Peter Chopelas wrote: > It has been my observation that the total resource consumed is generally > based on the total life cycle cost. The lower the purchase and > ownership costs, the less the resources consumed. This should also > correspond to a lower carbon "foot print". While there are likely many cases where this rule of thumb is valid, there are also many where it can be misleading. For an extreme example, Honda makes retail cars at $20,000 and F1 racing cars at $5,000,000 each. My Honda Civic is now 15 years old and still running well and at low cost. An F1 model will be obsolete in a few years. Life cycle costs will greatly overestimate the resource demands of the F1 car (though they are very inefficient and have a large carbon footprint compared to regular cars). In the case of hybrids, the low production volumes cause higher prices. Battery technology, Atkinson cycle engines, inline motors etc do not benefit from the economy of scale that would exist if all cars were hybrids. This can skew the results. (BTW - if you calculate the battery replacement cost on a per kilometre basis, it's cheaper than buying the fuel you would otherwise need). Ditto comparing kayaks. Carbon fibre is priced according to the market, not according to resources and CF has increased in price lately. That would bias the comparison with a fiberglass kayak. Ditto all other materials - resins are sensitive to oil prices, which in turn are _not_ governed by resource price (resource price at the wellhead is zero - no one pays Mother Earth. Extraction costs can be relatively fixed for a considerable period, taxes vary with political moods and other markups are governed by such "free" market systems as commodity markets and perceived risk/demand/etc). Mike *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Tue Jul 03 2007 - 23:00:35 PDT
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