By Mark Miner
If you read Matt's lawn post (and you should have, it was good), you may have noticed that he has ~ 4600 square feet of grass. That got me to thinking. I live in a 700 sq. ft. apartment. My "patio" is 5' x 10', and graced by a chair I don't use much and a mint plant in a pot sitting on a camping gear crate. Thus, the total greenspace at my flat is ~ 27 square inches. For those of you who like numbers, Matt's green:living ratio (allowing for slab as living space) is 2.3. Mine is 0.00025. Now, that just makes me sad.
As someone who thinks about ecological footprints and human impact, I get a little blue about my greenhouse gas emissions. I drive a pickup. An old pickup. It's a bit of a relic of my high-school mentality, when I got to go 4-wheeling 2-4 days every week. Unfortunately, I cannot currently afford to upgrade to something cleaner that meets my needs. When I get a salaried job, I'd like to switch it for a smaller car.
In a way, then, I am a microcosm of the problems facing environmentally sound practices. They are almost always capital intensive. GM is squawking at Congress that it cannot afford to meet tighter CAFÉ standards. They are probably right. Just when they got the black pen out again, they may be ducked right back under a sea of red ink playing catchup to a big jump in antiquated standards. I am not yet under government scrutiny, thankfully, but I want to upgrade my emissions too, and I can't afford it either. How did GM and I end up here? Simply by not thinking about it.
I mentioned the age of the current emissions standards as about 30 years old. Why? That puts them in the late seventies, when Jimmy was in the White House. President Carter was the last man in the Oval Office to attempt coherent energy legislation (and if you ask about the current energy bill, I say it is not coherent), and then the oil got cheap again and all of JC's initiatives got dropped like a hot goober. Remember the cars of the late 1970's? Do you suppose that emissions technology has advanced since then?
If the standards had kept pace with technology, this issue would not be the horse pill that it is. The American driving public would not be hurt as bad at the pump. Below is a little analysis I wish I had done when I bought my truck in 2003. At the time I paid ~$7000 for it, and the
Civic Hybrid was going for
$20000. That sets the scene. Now, the discussion of the analysis. You can skip to the conclusion if this is boring.
I assumed a fixed price for gasoline of $2.40. This has not been true, but it is the average price between July 2003 (when I bought my truck) and now, based on
US Department of Energy historical consumer gasoline price tables. The model scales linearly with the gasoline price, so it may be adjusted for the future. This is strictly a fuel-consumption model, and it doesn't take into account externalities such as maintenance or risk-of-damage that would influence a vehicle purchase. I also assumed an American annual mileage of 12000, since this is what the Kelly Blue Book says is average. I calculated my own annual mileage.
The Excel sheet conclusion is below, followed by the source file and a .pdf page of the whole analysis. It becomes apparent that even on my timescale (3.75 years of ownership) the Civic Hybrid almost pays for itself. For about $2200 more at the front end, I could be driving a Civic Hybrid right now. In another year or so I would have paid myself back for it (relatively speaking). Of course, as discussed above, that would have required a $20000 capital investment at the front end. This was very unpalatable to a high-school graduate in 2003, and it is similarly unpalatable to GM now, but see where it would have gotten me, and think where it might get Detroit now and in the years to come.
The .pdf, for looking atThe .xls for playing withI don't like to see American steel languish behind the Berlin-Tokyo Axis of Efficiency, but that's where we are. It's not cheap labor. German and Japanese workers are very well compensated, just like their American counterparts. It is lack of vision and planning. If we can't see our way clear now, we will be have to fight through the smog of the future and will be in an even worse condition then.
