George Will, do your homework

This week, I got a spate of emails from folks who were concerned about hybrids after columnist George Will dredged up the highly inaccurate CNW paper on hybrid vehicles' environmental impact.  Toyota had a solid response printed in today’s Washington Post, and were kind enough to mention UCS as one of those who have shed some light on this issue, as we did on this post almost a year ago.

Will’s lack of homework extended even farther, and Alden Meyer, UCS director of strategy and policy also wrote a response that I thought I’d share:

In his zeal to discredit efforts to address global warming, columnist George Will rests his baseless argument on two highly suspect sources ("Fuzzy Climate Math," April 12).

First, Will cites Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, whose book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," was roundly condemned by the Danish scientific community as having no credibility. Will recycles Lomborg's assertion that it would cost too much to cut global warming pollution. But the cost of inaction - rising sea levels, severe drought, reduced crop yields, spread of diseases - would dwarf to the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, Will cites a dubious report by CNW Marketing Research that says that if one looks at the life cycle of a Hummer versus a Prius, the Hummer is cleaner. In fact, 85 to 90 percent of a vehicle's global warming pollution comes from producing its fuel and driving it, not manufacturing (or disposing of) it, according to studies by MIT, Argonne National Labs and Carnegie Mellon's Lifecycle Assessment Group.

Ultimately, Will's “can’t do” argument poses a false choice between cleaning up pollution and economic well-being. California is a case in point. Its residents consume 40 percent less electricity than the average American - and the state's economy is booming.

We have the technology and know-how to deal with global warming. What we need is federal policymakers to join the states, cities, and companies already taking responsible action to cut global warming pollution.

As far as I’m concerned, case closed.  But I thought the same thing when we wrote about this back in August…

Posted by: ScottN

Comments

[altfuels]

In your August post, you said that UCS is "taking a close look at the [CNW] report's findings before we make an official reaction." Is there some central "white paper" or webpage where that formal, and I hope detailed, response is available so that I can link to it from my website? This damn thing keeps cropping up -- I first ran into it last year in a column by Betsy Hart, and I've seen it referenced half a dozen times since then. We have realclimate.org to debunk the claim that a few decades ago the scientific consensus was that we needed to be worried about a new ice age, not global warming (among other falsehoods -- I had to address this one just a month or so ago in response to a comment in my local paper); I put up a page myself at

http://www.altfuels.org/misc/onlygm.html

rebutting GM's anti-EV1 spin in response to the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?" last summer. Where can I direct people so as to put this "study" on the ash heap alongside the Carnegie-Mellon thing from a decade ago that purported to prove that electric vehicles would cause huge amounts of lead pollution? In response to an off-topic comment from me at

http://hybridblog.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/01/hybrids_and_tho.html

in January, you [actually Don] said "I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie, so unless it really starts to gather some steam, I'd rather not give it any undeserved press." I hope that you agree with me that this report has "gathered enough steam" to be worth rebutting in detail!