Where to begin...
"green" - for the love of Christ - if you take the bus, subway (tube), or carpool - you are doing your part. THose CFL lightbulbs - have mercury in them - how safe are they? It's not hard to save energy people. Common sense seems to have become an uncommon trait.

Al Gore - you pretentious fuck - lead by example. Move into a fucking Condo, and drive a damn Prius and take the train or commerical airlines. Having a house that is bigger than some small towns, doesnt look smart to me.

tranfat, sugar content, salt, etc - listen food police, I like fried food from time to time - let me make my own choices and let me deal with what happens to my body.

NOT everything is a damn conspriacy either.
(Subway Riding the rails underground, Tue 13 Apr 2010, 2:35, 3 replies)

I'm there with you, most of the way.
But regarding the Prius; it's nothing but delusion. It's got a battery loaded with nickel, a viciously poisonous strip-mined metal (Prius nickel is mainly sourced from Canada, if I recall correctly). It needs to be shipped overseas in dirty great cargo boats to be processed, then shipped again to be assembled. If one of those ships should sink, you've got environmental disaster all over your paws. Even just getting the parts from factory to factory consumes more fuel and emits more fumes, adds to the cost of the car and generates more pollution.

The Prius is a step in the right direction, but it's barely on the road to approaching a solution to The Problem. It's still built with dirty components, requires inordinately dirty industrial processes and consumes unbelievable amounts of natural resources, in order to generate a MPG rating that my father's Dirty Diesel Skoda Superb can beat in a headwind. If you're determined to be a smug envirodouche, buy a Prius and you've hit home run. Or an oncoming car.
(blueberrypossum wants to Jaffa your Cake, Tue 13 Apr 2010, 6:09, closed)

Sorry, but bullshit.

Well, actually you have some fair points but some of your post sounds like you took it from that 100% bollocks "Prius vs. Hummer" story that was going round a while ago. OK, a Prius has a few kilos of toxic Nickel in it (and not as much as you think). Well, every other car on the road has a few kilos of also rather toxic lead in it. If you're thinking of those pictures of a devastated landscape in Canada labelled "that's where the nickel for Prius batteries comes from", that was bullshit - the mine closed long before there ever was a Prius. Nickel-based batteries are also quite recyclable, and last as long as the rest of the car (which is as long as any other modern car), so it's not like there are piles of spent Prius batteries piling up anywhere. And the waffle about oooh, the terrible pollution from shipping components around - you think that's different for any other car? And even so, it's actually a rather small part of the car's overall environmental footprint. EDIT: Oh and environmental disaster if a Nickel-carrying ship sinks? Well, am I ever glad that the oil being transported around the world on great big cargo ships doesn't have that problem!

But you have two fair points. One, it's still a dirty car and only a tiny step in the right direction. I'm pretty sure *very* few people, even Prius drivers, would disagree with that. Well, I may be biased as my parents have a Prius (and would prefer something cleaner, obviously), but I've never met any example of the "smug eco-douche" type of Prius driver. I *have* met smug eco-douches who scoff at me for driving at all, rather than cycling 500 miles to visit my parents over Christmas or something, though... also, of course scrapping a good car and replacing it with a brand new Prius is stupid - but if you're in the market for a new car anyway, I don't think it's worse than any other.
Secondly, yes, many European diesels get better MPG ratings than the Prius and are cheaper. But firstly, subjectively, the Prius is quite a nice car, and not that small, you can't compare it to a diesel VW Polo or something. And secondly, diesels are much dirtier in emissions other than CO2 - particulates, nitrous oxides. This is an issue particularly in the US, where emissions standards are so strict that it's hard to make a diesel that's legal over there, and if you do it's not that much cheaper than a Prius...
(julius, Tue 13 Apr 2010, 12:17, closed)

I sort of agree, the word 'green' is very annoyingly overused. Especially because there are so many different environmental issues that you often have to trade off against each other - are you concerned about CO2, about air quality, about water quality, wildlife diversity, any of a thousand others? They're all important, IMO, but as Ben Goldacre would say, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that...

Such as CFL lightbulbs. Sure, they have mercury in them. So do you regularly smash lightbulbs and take a deep breath of the fumes? Seriously though, CO2 and stuff aside, burning coal releases quite a bit of mercury into the atmosphere. The mercury emissions alone avoided because of the electricity saved by a CFL more than outweighs the mercury contained in said CFL, in the unlikely case that it breaks and is released. If you break a CFL just open the windows wide for a bit and try not to inhale too deeply. (I'm still not a fan of CFLs, the light quality just isn't quite the same, but I use them in places where it doesn't matter too much. They also last for ages so save money and energy in that way.)

And Al Gore is leading by example. Oooh, he's got a big house the evil bastard. Well, he's rich. You may not like it, but he can afford it - and since his house is all solar-powered and carbon neutral (and he spent a *lot* of his own money getting it that way), I'd say he's doing pretty well in the "not being hypocritical" stakes. I'm pretty sure he drives a Prius, actually - there was a story some time back about his son getting a speeding ticket in a Prius. Er, bad example maybe, as speeding rather ruins the Prius's fuel economy. He also doesn't have a private jet (as I assume the 'train or commercial airlines' bit implies), though that doesn't stop the Al Gore bashers from criticising him for having one. Oh, and since we're on the Al Gore bashing, you forgot the big one - Al Gore is fat LOLOLOL!

I'm with you on sugar/salt/fat content, especially as they're not necessarily as bad as they're made out to be, but then where is the 'food police' trying to ban those things? The horrible 'nanny state' people love to hate is mostly pushing for better labelling which seems reasonable to me. Transfat is a different issue by the way - it is genuinely scarily bad for you, but doesn't really add to the flavour, it just makes things cheaper/easier to produce. So transfats being phased out isn't a matter of your beloved deep-fried pizza burger or whatever the fuck being BANNED!!! or made less tasty, it's actually being made slightly less bad for you.
Incidentally a friend of mine reckons (from reading actual research papers) that deep-frying stuff in lard or dripping is actually no worse for you (and possibly better) than sunflower/rapeseed oil.
(julius, Tue 13 Apr 2010, 12:33, closed)