Blessed by the Potato

I don’t really get it — there is a lot of fear and doubt out there about hybrid cars, a lot of people saying things to detract from the new technology. Some of it is pure bullshit, like the CNW study or the crap about the Sudbury moonscape. Some of it is selective accounting looking at the purely financial side of things, such as comparing a nicely equipped mid-sized car like a Prius to a bare-bones compact, or assuming that the price of gas won’t go up over the next 15 years, or that you’ll only own your car for 7 years at which point it will be worthless.

I can understand why some companies (cough, GM, cough) who are losing out on sales to hybrids might have an interest in sowing FUD, but I’m surprised that so many people out there seem to take it up without a second thought (how many times have I heard “oh, but the batteries will have to be replaced every 5 years”?!). Hybrids are a very promising technology and a vital step on our path to electric cars, and while rare until very recently on the ordinary streets of Canada, aren’t really all that new.

One of the latest rounds of fear-mongering focuses on the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by hybrid cars, getting international attention in a recent New York Times article “Fear but few Facts on Hybrid Risk” which was linked to by the Consumerist. To quote from the article:

Kent Shadwick, controller of purchasing services for the York Catholic District School Board in York, Ontario, evaluated the Toyota Prius for fleet use. Mr. Shadwick said it was tested at various speeds, and under hard braking and rapid acceleration, using a professional-quality gauss meter.

“The results that we saw were quite concerning,” he said. “We saw high levels in the vehicle for both the driver and left rear passenger, which has prompted us to explore shielding options and to consider advocating testing of different makes and models of hybrid vehicles.”

I sent a message to Kent Shadwick, asking if he’d share his data so I could see what he considered “high” and whether that was a static (DC) field or a time-varying field measured. He did respond, and promptly, but only to say that he hasn’t shared the results anywhere, and that they hired an outside company to take the measurements using a rigourous procedure. He also said that he was looking into shielding solutions.

I have to say that this is really disappointing, and I think it shows the real lack of a decent science education in the general public that the New York Times ran this piece without even being able to say what the fields are or how that compares to the geomagnetic field, let alone whether there’s any risk from that. The field, if you will forgive the pun, of bioelectromagnetics is so controversial and so lacking in standards that it means virtually nothing to have one person say that something is “concerning” without knowing what their threshold for concern is. Some people are concerned by static fields that are weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field; some aren’t concerned about static fields at all until we get beyond the MRI level. Likewise with time varying fields: some people think that virtually any exposure should be eliminated, others think nothing of using microwaves up to the point where they cause protein denaturation or other fields up to the point where they start to heat the tissue. I have no idea what Kent Shadwick might find concerning, so even if he does have a respectable position with the school board (not some random nut falling asleep at the wheel) and even if he did hire qualified people to take good measurements with the proper equipment… his “concern” is not really newsworthy to me unless I know how his threshold of concern compares to mine.

Plus all this concern about magnetic fields in hybrids is really only part of the issue.

The question asked is always about the risks — we know, for instance, that ionizing radiation is something that can cause cancer and other health issues. However, if you have a broken arm or get a nasty bump on the head, you can be sure you’re popping in for an x-ray/CT no questions asked because there is a big benefit to those diagnostic tests that far outweighs the small inherent exposure. It’s really all about risk-benefit ratios.

So for the hybrid car issue, we have the question “what are the fields?” and we don’t even have a good answer to that, from which point some people fall into hysterics (up to selling their car). The real issue is then several steps removed: the Prius may have higher magnetic field exposures than other cars, and those fields have an unknown but probably small effect on human health, and that might outweigh the positive aspects of the technology.

One example used to show that pulsed magnetic fields can effect biology is the FDA-approved bone growth stimulator. I had the pleasure last week of listening to Arthur Pilla’s (one of the inventors of the electromagnetic bone stimulator) plenary talk in San Diego. He talked about the first use of the bone stimulator on a woman who had a fractured tibia just below the knee that hadn’t healed for 9 years, despite multiple bone grafts, etc. They had this theory that an electromagnetic stimulator might be able to stimulate bone growth, but they also knew that the fields would not be restricted to just the break, and that the knee itself would also be exposed. There was a real concern that the bone might grow wildly out of control and completely fuse the knee, but since this woman’s only other option was amputation, they gave it a try. The stimulator only caused bone growth where there was a break. My point is that it’s not quite so simple to say that induced currents will have an effect on tissue; they may have an effect on some tissue some of the time.

So ok, there might be some small risk with hybrids (though probably not). On top of that the benefits have to considered (fuel efficiency, emissions, safety…) One colleague off-handedly said that even if magnetic fields cause cancer, you’d probably be better off with a Prius because you’d be exposed to less gasoline from the gas stations and escaped vapours in your garage… another possible carcinogen. To save less fuel than switching to a hybrid would net, some people will tailgate (draft) semi trucks in their blind spot. That’s a behaviour with a definite and immediate risk — not of possibly getting cancer 20 years down the road, but of getting instantly killed by a tire blowout or sudden stop with zero space for reaction time. Of course, the risk of being turned into a red smear on the pavement is not a new type of risk to drivers.

The benefits of a Prius vs. a comparable conventional car are real and material. The risks are unknown, but probably negligible. Unfortunately people have such a fear of the unknown that they can blow it out of proportion in their decision making, and focus on their fears rather than the overall picture. Back to the York Catholic District School Board: as a scientist, I was a little disappointed that he wouldn’t share his results so that I could come to my own conclusions; however, I understand why he went to the effort of measuring the fields and looking into solutions — for an individual driver, the risk-benefit ratio is pretty clear: just buy the hybrid. For a school board fleet however, there are unions to consider, and a union will fuck up a school board over a perceived threat to its drivers, whether or not that’s a real concern or a valid trade-off (after all, it’s not the union members who are saving on gas in a fleet purchase situation, so in their minds the risk-benefit works a little differently).

The title of the article was spot-on: Fear, But Few Facts.

I don’t know why there is so much misinformation and so much fear being spread about hybrids out there. I wrote Hybrid Cars: The Benefit of My Research (the 2nd link down in the static pages on the bar to the right) to try to distill some of my research over a year ago. Some of that information is starting to get out of date, but I don’t think that anyone has ever read it anyway, so I’m not sure if I should bother updating it with things like this.

Here, we have a kitchen lit by 78 W of CFLs.

Whose messy kitchen that is exactly is unimportant. Now, 100 W of halogens.

If that doesn’t convince you, you should know that CFLs now have the John Scalzi Seal of Approval.

It wasn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but you can easily see how the fluorescents for less energy give off a ton more light than the two little halogen spots above the counter. The near dusk light from the window and the camera’s colour settings make the quality of the halogen light, IMHO, look much better in that picture than with the CFLs, but in real life the CFLs are only slightly less desirable in terms of colour output, again IMHO.

PEI has always been a bit of a funny place out on its own. Part of its unique character was the fact that you couldn’t get pop in cans out there. Oddly enough, juice did come in cans, but anything carbonated had to come in a bottle. A lot of people bristled against this, and one of the most common things to buy when on an excursion to New Brunswick was a couple of cases of Coke, but the system worked for the most part. The bottle deposits were fairly hefty — 30 cents for a 750 mL bottle IIRC, and as much as $2 for a 2L (which are no longer around because they were frickin heavy) — which is I think part of why it worked so well. Ontario also has a bottle return system (though it’s been several decades since pop or juice came in returnable containers) run by the Beer Store, which does a half-decent job of reusing the bottles; and reusing them is much more efficient than throwing them in the recycling. However, the deposits have really not kept up with the times, and far too often people simply throw their bottles into the recycling, where rather than be rinsed and refilled, they are smashed, melted down, and reformed (which, as you can imagine, takes a lot more energy). At 10 cents a bottle though, only serious drinkers with a full case (which is, from the looks of the stats, about 90% of beer drinkers) and a car tend to bother bringing them back — I know that even though I’m probably going to be close to the Beer Store tomorrow, I’m not going to bother trying to return the two bottles that were left at my house after the long weekend party for a lousy 20 cents.

The bottles are so near worthless that drunken kids throw them just for the sheer idiotic hell of watching them smash, never mind the dangerous broken glass. Which is, unfortunately, a nasty side effect of a bottle economy, and one of the main reasons PEI is now phasing out its bottle system and allowing cans back on the island (though from what I just saw in the grocery store, the 2L plastic bottles are more popular than the cans). With pop in bottles, the danger is amplified by the fact that kids can have access to them, knock them off store shelves or out of the fridge. Kids are clumsy. Adults (and who else is allowed to drink beer or liquor) should be able to handle not breaking bottles — even drunk adults (ideally, anyway). So here’s what I think: we should increase the bottle deposit to make beer bottles worth something again. The deposit in Ontario has been a dime for as long as I can remember — decades, at least. To keep up with inflation, that should have tripled to over 30 cents by now. To account for the fact that people are perhaps a little lazier and/or more smash-happy these days, and for the fact that the bottle deposit probably won’t be touched (if we do change it now) for another 3 decades, I propose that we increase the bottle deposit to an even buck.

A bird (which I think is either a grackle or a swallow) has set up a nest in my next door neighbour’s bathroom exhaust vent on the side of their house. It made for some interesting lazy bird watching as the bird flew right by my office window going on its feeding rounds. As the baby birds get bigger, you can hear them chirping as the bird brings food back on his/her rounds.

Unfortunately, not all has gone to plan, and one of the baby birds fell out of the nest and died. Unfortunately, it didn’t fall all the way out of the nest, and now this dead baby bird is hanging by its leg off the vent cover on my neighbour’s house. To add insult to injury, the baby birds are now getting big enough that it doesn’t look like mommy can fit in the vent tube with them all at the same time now, so instead of climbing in to feed them, she stands on the convenient perch made by the dead bird and just sticks her head in to feed the other birds. Sick.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the Vibe I rented in Victoria had a 120 V AC power port on the front dash, which I thought was a pretty neat feature. No more having to buy all kinds of car adapators for various electronic gizmos (phone chargers, laptops, ipods, etc): just use the regular wall-socket version while in the car!

Wayfare and I were talking about housing and about how it seems like any halfway decent place in Toronto is out of our reach — when we realized we weren’t quite certain what our reach was. We had some very vague ideas based on our savings and estimated income, and some rules of thumb (e.g.: you can afford a house that costs about 3 times your yearly pre-tax income). However, I didn’t think a lot of those were very realistic: what if we had a lot of debt, or liked a lavish lifestyle, or were frugal and wanted to spend more of our income on a house? Plus, as nice as some of the rules of thumb are, they seem to have been largely blown out of the water by the current housing market (which I think may be due for a flatlining or correction, but that’s a topic for another day). So to help us look at our options and lay out a few future scenarios, and also to see where all the figures and calculations were coming from, I made a spreadsheet. It was actually a rather good spreadsheet if I do say so myself, and I took the time to put a bit of formatting into it, so I decided to share it with you here.

[Note for those reading this via a feed: you may need to come to the web site proper at www.holypotato.com/?p=499 to download the excel file]
I am not a financial advisor, nor do I even own my own house. This spreadsheet will likely contain errors and is simply an attempt to share my efforts with you, don’t take it as accurate financial advice. Use it, edit it, redistribute it to your liking. Attribution is appreciated but, in this case, not required.