Taking the Measure

Paul Rako at EDN has been green-baiting lately, but I haven’t seen him yet defend the Hummer. Although Paul has questioned the greenness of alternatives to incandescent light and has suggested that solar power kills babies, I’ve not seen him address the claim that a Hummer is more environmentally friendly than a Prius.

According to Brendan I. Koerner writing in Slate this week, that claim originated with a report titled “Dust to Dust” from CNW Marketing Research. The report, writes Koerner, “was cited in a March 2007 editorial in the Recorder, a student newspaper at Central Connecticut State University. That editorial, in turn, was praised by Rush Limbaugh, thereby guaranteeing its eternal life in blog comments, online forums, and the musings of George Will.”

Continues Koerner, “Such a contrarian conclusion is manna to those who sneer at Prius owners as effete or snobbish. It's also unsubstantiated bunk. As numerous learned folks have pointed out, the 458-page ‘Dust to Dust’ makes zero sense, and not just because it betrays its scientific shortcomings early on by referring to ‘gigajeulles’ of energy.”

One of the report’s shortcomings, says Koerner, is that it “automatically penalizes the Prius by prorating all of Toyota's hybrid research-and-development costs across the relatively small number of Priuses on the road.” It also, he says, “makes a gaggle of inexplicable assumptions, such as claiming that a Prius will last only 109,000 miles.”

Read Koerner’s complete article here.

Paul, care to offer a rebuttal?