How Now, Brown Cloud?
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 10. 4.05
If you're still debating with yourself (or online) about whether the premium price for a hybrid makes sense, stick your head out the window and breath deeply. Smell that savings? Miles per gallon is only part of the payback. A big chunk of sustainability gold lies under that brown cloud a-brewing. If you live in Denver or Los Angeles or Phoenix, for example, the health risk of plain brown wrapper ICE propulsion is up front and personal.
Only extensive reliance on hybrid propulsion, combined with mandatory diesel particulate filtration, can make personal vehicles sustainable in the North American metropolis. [We're saving sprawl control and public transit for another post.] With a few geographic exceptions, every other propulsion option is unsustainable in terms of health effects. Fuel cells will take decades and we don't have decades to wait. From the Airizona Republic of October 3, 2005, comes sufficient illustration. "The Valley's Brown Cloud is back, and it's a bit early. The layer of visible particulates blanketed the horizon Wednesday and Thursday mornings, days before environmental officials annually declare an end to the summer air pollution season and start of the winter season, when the ugly layer of air usually appears".
"Stagnant air and an increase in particulates, made up of car and truck emissions and dust, are the reason for the early appearance, according to the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Throw in a dry September and a hay fire in the west Valley, and the result is a Brown Cloud that may not be following the standard winter patterns....Ending today is the ozone season, when the same pollutants, heated up, create the colorless, odorless gas that damages the respiratory system, reduces breathing capacity and causes chest pain, headache and a sore throat. Individuals with chronic respiratory diseases are especially susceptible to ozone. Steve Owens, ADEQ director, said the Valley had an average ozone season with no specific concerns...There's two ways to look at it," he said. "The good news is that we stayed even, even with more growth and more driving. The bad news is that there continues to be more growth and more driving.""
"The winter's Brown Cloud, often visible Valley-wide as a layer of thick yellow-brown gunk hanging near the ground, accounts for an additional 250 to 1,000 deaths a year from respiratory ailments, according to the Governor's Brown Cloud Summit...The pollutants that make up the Brown Cloud are present year-round, said Ben Davis, air-monitoring unit manager for the Maricopa County Air Quality Department...So are thermal inversions, but wintertime provides less heat to generate wind currents, a driving factor in breaking up the thermal inversions that hold in pollution like a lid on a jar".
I appreciate the main point of this piece - indeed, with even Montreal getting smog days, a definite change is needed. But I think there are some false assumptions at work here.
1. Places like Arizona even being habitable in even the near short term. With battles over water diversion between Nevada and California, and a climate so harsh you would die without water or air conditioning in the summer, as energy prices spiral upwards (on the downslope of the oil and gas peak) places like this will simply become unlivable.
2. Personal vehicle use being 'sustainable' at all. For the same reasons, in a very short timeframe the poor and lower middle classes won't be able to afford driving at all. In a sort of reverse movie of the 20th century, car use will revert back to a few people with deep pockets, and/or government agencies. We only have to look to Cuba - which went through its own oil crash when the Soviet Union broke up - to see how they had to come up with ad hoc solutions for mass transit (converted 18-wheelers), there's mandatory carpooling for long distances (it's almost illegal not to pick up hitchhikers!), and people walk or bike everywhere else.
So the issue of smog, I think, is going to be a short-term problem. The real question then is, are we going to return to lethal black clouds of coal and wood smoke hanging over cities as people try to heat their homes.
=== author's response follows ====
Comment well states the long view outcome. The post is relevant for the 10 to 20 year increment, speculatively.
I can see your point in this article, but I have significant questions about any vehicle with large banks of batteries. What of the polution they cause? What heavy metals are in them and where do they go? What is the overhead of manufacturing so many batteries and then moving them everywhere you go? Surely the perceived benefit of hybrid vehicles is greater than reality.
Dean,
Please read this:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/06/should_we_be_wo_1.php
Hybrid batteries are one of the rare things in the automotive world that actually bring a benefit. If I were you, I'd be worried first about non-hybrid car batteries, and moonroofs that add weight, and big engines, and so on.
Hybrid batteries are 100% recyclable anyway (they actually pay you to get your batteries back), and they are not lead-acid batteries but lithium-ion and such.
Hey, that's good news! I wish it were better documented, but the bits from Toyota and Honda will do.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. You've brought the argument one step closer to home for me -- and that's saying something. You're not preaching to the choir when I read your articles. I compost because I get free product. I garden because I get free food and enjoy it. I drive carefully because I pay less. Any ecologically-kind decisions I make are driven by mostly by cost and convenience. But you are the first to offer an answer to my question about hybrids with something other than hate.
I would also like to add that with hybrid/electric automobiles, the pollution generated could be much more easily monitored and regulated. I would much prefer that there be electric autos that run on plug-in power from a central power plant, than have a million unregulated mini-polluters chugging away around me.
The power plant could be solar, geothermal, hydro, biomass, or even coal, and still be 'cleaner' than all the combined gunk from cars we have running idle on the highway and on the city streets today.
And for people that are afraid that Terrrists would make the central plants a target*, you can have your own off-the-grid wind/solar panel generator attached to the roof of your garage.
cheers!
*of course the same Terrrists could do it today with our centralized oil refineries...
=== author's response follows ====
Your idea and the underlying design precept of the Internet are similar: based on individual networked entitities, mutually reliant but with standalone functionality. Big utils got to love that concept.
I've considered horse & cart. More friendly & fun than a car, but not good for long trips. still scared to cycle in traffic, so walk or get public transport... but now wonder about terrorist attacks.
By Terrrist i assume you mean terrorist. The misspelling could be read as Terraist, which has a different meaning.
After reading an article last night I have seen the light. Hybrids while they may save fuel they have a problem. They have to drag around the weight bo the batteries plus the weight of the motors and controllers. Not only that there are few companies making the components for hybrids. Ford would love to sell more Escape Hybrids but they can't get enough drivetrain parts.
The solution put forth in the article was smaller turbo charged engines. That is how many cars in Europe get by with engines that are much smaller than those in American cars. Turbo lag has been beaten with improved technology. The plus side, no extra batteries, motors etc that weigh down the car and since several companies make turbos there are suppliers with the knowhow. The minus side is that you do not recapture energy during braking.
===== author's response follows ====
Well...yes and no. Toyota is the supplier of the hybrid drive tech used in Ford and other hybrids. With hybrid sales taking off as they are (who expected the gas spike to go this high so soon?) meeting their own (Toyota's) and those of other makers needs is a challenge in the short term. Ford could have developed their own drive if they'd started out early enough but waited to long and now is playing catch up. Not an inherent fault of technology but one of design and supply chain management on the part of non-Toyota makers. We don't know what the supply contract states but we can only guess that sold out pressents a real limit for a year or two.
Battery weight is only one parameter. If overall vehicle power to weight ratio is good, and torque is good you're fine to go, regardless of absolute battery weight, which for Prius I believe is a bit over 100 pounds. The engineers could easily shed that amount by choosing lightweight materials elsewhere and by specifying a smaller ICE engine. Fuel load is less too!
I think alternative fuel vehicles (ethanol, biodiesel, CNG, etc) are a better situation than hybrids. Hybrids will & do play a role in alleviating smog, but its silly to not talk about ALL options, IMO.
Hybrids are an improvement concerning fuel effeciency, but they are still an unproven technology. Also they are more expensive in almost every aspect of ownership (except fuel, which is a small % of the total cost of owning a vehicle).
=== author's response follows ====
My principal thesis is that cost of ownership includes, although off the books, personal health risk. A couple of hundred thousand on the road does not constitute "proof". What would?
Natural gas price and availability make it questionable as a transit fuel presently, although that could change. We agree about diesel, and I say as much in the post.