Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Hummer is NOT More Environmentally-Friendly Than a Prius

It's amazing how a report that is full of holes can gain such a foothold once some talking heads on TV adopted it.

A while back, there was a rather dubious report called "Dust to Dust" that essentially drew up a conclusion that the monstrous Hummer is more "environmentally friendly" than the Prius, based on all the energy accounting that is being used to research, manufacture, and run the vehicles. Slate.com has a brief synopsis of the whole thing. Luckily, they also tackled the validity of that claim and cited several prominent (and certainly, NOT dubious) research work. It essentially debunked that myth.

Moral of the story: never accept the validity of science/engineering issues from politicians, TV personalities, or popular news media.

Zz.

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