This narrative misses a lot of very important points:
- Priapi’s power trains aren’t necessarily cleaner. If the source of electricity used for recharging is dirty, then it is dirty regardless of whether it’s used in a Prius or a blender or a rechargeable battery in a vibrator.
- Assuming the Prius is charged using a relatively clean source of energy, it’s still not clear that the overall system costs of the Prius are less than those of a more typical gasoline engine. The manufacture of batteries for Priapi is not exactly clean, and mining for the materials needed is very dirty indeed. Taking into account lifetime costs, it’s not clear to me that hybrids are cleaner than efficient, long-lived ICEs.
- This goes for renewables in general – lifetime and system costs aren’t taken into account in EROEI analyses, meaning that most sources of “green” energy are much less clean and efficient than advertised, and almost invariably underestimates the costs. Costs for renewables are mostly paid up-front and need to be recouped over the cost of decades of maintaining capital equipment (which also means that producing renewable electricity requires increasing carbon dioxide output in the short term, though it’s unclear how this should affect the cost/benefit analysis from a whole system perspective). What’s more, they’re affordable mostly because of huge tax subsidies and incredibly loose credit from QE. Which brings us to our next point:
- Clean energy costs money, dirty energy provides money. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/3-us-oil-companies-paid-highest-corporate-income-taxes-2897b-2007-12 Even despite the subsidies, oil companies are net contributors to the US federal government budget. We could argue all day about whether the federal government should really get more money, but the point I’m really making is that you can’t replace something that provides taxes (oil) with something that uses taxes (renewables) without some kind of negative impact on revenue.
- There are costs associated with switching/substituting from fossil fuels to electricity given that much of our technological infrastructure is built with fossil fuels rather than electricity in mind. For example, the mines for the rare earths for those Prius batteries – those run on diesel, not batteries. If the cost of diesel fuel goes up, so does the cost of batteries. These costs typically aren’t accounted for in projections of our bright green carbon-free future.
Honestly, I’m not sure how to do this cost/benefit analysis. Global warming might cause billions of deaths, but I suspect the decline of industrial society would also cause billions of deaths, and by some analyses, trying to prevent global warming will cause the decline of industrial society. (The story I’ve found most plausible recently: subsidized renewables distort the energy market and contribute to making oil extraction unprofitable, but since oil is extracted on credit and lending money to oil companies for this purpose is a huge part of the economy, doing this will almost certainly cause an economic disaster on par with 2008 or even worse. Then no one can afford anything, no one can pay anyone anything, everyone loses their job, no one buys anything, and oil becomes even less profitable to extract.)
