The one question that keeps burning me though is........ok yes the world is getting warmer and the climate is changing, but how do we know that mankind has anything to do with it. Earth has gone through so many massive climate changes that surely its bound to happen again!
According to a friend of mine, who is an environmental scientist, CO2 emission plots correspond almost perfectly with global temperature rise.
My problem with the "green" movement is the lack of understanding of the issue on their part. Here is a perfect example that many probably know about:
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw[/YOUTUBE]
I would disagree that cars are not a part of the problem, they absolutely are even though private transport is far from the biggest offender it still pollutes. The problem is how most econuts go about solving the problem.
Hybrids and anything with a high capacity battery, as been mentioned, is absolutely the wrong way to go. HEV's are slightly better but the problem of manufacturing still exists, electronics are VERY toxic when being made and are very difficult to recycle not only because of their composition but because there is no electronic recycle bin outside your house.
Moving ALL cars to be HEV's or whatever other green propulsion they come up with is also not a solution. I would bet that my friends and I produce less pollution with our unfriendly cars than my friend with a Camry Hybrid down in NC. Simple reason for it is that my gearhead friends and I don't drive to and from work every day and don't need to take the car to go get some groceries and even if we do its a few blocks not 2-3 miles. If/when "green" cars become the norm there is nothing wrong with having a beast in the garage that will spew huge amounts of black smoke into the atmosphere simply because it will be driven once or twice a week at most.
I caught a few minutes of the Colbert Report last night and they had some guy talking about eating habbits. He brought up an interesting point, that Clarkson sorta made before, he said that a family of three eating a steak dinner is the same as them turning all the lights in the house, getting into their SUV and driving around for an hour. He cited the UN study that something like 2/3 of all greenhouse gases come from industrial life stock. Add to that factories, "clean" :ROFL: coal burning plants, oil/gas boilers that are pretty much at every single house/building on the planet.
Problem is that it is very hard to go after Kraft, Perdue, National Grid and so on... because they have money, they have power, they have lawyers and lobbyists in the government so they can get what they want. It is easy to go after individuals because we have very little power and since the propaganda made "green" fashionable there is not much will to speak out either.
And for mileage: It's not the car you drive, its how you drive it. I've tried to see how low of mileage I can get on my dad's pius. I've managed to get it down to 15mpg on a 6 mile trip. The highest my TSX has gone on the same trip was around 35-40 mpg.
Agree 100% my roommate drives a 2.0 (I think) Nissan Sentra. No power, small light car, he gets about 30MPG. My A4 gets 33-35 w/o much trouble, to add insult to injury I can get that mileage going 70-75 and he can only get it at about 60.