Hybrid Hev Carbon Dioxide Emission
Hybrid Vehicles: Helping the Environment a Gallon at a Time
There are currently 600 million automobiles being driven in the world. The fuel required to keep these machines on the road is a monstrous 120 billion gallons of gas per year. Besides gas costs affecting everyone's pocketbook, that much gas consumption causes billions of tons of CO2 emissions to be released in the atmosphere every year.
But, what is the big deal about carbon dioxide emission, anyway? Isn't it a natural gas that we need to be converted into oxygen? Yes, but it is also classified as a "greenhouse gas," which means that an overabundance of it, produced unnaturally, traps the heat in Earth's atmosphere as it tries to escape. The result: the Dreaded Global Warming epidemic we hear so much about that is credited as the culprit for so many disastrous climate changes.
Each gallon of gas burned contributes 19lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere. So, since the vehicles we drive is one of the biggest contributors to this overload of CO2 in our atmosphere, technological advances have attempted to ease some of this burden. Hybrid-electric vehicles (better known as HEVs or Hybrids) help offset some of that gas consumption by reducing the miles per gallon rate. They have been reported to reduce CO2 emission by 1/3 to . Based on 15,000 miles per year, the Toyota Prius boasts one of the lowest CO2 emission rates per year, at only 3.5 tons.
The Prius also boast one of the highest MPG rates, at a combined city/highway rate of 55MPG. The Honda Civic Hybird is next in line with 50MPG. At only $21,815 to purchase, the Prius has been measured to only take 1.2 years recoup the extra money spent on the car with the savings from gas prices.
Of course, the compact Hybrids are more fuel efficient than the SUV variety, simply because the heavier the car, the more fuel it takes to operate. On http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ you can view the average MPG, carbon footprints, and estimated annual fuel cost based on the make,model, and year of vehicle. This site is a good tool for learning how much carbon your car emits per year and how much you could reduce it by by driving a hybrid instead.
Resources:
All About Hybrid Cars (www.allabouthybridcars.com)Hybrid-Car.org (www.hybrid-car.org)"Hybrid Cars' Fantasy Mileage Ratings Drive into the Sunset" by John Gartner (www.wired.com)"Global Warming the Rise of CO2 and Warming" University of California (http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/globalchange/global_warming/03.html)
