carbon emissions is not everything.
Everything? Definitely not. But neither are they inconsequential.
Just do the math your self rather than believing articles that don't show any. An average midsize car will burn about 600 gallons of fuel per year. The energy costs to make a new car are not tiny, but even the worse estimates I could find online add up to less than the equivalent of 1000 gallons of gas (and I'd be interested to see what someone else might come up with independently). So it looks to me like over the average 8 year lifespan of a new car, far more than half of the total energy requirement go to fuel, not manufacture.
Please, somebody check my math.
1) Electric cars - The source of electricity generation is a relatively insignificant part of the electric vehicle's overall total pollution impact
I think I just addressed this.
nowhere near the levels that are involved with the toxic, rare-earth mineral mining
Rare earth metal mining is only dirty because China is doing most of it. That same mining done here in the states, and subject to our environmental laws, isn't any worse than mining iron or copper or anything else that goes into ordinary cars.
A common oversight in both of these articles is that they're extrapolating into the future from current values. Nobody believes that electric cars will never get any better than they are today. Nobody believes that rare earth mining will always be as dirty as it was in the 90s.
Pollution is pollution, and just because it's no longer happening in your own backyard and has been exported off to another part of the country or world is an incredibly elitist and narrow-minded approach to environmentalism.
It's not elitism to want to concentrate your pollution in places where there are no people. It's why we build chimneys. And nuclear waste repositories and garbage dumps and wastewater treatment plants. Society benefits when we optimize processes that generate ugliness.
2) Hybrid cars - To hand-wave away the entire argument based on personal politics while completely ignoring basic engineering principles is no better than...
You're reciting the article's admonishments, which don't apply to me. I didn't hand wave or say anything about hybrids. Don't get so caught up in the text that you regurgitate it inappropriately. It's not a bible.
The basic advice of both articles is "drive a gas car, just drive a smaller one and drive it less often." Great advice for individuals, totally useless to the nation as a whole.
Every frugal forum member should embrace it, but America isn't going to abandon full sized pickup trucks to save the environment. If we mandate those trucks to get 54mpg (the 2025 fuel efficiency goal) then we save the environment without forcing anybody with a big belt buckle to feel like he's sacrificing his liberties to save the spotted owls that put Uncle Bubba in the poorhouse and drove him to drink.
The politics of these things is far too complex for simple advice like "drive less" to be a viable solution on a national scale. Baby steps for now.
but the core of the argument is solid. Trying to engineer a more efficient vehicle should never involve making it more mechanically complex and heavier,
Was that a serious argument?
So we never shoudl have engineered automobiles because they're more complex than horses? You know, that polio vaccine was WAY more complex than just letting people get polio. And those new fangled gas power plants, surely all that added clean burning efficiency is just wasted complexity and spare parts.
As a technical man yourself, I'm shocked to hear you espouse the theory that complex technical systems are inferior. Jet engines vs props. Fuel injection vs carbs. Wifi vs fm radio. FormulaOne cars vs stock. The list is kind of convincing, to me.
The problem is the automobile, in any form, and it doesn't change the reality that if one must utilize individual powered transit, motorcycles and sub-compact turbo diesel cars will cause less total damage than gasoline
I think this is a truism that was well hidden in those articles. Almost nothing is as efficient as a bicycle, and good for your body to boot. Cars are admittedly an evil, but they are an evil we have chosen and embraced.
Our capitalist society isn't interested in solutions that don't make somebody rich, so rather than reverting to cheap as free ultra clean pedal power we make expensive new technologies to clean up the messes from our previous technologies. This isn't an indictment of electric cars, which is what's presented in those articles, it's an indictment of our economic system.