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Breaking news: Customers like hybrids that save gas

A Wall Street Journal story (yes, I know you can't read it, and I am truly sorry, deep in my heart sorry) attempts to explain the relative failure thus far of the Honda Accord Hybrid. It contains this tidbit:

A four-cylinder Accord EX sedan with automatic transmission is rated at 24 miles per gallon in the city, 34 highway. The asking price, with leather seats, is $25,500. The Accord Hybrid's asking price, for 2006, is $31,540 with freight charges. The rated mileage for the redesigned car is 25 miles per gallon in the city, and 34 highway.

I guess not much more needs to be said, huh?

As many folks have pointed out, financial savings are only one of many reasons folks might buy a hybrid. Just as important -- more important, I suspect -- are issues of identity. Driving a hybrid is an expression of values.

So Honda makes a hybrid that's virtually unidentifiable as a hybrid (you have to squint at the bumper), that offers little-to-no fuel savings. It just accelerates a little faster.

W, as the kids say, TF?

T-shirts are all sold out!

GM's Live Green, Go Yellow PR campaign to greenwash its ethanol efforts is off to a roaring start -- namely, "overwhelming demand" quickly exhausted its supply of free T-shirts. But never fear: "Please try again later -- they'll be back soon!"

The campaign tries to spin some good news out of GM's monumental financial woes. GM has already sold 1.5 million "flexible-fuel vehicles" -- principally those that burn an 85% ethanol mix -- largely thanks to a loophole in CAFE fuel-economy regulations that grants FFVs "extra credit." GM's truck-heavy vehicle mix has needed all the extra CAFE credit it could get in recent years, so it's on track to sell 400,000 FFVs in 2006, and all but two of the 11 FFV models are trucks. GM and Ford spent recent years riding high on booming truck sales, using loopholes to barely stay inside CAFE regulations without having to actually improve fuel economy.

Color Us Grateful

Do you work for Hewlett-Packard? Do you love Grist? We’re seeking Grist-loving Hewlett-Packard employees to help us get a new color printer via the company’s employee giving program. If you could lend us a hand, drop a line to emailE=(‘rmorton@’ + ‘grist.org’) document.write(‘‘ + emailE + ‘‘) . Thanks!

Well, They Had to Chop Something

BLM suspends funding for forestry research that contradicts Bush policy The Bureau of Land Management has abruptly suspended funding for a team of scientists who published findings undercutting a Bush administration timber policy. The Oregon State University researchers’ report, published last month in the journal Science, suggested that forests scorched in southwest Oregon’s 2002 Biscuit […]

That’ll Teach You to Put Pee in Frogs

Lethal frog fungus spread by pregnancy test, researchers suspect Weird non sequitur of the day: A skin fungus that’s killing off frogs worldwide may have been spread by a pregnancy test. Yeah, we got that same confused look. A few decades ago, African clawed frogs were used to detect pregnancy — with surprising accuracy. The […]

Singin’ in the Rainforest

Deal will protect vast Great Bear Rainforest in Canada We love the smell of vast tracts of protected rainforest in the morning. Smells like … victory. Today in British Columbia, Canada, a coalition including the provincial government, Native groups, forest advocates, and timber companies is expected to announce an unprecedented agreement to protect the 15 […]

WSJ says cutting subsidies would make ethanol more viable. Oh really?

The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday on "How Brazil Broke Its Oil Habit."

The article attempts to draw lessons for the U.S. from the Brazilian experience, where sugarcane-based ethanol supplies 18 percent of the transportation market. The author, David Luhnow, seeks to apply "lessons from the sugar fields of Brazil to U.S. cornfields."

The first problem I see here -- and more scientifically sophisticated Gristmillers like biodiversivist and greenstork are invited to weigh in here -- is that sugarcane seems a much more efficient way to create ethanol than corn. Ethanol is just alcohol, right? The process of making it means converting sucrose to alcohol. And sugarcane has a lot more sucrose, on a per-weight basis, than corn. Right? Thus it would require more energy input to create a given amount of ethanol from corn than it would from sugarcane. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Secondly, Luhnow states that ethanol didn't really take off in Brazil until the government stopped subsidizing sugar farmers. This moves him to write:

The return of SOTU: Oil ‘addiction’

A post on Andrew Sullivan's blog last week got me thinking: Is "addiction" the right word?

Bush's SOTU statement that "America is addicted to oil" was treated as the Big News of the speech, as though he'd admitted to some deep dark secret. Even groups hostile to his administration lauded him for it; many of them have used the metaphor themselves.

But it strikes me as an extraordinarily poor way of describing the problem. It's imprecise in a way that serves Bush's interests in subtle but important ways.

Super Bowl hybrid commercial, warm and fuzzy edition

This one just makes me feel icky:

Super Bowl very not hybrid commercial

This, on the other hand, was vomitous: