Dear Editor,
Chris Demorro's opinion piece, "Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage" suffers from a lack of fact checking. He claims ". . . their ultimate 'green car' is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America" copied from a flawed _Daily_ _Mail_ article without at least fact checking the environmental record of the Inco Sudbury Canadian plant,
http://wwww.inco-sudbury-airquality.com/.
Frank Javor, Superintendent, Health and Environment, CVRD Inco Smelting Operations e-mailed their annual emissions data going back to 1974, 23 years before Toyota sold their first Prius. Since then, INCO has made a 90% reduction in SO(2) and INCO emissions continue to go down.
Chris failed to check the amount of nickel used in hybrid batteries, about 200 pounds per vehicle or 30 million pounds for 150,000 existing Prius versus the annual Canadian nickel output, over 380 million pounds. Nickel production is driven by the vastly larger market for stainless steel and other high temperature metals.
Failure to fact check is compounded when the flawed CNW Marketing report is cited while the "Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment",
http://www.ilea.org/lcas/macleanlave1998.html, from Carnegie Mellon University, reports 73% of the energy used comes from operation, not manufacturing. Only CNW Marketing makes this false claim and compounds the error by using dollars instead of Joules, an energy unit. Those who have read the CNW Marketing report can confirm a large number of false claims including assignment of shorter vehicle lifetimes to hybrids, excessively development costs, false recycling claims, and a claim that hybrids are "a style.' This last lie suggests that if someone had a gas-only Camry and a hybrid Camry, they would drive the gas Camry even with $3/gal gas because the hybrid is "a style."
An opinion piece that states the opposite of the facts and data is deliberately misleading to the point of propaganda. Hybrids aren't for everyone but in this case, Chris failed to fact check and at best, his piece was misleading.
Robert J. Wilson
Sr. Network Engineer
9011 Randall Road
Huntsville, AL 35802
256-961-9391
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