You're occluded!

This whole damn court is occluded!

Actually, I am occluded. Well, a vein in my left eye is, anyway....

I just saw this in the Hybrid Car Q&A column today:

A variety of reputable investigators have concluded that 85-90 percent of energy use and global warming emissions attributable to a vehicle over its entire lifecycle come from operation. Only 10-15 percent is production and disposal. This is true for both hybrids and conventional vehicles.

In order to achieve a net reduction in per-mile global warming emissions, (i.e. to offset the additional emissions from manufacturing and disposing of another vehicle) the new vehicle will have to get 10-20 percent better fuel economy than the old vehicle.

Dictionary.com says, "unobvious," and I finally came up with Omar Khayyam. Still, I made you think for a minute, didn't I? Tomorrow, on another episode of "Emily unexpectedly asks you to come up with trivia," I'll be asking for an explanation of the crankshaft at three in the morning after several drinks.

OK - went and looked up the study.

One - done by a marketing firm who worked for GM. No evidence that it was a peer reviewed LCA study meeting ISO LCA standards.

Two - a number of assumptions are questionable. For example one assumption is that hybrids will last half the lifespan of hummers. Questionable at the very least. Hybrids -especially Honda's hybrids get very high reliablity ratings. The hummer gets very low reliability ratings. Also one of the ways to get these figures is that R&D energy costs are being counted very heavily. Now the hummer has been around since at least the 80's and maybe the 70's. So its R&D costs are distributed over a lot more cars than Hybrids. This is like a really ersatz levelized cost techique. It is like taking a power plant that has been running only a year, and distributing its capital costs over the power it has produced so far and comparing that to the similarly levelized capital costs for a power plant that has been running for 20 years. In other words to get these results Spinella was expensing rather than amortizing capital costs. He admiteed in an interview that if the study was done three years from now the resulst would have been different - in part because hybrids are improving, but mainly because there would be so many more hybrids to distribute R&D among. Which, of course, is why it has been standard accounting for a long time to amortize not expense capital costs.

Tomorrow, on another episode of "Emily unexpectedly asks you to come up with trivia," I'll be asking for an explanation of the crankshaft at three in the morning after several drinks.

We're drinking tonight?

Cool.

Tommy, has your eye gotten any better?

I'll be asking for an explanation of the crankshaft at three in the morning after several drinks.

It's a shaft, see? And it, uh... cranks... things.

It's a shaft, see? And it, uh... cranks... things.

Bowm-chicka-bom!

Tommy, has your eye gotten any better?

It got noticeably better in the first few days or the first week, and it's been pretty much the same since.

I'm assuming I didn't get the placebo, but I have no idea if I got the strong or weak dosage....