Warmies: "Kill The Blind!"

This is a tale of compassion ... or more specifically, the absence of compassion among the Warmies, that doom-spewing bunch who put their hysterical fear of global warming above all else.

For example, they would rather fritter money tipping at warmie windmills than solve solvable problems like malaria. Of course, you won't hear a Warmie say, "We don't care about malaria! Fix global warming!"

This story is different, because it involves the icon that's on the middle of the Warmie religion's alter -- the ubiquitous Toyota Prius -- and it drew just such a quote, showing that Warmies and Greenies share all the raw anger of the Kos Krowd.

It seems that Priuses (Prii?) pose a very real and present danger to blind people:

Gas friendly electric hybrid cars are under fire from at least one group of people. The National Federation of the Blind believes the cars to be too silent, and a possible threat to the safety of the visually impaired.

"I'm used to being able to get sound cues from my environment and negotiate accordingly," said Deborah Kent Stein, the NFB's chair of their Committee on Automotive and Pedestrian Safety. In an interview with the Associated Press she says that, much to her surprise, she simply has no clue when a hybrid car, running at slow speeds, is approaching.

"We did a test, and I discovered, to my great dismay, that I couldn't hear it."

Hybrids are nearly silent when running on electric power, something the NFB says is incredibly hazardous. But with gas prices steadily rising, hybrid cars are becoming more popular. Year-to-year hybrid sales are up nearly 50% from 2006.

The committee conducted several unscientific tests, with visually impaired people instructed to signal when they were passed by a hybrid while standing in parking lots. The results were revealing.

"People were making comments like, 'When are they going to start the test?' And it would turn out that the vehicle had already done two or three laps around the parking lot," according to Stein.

The NFB call that Priuses make a little noise sounds reasonable enough, doesn't it? Not to Warmies, it's not! According to news reports, it generated this comment from an unnamed environmentalist:

... an environmentalist ... suggested that NFB President Marc Maurer die in a flood caused by global warming ....

With ocean levels rising about one one-hundredth of an inch a year, Maurer would suffer one slow death ... one he could easily tap his way to higher ground to avoid.

Maurer, who as a blind man should be just dripping with all the cloying tolerance heaped on him by politically correct Lefties, wasn't calling for a Prius ban; he just wants them to beep or click or whir. And for this, he gets something of a death threat.

Warmies ... very, very hot around the collar.

Prius: More Enviro Harm Than A Hummer

Eat my CO2, DiCaprio! Up your tailpipe, Maher!

Leonardo and Bill are but two of a plethora of Hollywood hype-buyers who drive about in their Priuses with smug superiority, sure that they are greener than thou. But they would be better off driving a Hummer.

That's right. The total cost of energy (that's manufacturing and operating costs) for a Prius is $3.25 per mile over the 100,000 miles you can expect it to run. A Hummer on the other hand is expected to run 300,000 miles (You know the old saying, "GM cars run bad longer than most cars run.") at $1.95 a mile.

OK, maybe you're not going along with that 300,000-mile Hummer. So give the Hummer a 150,000 mile life -- that's still $2.93 vs. the Prius' $3.25.

That's just the conclusion of a fascinating article by Chris Demorro that ran last week in the Central Connecticut University Recorder. Here's the much juicier stuff:

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

Demorro's piece is damning, indeed, and he doesn't even touch on the energy costs involved in recycling the Prius' batteries once the car goes to the junk yard.

I remain, and probably shall remain for the foreseeable future, a fan of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Gasoline burns incredibly efficiently and engines have become gas-sippers (I get 19.1 mpg in my 325 hp German V8) with very low emissions.

Behind the wheel of your gas-fired car, you may not be Oh, so cool driving down Rodeo Drive among the Prius glitterati, but you'll be driving the smarter car.

hat-tip: Incredible Daughter #1