Let's say a pollster walks up to you and asks you the following question:
"A town maintains a fleet of vehicles for town employee use. It has two types of vehicles. Type A gets 15 miles per gallon. Type B gets 34 miles per gallon. The town has 100 Type A vehicles and 100 Type B vehicles. Each car in the fleet is driven 10,000 miles per year." The town wants to replace these vehicles with corresponding hybrid models in order to to reduce gas consumption of the fleet and thereby reduce harmful environmental consequences.
Should they (1) replace the 100 vehicles that get 15 mpg with vehicles that get 19 mpg , or (2) replace the 100 vehicles that get 34 mpg with vehicles that get 44 mpg?
If you are like the people who were actually surveyed by Richard Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University, you chose option two. After all, an increase of 10 mpg clearly sounds better than a measly 4 mpg. And yet, some simple number crunching reveals that the town fuel efficiency is improved more in option one (by 14,035 gallons) than in option two (by 6,684 gallons).
Fuel efficiency, write Larrick and Soll in the current issue of Science magazine, is systematically misunderstood by car consumers in the United States, where the standard of measure is miles per gallon.
"People falsely believe that the amount of gas consumed by an automobile decreases as a linear function of a car's mpg. The actual relationship is curvilinear. Consequently, people underestimate the value of removing the most fuel-inefficient vehicles."
They cite a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed in which an automotive expert likened hybrid cars to "fat-free desserts" -- they "can make people feel as if they're doing something good, even when they're doing nothing special at all." The Times writer had questioned the logic of granting tax incentives to buyers of "a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source" but not to a "buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that gets 40 miles per gallon."
According to Larrick and Soll, the basic argument is correct:
"The environment would benefit most if all consumers purchased highly efficient cars that get 40 mpg, not 14, and incentives should be tied to achieving such efficiency. An implicit premise in the example, however, is that an improvement from 12 to 14 mpg is negligible. However, the two mpg improvement is actually a significant one in terms of reduction in gas consumption. A car that gets 12 mpg consumes 833 gallons to cover 10,000 miles (10,000/12); a car that gets 14 mpg consumes 714 gallons (10,000/14). The roughly 120-gallon reduction in fuel used is larger than the reduction achieved by replacing a car that gets 28 mpg with a car that gets 40 mpg over that distance.
It's not exactly intuitive (especially to a non-mathematically jiggered brain like mine), but essentially fuel efficiency abides by the law of diminishing returns: The greatest savings in terms of gas consumption occur at the guzzler end of the spectrum, where the miles-per-gallon ratio -- and the denominator in the fractions above -- is a small number.
If relying on linear reasoning about mpg leads us to undervalue small improvements, Larrick and Soll think there's a relatively simple fix. Let's invert the numbers. Instead of miles per gallon, "the United States should express fuel efficiency as a ratio of volume of consumption to a unit of distance." A gallons per mile rating "allows consumers to understand exactly how much gas they are using on a given car trip or in a given year and, with additional information, how much carbon they are releasing. GPM also makes cost savings from reduced gas consumption easier to calculate."
Which brings us back to the original vehicle fleet survey. When Larrick and Soll gave participants in the same instructions, but in addition to mpg also included gpm data, far more people chose the better answer: Option one. Overall, they found, the percentage choosing the more fuel-efficient option increased from 25 percent in the mpg frame to 64 percent in the gpm frame.
Comments
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Sean Casten Posted 4:58 am
20 Jun 2008
But it doesn't solve the non-linearity innate to the math. A 0 liter car is infinitely more efficient than a 1 liter car, but a 1 liter car is not infinitely more efficient than a 2 liter car. But - if such options were avialable - I'd guess you'd see the same results, with people guessing that the 1 liter difference in the two scenarios is equivalent. The problem is innate to the fact that this is a fraction, not to which goes in the numerator or denominator.
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Biodiversivist Posted 5:11 am
20 Jun 2008
Policy makers would have had someone run the numbers for them to determine which cars to replace. They would have replaced the gas guzzlers, even if the engineer had to sit down and explain why to them as your article did. The fact that consumers would get a survey question wrong is relatively irrelevant. We all know a high MPG rating means using less gas and saving more money.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Max8806 Posted 5:21 am
20 Jun 2008
An argument against upping fleet efficiency standards is often that it will deter people from buying new cars, holding onto their old (and so really low mileage, especially trucks) ones longer. This is always brushed aside as, well, nothing's perfect. In light of this, maybe we should give this more thought. Not saying don't raise standards, but maybe a buyback on old trucks or something. Emphasis on the something. But point is I think its more important that policy makers start thinking about this than that every consumer get it, since ultimately it really doesn't affect (most of) their decision.
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David Roberts Posted 5:55 am
20 Jun 2008
Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that's just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason--age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner--a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.
"Let's say a car is fifteen years old," Donald Stedman says. Stedman is a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. "Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It's the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions--the computer's not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst 's not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It's not just old cars. It's new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year."
In Stedman's view, the current system of smog checks makes little sense. A million motorists in Denver have to go to an emissions center every year--take time from work, wait in line, pay fifteen or twenty-five dollars--for a test that more than ninety per cent of them don't need. "Not everybody gets tested for breast cancer," Stedman says. "Not everybody takes an AIDS test." On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and fixing the few outliers. Car enthusiasts--with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars--have been known to drop a clean engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register their car in a faraway town without emissions testing or arrive at the test site "hot"--having just come off hard driving on the freeway--which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be clean. Still others randomly pass the test when they shouldn't, because dirty engines are highly variable and sometimes burn cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says, that the city's regime of inspections makes any difference in air quality.
He proposes mobile testing instead. Twenty years ago, he invented a device the size of a suitcase that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the emissions of cars as they drive by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of Stedman's devices. He says that cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them on freeway off-ramps around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who fails the test. A half-dozen vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same twenty-five million dollars that Denver's motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city could identify and fix twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few years cut automobile emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent. The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it.
Why don't we all adopt the Stedman method? There's no moral impediment here. We're used to the police pulling people over for having a blown headlight or a broken side mirror, and it wouldn't be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to their list. Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and--presto--the air gets better. But Stedman doesn't much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn't so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It's a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution?Thinking about it more, it seems this applies to smog but not necessarily to CO2, since the latter is much more evenly spread among bad actors.
grist.org
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Max8806 Posted 6:34 am
20 Jun 2008
This problem is even more apparent when you think about how the mpg standards are calculated- Fleet Average. So all the cars sold just have to average a certain mpg. But the cheaper mpg boosts come by adding marginal cleanliness to the already clean, and the needed ones are at the bottom. So we will likely see the worst, such as truck fleets, not actually improve much, but the fleet average will be offset by (less effective) increases in mpg at the top of the fleet (combined with more sales of those smaller cars), but not necessarily less sales of the big dirty ones.
I just realized, isn't the EPA drafting/accepting comments on the rule for implementing that mpg standard now? I'm pretty sure I saw something on it on grist the other day. This could be fixed by changing the forthcoming rule from a "fleet average" to a "fleet weighted average," to reflect the fact that marginal gains at the bottom of the spectrum do more to reduce actual aggregate pollution. Given that the purpose of the law is clearly to reduce actual aggregate pollution, I bet it would easily stand up to Court challenge. Unless the bill is overly specific on defining fleet average, but I would bet its not, which would leave some administrative leeway (though I haven't checked). I would think if the EPA could show (which it could) that a normal fleet average standard would in fact result in substantially more emissions than a hypothetical every-car-gets-35mpg, then they would have room to weight the former to come closer to the latter.
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greentiger Posted 6:50 am
20 Jun 2008
this reminded me of an article last week about a researcher at Georgia Tech who has a drag reduction mechanism for tractor trailors that could provide a 0.6 mpg boost, from 5 to 5.6.
Putting this small boost into the Larrick/Soll example above, we get a savings of 21,429 gallons!... yet when we consider putting that into the fleet average that 0.6 mpg looks pretty pitiful.
What's appealing about switching to this kind of system, is that it doesn't require the end user (or 'the dumb consumer') to have to think very differently, as the significance of this change is only applicable to a small minority of vehicles, while consumers would still make the same kinds of choices near the middle and high end of the mpg spectrum.
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Wolverine Posted 8:49 am
20 Jun 2008
Sheesh people, wake up! Driving is the problem. Obsessing on which cars get better mileage or which ones it's better to replace with other ones is meaningless mental masturbation. Of course it's not as destructive to drive a car that gets higher mileage than one that gets lower mileage, but any fifth grader should be able to tell you that!
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David Roberts Posted 9:07 am
20 Jun 2008
grist.org
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Gar Lipow Posted 9:25 am
20 Jun 2008
And the author apparently never read the study that showed that hanging on to an old car causes less environmental harm than consuming a new one, due to the immense amount of resources and pollution required to build a car.
The study conducted by a PR firm? A PR firm who won't share their data, because people might "abuse" the data to draw differing conclusions. A PR firm who in a previous versions of the study allocated capital and R&D costs only over cars made to date, rather than projected sales over the lifetime of the factory. The "Dust to Dust" mess. That study?
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Nucbuddy Posted 9:30 am
20 Jun 2008
Bottom line:
Cars don't consume fuel. People consume fuel.
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Biodiversivist Posted 9:39 am
20 Jun 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Wolverine Posted 9:50 am
20 Jun 2008
The reason I posted my comment, and will continue to post similar ones in reaction to tripe like this, is because people need to hear the truth constantly. (It's the same reason that corporations saturate TV viewers with the same commercials.) Instead of telling people what they need to hear, Grist often panders to its readers and posts garbage like this essay, which emits the toxic message that it's OK to drive.
And BTW, I notice that you save your most venomous comments for me, probably the strongest defender of the Earth who posts here. There are several anti-environmental posters, such as Mad Mac, Nucbuddy, and John Bailo, but I've never seen you make a nasty comment toward them or tell them to stop saying something. Shows which side you're on, and it's quite obviously not that of the Earth. As Jerry Brown once said, the only difference between the Democrats and Republicans is the pace of destruction. Looks like you're nothing but a Democrat.
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Max8806 Posted 10:21 am
20 Jun 2008
- than someone in a poor developing country even if they had 50 kids.
None of our hands are 100% clean. It's impossible. So get off your high horse man. The whole world is not going to abandon any care for the standard of living of themselves and their loved ones because you tell them too. So acknowledge you do your own fair share of eco-wreckage yourself, and stop chastising people here for their (generally probably pretty successful) attempts to live more sustainably, without moving into a cave. And even if you did that, you're still a mobile source of CO2 running 24/7.
And btw, since you always challenge people to live with native people, I lived and worked with several Dine people, right across from the reservation in N. Arizona. They built a coal plant themselves, ruined the most beautiful scenic environment I've ever seen - red rocks and blue sky as far as the eye can see for 330 degrees, and then that coal plant. Obviously its not the only coal plant that doesn't belong in a beautiful place, and I'm not saying anything against the Dine people, I made great friends. But you go overboard with your self-righteousness.
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Nucbuddy Posted 11:31 am
20 Jun 2008
Good point, for a given family, except:
I think, that a Yaris or Corolla would be a more-likely Prius-competitor.
There is no such thing as a 24-mpg Outback, since cars do not consume fuel. One owner uses 10 gallons in a year of Outback ownership. Another owner uses 10,000 gallons in a year of Outback ownership -- half the time idling it (zero miles travelled per fuel consumed). The quantity of miles-travelled, by itself, does not -- cannot -- matter. So far, no car has been marketed that pumps up its own tires, and certainly none that decides when/where/how it is used. An EPA-rating is just one among myriad factors, and in any one given case of any trend, N=1.
An important point was the effect the fixed/marginal cost ratio has on average VMT and hours-used. When one pays a lot for an item, he feel compelled to get some return on his investment, and does socially-inefficient things like drive/sit-in/idle/use/wash/tinker-with his new car 1,000 hours in a single year. Automobiles are more expensive than they would be if they were made more like beige-box PC-clone computers. Features jack up the prices. Custom engineering (instead of universal component-modularity) jacks up the prices. CAFE and smog standards jack up the fleet-average prices, and the automakers also subsidize their fuel-sippers with extra-high prices on their guzzlers. Result: the guzzlers get driven/idled/used more, to make up for their high prices.
If the Tato Nano were available in America for $2,500, Americans would have more financial opportunity to let their cars sit and rot, instead of feeling financially-compelled to use them constantly to ring out every last bit of value. Moving insurance-costs from fixed to marginal (per mile and/or per minute), would also help. Before you say something about status, perhaps part of the car-status issue is that Americans are resigned ahead-of-time to spending so much time in their cars, thus making the status of the car important. If one observes shoppers at nice-suburb supermarkets, one can observe lots of well-to-do people buying cheap food. They can get away with it, because no one sees their family eating it.
No one sees the $1,000 brand-new gas-guzzing zero-safety-feature all-universal-modular-parts Model-T of the 21st-century rotting in the garage between being used 10 hours per year.
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Nucbuddy Posted 12:09 pm
20 Jun 2008
I suspect it is not the message, but the delivery style. There are plenty of deep-ecologists in the world. I would be surprised to learn that David did not know, and was on very good terms with, at least a handful. Throughout history, plenty of radicals in-general have graduated from milquetoast media/groups just like Gristmill.
Wolverine wrote: I've never seen you make a nasty comment toward [Mad Mac, Nucbuddy, and John Bailo] or tell them to stop saying something.
Google the archives.
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spaceshaper Posted 10:29 pm
20 Jun 2008
Of course this still begs the question of considering miles traveled as the benefit rather than access to resources gained. Far better to live where your kids can walk/bike to school and soccer practice under their own steam than to drive them there, even in a plug-in hybrid.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Biodiversivist Posted 1:13 am
21 Jun 2008
Nucbuddy,
In general, I agree with your observations on status seeking. People will compete at the drop of a hat. Even lawnmowers can be turned into status symbols. You can't really stop the status seeking, but maybe we can change what is a status symbol--high mileage.
http://scots.covenant.edu/faculty/davis/Simpsons%20CandC/Cartoons%20as%20Art_files/image036.jpg
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 2:03 am
21 Jun 2008
And the car gets 30 mpg in gasoline mode. That is 5 gallons for a total 500 miles driven.
11 gallons of gas was saved. Substuituted by 66 kwh of electricty, if that electricity came from renewables, it ought to get a 10 cent per kwh subsidy. About a 60 cent government subsidy per gallon of gas and gallon's worth of GHG saved.
Reframing, it's the way to win in politics, the zen method copmmon to Ghandi and Obama. Change the perspective and backward thinking dissapears into the vanishing point. Aum.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Wolverine Posted 5:05 am
21 Jun 2008
My comments are about the goals we should be setting more than they are about making immediate changes, though of course I also want everyone to make a strong effort to live more naturally. On this specific issue, for example, if our goals are only to get better gas mileage, nothing significant will have been solved. And by continuing to post essays like this, the message portrayed is that driving is just fine, all we need is to drive more efficient cars. As to your specific personal attacks:
Breathing is not environmentally harmful, with the exception of too many people breathing. As has unfortunately become common with many environmentalists, especially the more conservative ones, this comment shows an obsession with global warming to the exclusion of other equally or more harmful problems like the sixth great extinction and ocean acidification.
You're correct in your assessment of what all of us eat, with the extremely rare exception of the very few hunter-gatherers left. I never advocated that we should all starve, but instead that our eventual goal should be to eliminate the extremely destructive practice of agriculture and return to being hunter-gatherers. This would likely take hundreds of years if not millennia, because humans have been practicing agriculture for millennia and because humans are grossly overpopulated and must greatly reduce their population in order to not hunt everything to extinction. But if you don't set it as a goal, it will never happen aside from being forced on people by a collapse of the agricultural system.
As to overpopulation, I don't have any kids and won't be doing so. But, as other people analyzing overpopulation from an anthropocentric viewpoint, you focus on resource depletion as the only, or at least most important, problem caused by overpopulation, which it is not. First, if humans are overpopulated, they overconsume as a group by definition, even if they were all just consuming what is necessary. Second, habitat destruction just for providing homes and food for people is at least as big of a problem as resource depletion. As I've said ad nauseum, overpopulation and overconsumption are the twin roots of all significant ecological and environmental problems.
People who say something is not going to happen usually mean they don't want it to happen. Saying that "[t]he whole world is not going to abandon any care for the standard of living of themselves and their loved ones" just means you don't want to give up your destructive lifestyle. Furthermore, people WILL give up those lifestyles, because they will eventually be forced to do so, as those lifestyles are so ecologically and environmentally harmful that they're nowhere near being sustainable.
I don't chastise people for trying to live more sustainably, in fact I encourage it. But driving a car that gets improved gas mileage is not trying to live more sustainably, it's just feel-good crap that continues to harm the natural environment. I don't care about merely slowing the pace of destruction, I want to eliminate destruction and restore the ecosystems humans have ruined.
I've always said "traditional" native people. The traditional Dine have ALWAYS been opposed to ANY form of mining and certainly oppose any coal plants. There are sellouts in any group, and indigenous people are no different. As one of my AIM friends once said about some Native Americans wanting to live like white people, "we've always had a problem with scouts." Moreover, Native Americans had a "tribal council" form of government imposed on them by white people. This form of governance is not traditional, so some traditional people refuse to participate in it. It also encourages the "scout" behavior, which is why the ruling whites imposed it in the first place. This is where your coal plant came from, not from the traditional people.
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Nucbuddy Posted 5:12 am
21 Jun 2008
amazingdrx wrote: a plugin hybrid [...] ought to get a [...] subsidy.
Really? Why?
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Wolverine Posted 5:35 am
21 Jun 2008
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Max8806 Posted 9:28 am
21 Jun 2008
Your writing that your breathing isn't causing any appreciable effect on climate change misses the point entirely. No individual has an appreciable effect on climate change, even if they drive to work in a jumbo jet (borrowed anecdote). So its all about where you draw the line. And my point is only that you act like its black and white between your perfectly sustainable self and the complete sellouts who drive a Prius instead of a methane-emitting horse. But you rely on evil agriculture for your sustenance, you live on converted habitat, and you are (again) a mobile source of GHG (as is your horse).
So if driving is under no circumstances ok, even for people who do their best to minimize its impact, why the hypocrisy? Why is agriculture ok for you to rely on, and converted habitat ok to live on? Shouldn't you put down the computer and go a-foraging?
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Nucbuddy Posted 10:10 am
21 Jun 2008
Like the Turks that you reference? Turks (also known as Tibetans, Ainu, Chukchi, Eskimo, Navajo, and Dine) certainly have tradition, but they are not native to Southwest United States. (And "Not all Native Americans are Turkish.")
One of their more-famous traditions was nomadicism. Another was worship of the copper-aluminium-phosphate mineral turquois (note the relationship: Turkish, turquois).
In both Turkish and Navajo legends the first man is stated to have been made of turquoise.
Turquois is an interesting mineral in that it is found in essentially only two places on Earth:
Persia.
Southwest United States/North Mexico.In most European languages the bright blue or blue-green stone is called "Turkish" because at the time of its introduction to Europe it appeared to have originated from the country of Turkey.
Wolverine wrote: The traditional Dine have ALWAYS been opposed to ANY form of mining
If that were accepted as true, it might be hard to explain this big pre-Spanish hole (from the above Persia-link):
Turquoise [...] was called chalchihuitl or xiuitl ['xiu'=blue] [thus the word 'Mexican' might mean 'men of torquois' -NB], which are Nahua [as in Navajo? -NB] words. Nahuatl is the language of the Aztecs
[...]
The Nauhua colonial name for the Turquoise Hill on the north side of the Cerrillos was Cerro Chalchiquite. In the Argentine Andes the valley of turquoises is recorded as Valle de Chalchaquies.
One of the smallest, but at the same time most important, of the Cerrillos Hills is Mount Chalchihuitl [...] the site of numerous prehistoric turquoise mines. The early Spanish visitors to New Mexico did not value the mineral -- there is no "Cerro Turquesa" -- but their central-Mexico allies and fellow-travelers, primarily Nahuatl-speaking Tlascalans, esteemed turquoise above all other stones. Hence, we have inherited through the Spanish records the Tlascalan name for this 'turquoise hill'.
[...]
Mount Chalchihuitl is the site of the most extensive prehistoric mining operations known on the American continent. The extent of the workings is "truly marvelous"; the whole north side of the hill has been quarried out, while less extensive excavations are found in other parts of the so-called mountain...
William P. Blake, the first geologist to visit Mount Chalchihuitl, described it in Journal XII, the entry of August 29, 1857.
[...]
"A great chasm or excavation, basin shaped, with projecting crags and precipices. 200 feet deep - 300 wide - an enormous excavation into the solid rock and a pile of debris equally enormous. Trees growing in the bottom and at the sides, 20 feet high pines & very old. The rocks have caved in. A cave or shelter cut into the crags where Indians even now lodge.
"Leaving the arroyo we ascended the slope of the hill following a foot trail among the cedars & gradually ascending until we reached the brink of a precipice which stopped our progress. Here we dismounted and clambering down among the crags looked off into an enormous basin shaped excavation below in the bottom and along the sides of which pine trees were growing. This excavation is nearly circular and is bounded on three sides by vertical precipices of rock, rugged and supporting trees here and there in the crevices.
"I was so much struck with the extent of this singular excavation that it was some minutes before I could believe that it was the work of men alone and for an ornamental stone whatever it might prove to be. I looked in vain for traces of a mineral vein or bed of ore which might have attracted miners but there were none. In extent this opening is not not less than 300 feet in length and breadth and 200 feet deep and it must have been made the greater part of it centuries ago. The immense heaps or debris of the rock which has been removed is strewn out on one side and forms quite a hill which is over covered with pines - sufficient evidence of the antiquity of the opening. This is not the only pile of rocks which have been removed they are found on all sides and in most places are covered with lichens, gray with age. All the rock appears to have been broken up into fragments not larger than the fist or of eggs and then carried out and turned over the bank of refuses precisely as is done by the miners with their [] at the present day.
In the words of Silliman,
"The observer is deeply impressed with the enormous amount of labor which in ancient times has been expended here. The waste or debris excavated in the former workings covers an area which the local surveyor assured me extends by his measurement over at least 20 acres. On the slopes and sides of the great piles of rubbish are growing large cedars and pines, the age of which... must be reckoned by centuries." (Benjamin Silliman, Jr., 1881)
According to measurements made by Sterrett in 1911, the main pit is about 130 feet deep on the high side, 35 feet deep on the low side, and 200 feet across, and the debris therefrom covers about 2½ acres. Many stone hammers and other primitive implements have been found in the debris of the ancient workings.
Ancient excavations have also been found at the other points modernly worked and at several places in Turquoise Hill they exceed in extent the recent excavations.
The immense excavations at Cerrillos are of great antiquity, and it seems beyond reasonable question that the greater portion was executed before the advent of the Spaniards. Indeed, this deposit must have supplied much of the turquois which was so widely used in pre-Spanish times
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Wolverine Posted 11:05 am
21 Jun 2008
Of course I want everyone to make a strong effort to live in as environmentally friendly a manner as possible. But because this is a discussion of ideas, my overriding emphasis is to discuss what our goals should be. I don't claim to be perfect, far from it, but neither do I attack an individual's lifestyle unless I'm defending myself from that individual's attack. I have never bragged about how I live or don't live, but I do state those facts in response to people like you who attack me first. Almost all of my friends drive, including my radical environmental friends, and I don't berate them for it, though we know how we all feel about it and we do tease each other occasionally. But saying that I should "put down the computer and go a-foraging" when I'm trying to discuss what our ultimate goals should be just means you don't agree with my goals. In that case, you should articulate your objections instead of making personal attacks (same for you, Dave). As I said in my last post, many of these goals can't be realized in anywhere near our own lifetimes; a few individuals leaving modern society will do nothing to stop human destruction of the Earth.
Moreover, your priorities are obviously anthropocentric, as you also obsess on what will work for a small number of one species for a short geological period of time. Driving does not "work" in any ecological or environmental sense, despite the fact that it might be more convenient for a small percentage of humans for awhile, or that some humans consider it necessary because they CHOSE to organize their lives in a manner that requires driving. Instead of your milquetoast, anthropocentric comments about realizing that not driving doesn't work for everyone, how about defending driving on ecological and environmental grounds? Of course you can't, just as Dave couldn't, and that's my point.
Finally, you're dead wrong that "[n]o individual has an appreciable effect on climate change," with which you are obviously obsessed despite the fact that there are many other just as serious human-caused ecological and environmental problems. With over 6.5 billion people on Earth, you have to multiply everything someone does by that number. It is totally dishonest to claim that just individual actions have no significant effect. We are not just individuals, we are more importantly each tiny portions of a species, which is a tiny portion of life on this planet, etc.
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