For a blog concerning itself with the environment, “Unwelcome Advances” seems to be a rather unfortunate name. Outside of “Captain Planet” very few individuals actively hate the environment, unless you have sever allergies I suppose. That, however, isn’t what unwelcome refers to. What’s unwelcome are the negative externalities related to the advancement of technology.

Take the Toyota Prius for example. This fancy piece of equipment gets an impressive 51 mpg on the highway and an equally impressive 48 mpg in the city. While this may sound wonderful to those living in Toyota City (it’s a real place), but there are some problems, mostly involving the battery system.

First of all, the batteries weigh a lot. The hybrid system may improve efficiency, but the weight of the electric power supply prevents it from improving its already good mpg, not to mention negatively affects the handling and appearance of power.

More importantly, those batteries aren’t particularly good for the environment. The Prius traditionally uses a nickel metal hydride battery, which fortunately do not contain cadmium but still contain alkaline fluids (not so good).  Admittedly, throwing out a few might not do significant harm to your local landfill, however, enough of them might wreak some ecological devastations (or whatnot).

On a fun side note, the Prius uses a lot of rare earth elelements. According to Reuters, a Prius motor needs over 2 pounds of neodymium and almost 23 pounds of lanthanum. That’s a lot.

Does this mean that the Prius is bad? Not at all. It’s not my cup of tea, but it gets good mileage and the batteries aren’t awful (like the lead-acid batteries in the common car engine assembly). It’s just has some ways to go.

That’s the thing. We all love to appear to help the environment, but most people stop there. We’ll extol things that aren’t all that great like photovoltaic cells and blast things that are actually practical, nuclear power for instance.