

Should we even bring up the fact that the rarer the element in question, the more destructive the mining for that element is.  If we take a look at something like gold which is more common than the metals mentioned above, in some mines it’s necessary to move 1 ton of rock to extract as little as 0.015 ounce of gold!  Of course, toxic runoff from mineral extraction, strip mining, and other environmental issues arise.  It is not different for the stuff required to build a hybrid.

The ironies with hybrids are numerous.  Liberals favor these vehicles (many Hollywood stars “drive” them in public to look hip) but, as with many of their beliefs, if you stack them up with the facts they look very silly indeed.  A green website, TreeHugger.com says:

China is famous for mining one of the yuckiest, costliest and deadliest natural resources. But it’s also home to 93 percent of global production of so-called rare earth elements — including two metals essential for a wide array of green technologies, from hybrid cars to wind turbines. Think of these as the Achilles’ heels of clean tech.

The same website also reports that China is the #1 user of coal fired power plants with some of this energy obviously going towards producing the “green metals” enjoyed by Global Warmers everwhere.

Ah, the irony.

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