Over at Wise Bread, Fred Lee writes about Honda Hybrids:

Hybrids are considered the wave of the future because they not only reduce emissions, addressing the issue of climate change, but they get great gas mileage, an important consideration with the current price of oil. It should be noted that hybrids can also improve the power of the engine, which compromises any advantages in fuel efficiency and emissions. Whatever the application, however, the technology makes the cars more expensive.

I wasn’t aware that the hybrids reduced emissions, so I went to do some research. According to this article, the reason that hybrids reduce emissions more than any other modern car is simply a function of their fuel efficiency:

The pollution associated with the production of fuel for hybrids is the same as the pollution created in the production of fuel for gasoline vehicles because they both use gasoline. The pollution is somewhat reduced for a hybrid vehicle because the vehicle has greater fuel efficiency.

Therefore, a hybrid car has no advantage over any traditional vehicle that gets similar gas mileage. In fact, the hybrid is at a significant disadvantage over a traditional vehicle because of the differences in their production processes (same source as the last quote):

The production process for the hybrid vehicle is very different than the production process of a gasoline vehicle. There are similarities especially in regards to the production of the gasoline powered engine. Thus the production of the gasoline powered engine in the hybrid is similar to that of a gasoline powered vehicle however the addition of the electric engine increases the environmental impact of the production of the hybrid vehicle. The greatest environmental impact comes from the pollution caused by the elaborate battery system that powers the electric engine. The battery pollution is substantial because the creation of the batteries requires destructive mining to produce the batteries and the caustic substances that power the batteries must later be disposed of. The caustic substances that power the batteries are very poisonous and when released into the environment leech into the waterways and poison groundwater.

But the hybrids get significantly better gas mileage than any traditional vehicle, right? Wrong.

The 1996 Metro’s average of 40 miles per gallon nears that of the hybrid 2008 Toyota Prius — priced at $21,000 for the cheapest model — and bests most current cars by a long shot, according to government ratings. Older models of the Geo Metro, specifically cars from 1991 and the XFi edition, have the same average as the hybrid.

Granted, it’s hard for a modern traditional car to get the same gas mileage as a Metro, because recent increases in required emission reduction technology and safety equipment have an impact on efficiency. Still, my 2007 Versa gets pretty close to 40mpg if I’ve been doing a lot of highway driving. The reduced emissions of a hybrid aren’t nearly enough to make up for the increased environmental impact of the batteries, even if the financial cost was the same.

None of this is to say that people shouldn’t buy hybrids if they want one. I seriously considered a Prius back when they were first introduced, because I wanted the cool touch-screen monitor that showed the fuel efficiency and power distributions. I’m just tired of people who’re supposedly environmentally conscious preening over their hybrid cars as though that choice makes them better than the rest of us — especially when their choice is actually more harmful than mine.

In the middle of his Reader Mailbag for the week^[a], Trent over at The Simple Dollar writes about “massive” profits by Big Oil:

Let’s say that we then put a windfall tax on Exxon and siphon away some of that profit, driving their profit down into the 4 cent range. Investors will look at Exxon and see something that they should pull their money out of. Very quickly, Exxon stops having the money necessary to get fuel to you at all. The infrastructure breaks down, no one has the capacity to pull off that large conversion of oil in the ground to gas at the pump, and gas goes ballistic in price. Since there’s no real alternative available, the United States would be hammered.

His entire answer is really worth reading. I’ve always looked at the idea of a “windfall profit” tax on oil companies to be stupid because the tax would simply get passed on to the consumers — we’d pay every penny of the tax. I hadn’t stopped to consider what such a thing would do to investments.

1. LAST week, that is. Sorry; this one’s been written and waiting to be posted for a while — as has the one that’ll be coming up tomorrow. [↩]

Or is it Bigfeet?

I know I’ll never live there (it’s way too cold for me), but I would love to visit Montana. Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks are the most famous, but everything I’ve seen about Big Sky Country indicates it’d be a beautiful place to visit.

Plus, it appears that they breed the rarest of rare animals in Montana — politicians I could actually like.

I’ve mentioned the Consumerist before. It’s a fairly large blog that gives customers another method of fighting back against bad customer service. All in all, I think it’s a pretty good blog, but occasionally, I find something on there that annoys me a bit.

For example, this post, which calls out T-mobile for poor (potential) customer service. While I will admit that T-Mobile probably could’ve helped this customer a bit better, I don’t think that the customer service in question was quite as bad as it many other examples that pop up on The Consumerist, and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the post’s title suggests.

The title is “T-Mobile: We Can’t Help You, Sell Your Brand New Defective Phone On eBay”. Reading the article, though, you’ll see that, at the time the customer service representative encouraged selling the phone on eBay, he had no way of knowing the phone was defective.

Here’s a summary of what happened:

• The writer of the original post (quoted at the Consumerist), whom I will simply call the OP from here on out, got a phone for Christmas, decided she didn’t want it, and asked the gifter to take the gift back.^[a]
• Because the return attempt was more than 14 days after the purchase, T-mobile wouldn’t take back the phone.^[b]
• The OP asked the gifter to send him the phone, and attempted to return it himself, with no more success — the T-mobile rep suggested selling the phone on eBay. At this point, no one involved had any clue whatsoever that the phone was defective
• The OP sold the phone on eBay, and the recipient discovered it was defective. OP refunded the money and took the phone back to T-mobile again.
• T-mobile again says that they can’t take the phone back.^[c]

Pay special attention to the bolded section above. The title of the piece suggests that T-mobile or one of its employees suggested that the OP knowingly sell defective merchandise on eBay, when the truth was that T-Mobile simply suggested selling what was (as far as they knew) a perfectly functional phone that the OP simply didn’t want.

1. Note that the gifter gave the OP a $350 phone. I’m assuming this is because the OP asked for it, or the gifter had reason to expect that he would like it. Asking the gifter to take back such an expensive gift seems very tacky to me, but I’m just weird like that, I guess. [↩]
2. This is the only time I really feel like T-mobile did something wrong, and even this isn’t wrong, just kind of short sighted. In the interest of good customer service, I’d probably extend these timelines around Christmas time, if I was a retailer. [↩]
3. At this point, I believe the OP should probably have tried to send the phone back to the original gifter and have him attempt to return it, though I’m not sure that would’ve helped — this far in, it would be impossible for T-mobile to know if the phone was defective or if it had been broken after the fact, I’d think [↩]

Shiny.