Not 72 hours ago I was sitting between two cantankerous twin sisters as they argued about this very question— whether it's more noble and correct, environmentally speaking, to buy a new Prius or a sensible, fuel-efficent used car— and today the tubes, in the form of a Matt Power article in Wired magazine, provide at least the outline of an answer:
If a new Prius were placed head-to-head with a used car, would the Prius win? Don't bet on it. Making a Prius consumes 113 million BTUs, according to sustainability engineer Pablo Päster. A single gallon of gas contains about 113,000 Btus, so Toyota's green wonder guzzles the equivalent of 1,000 gallons before it clocks its first mile. A used car, on the other hand, starts with a significant advantage: The first owner has already paid off its carbon debt. Buy a decade-old Toyota Tercel, which gets a respectable 35 mpg, and the Prius will have to drive 100,000 miles to catch up.
Better yet, buy a three-cylinder, 49-horsepower 1994 Geo Metro XFi, one of the most fuel-efficient cars ever built. It gets the same average mileage as a 2008 Prius, so a new hybrid would never close the carbon gap.
My initial feeling is that there's another layer of complexity that Power overlooks. I'm no economist, but I can think of at least one crucial way the used car market is different from the new car market: it's fixed. There are no new 1994 Geo Metro XFi's rolling off the assembly lines. There are no Japanese car executives weighing whether or not to build more of them based on consumer demand for low-carbon-emission cars.
What this means is that my personal choice to drive a used car will not actually change the amount of carbon spewed into the atmosphere. It's more like a shell game: it will just be me driving the already existing car instead of someone else, who may have been able get it at a slightly lower price if I hadn't allowed my sense of personal virtue to increase pressure on the finite used car market. That other person will now be forced to purchase and maintain another car, almost certainly less fuel efficient.
If I buy a Prius, however, my purchase will have some small effect on a living, breathing manufacturing economy. Some executive in Tokyo or Detroit may decide to produce fewer gas-guzzlers and more fuel-efficient cars based, in part, on my decision as a consumer. With many, many replications of this process, the nature of the entire world fleet of cars could change.
The Wired article also fails to grapple with another salient point: if the 1994 Geo Metro XFi was so fuel-efficient and inexpensive to produce, why aren't car manufacturers dusting off the old blueprints and rolling more of them off the assembly lines? Why did innovation, along the lines of making conventional, non-hybrid cars really, really fuel-efficient, dead-end when I was still training for my bar mitzvah?
I invite anyone with a background in economics or ethics to poke swiss-cheese holes in anything written above. Just keep it clean, or at least carbon-neutral.
No comments:
Post a Comment