Degrading the environment of third world countries in our quest to improve our California air quality with the production of new "groovy" "green" low-emission vehicles...

By James K. Sayre

Doesn't the Chronicle still have an Automobile section? I was disheartened to seem the picture of some "groovy" "green" new three-wheeled vehicle on the top of a recent Home and Garden section (The Chronicle, April 16). Supposedly all these new "green" vehicles will improve our environment... When I studied Metallurgy at the University of Michigan many years ago, we had to take some core courses in Chemical Engineering, which introduced us to the concepts of material and energy balances for different systems.

If we look at the whole earth as one system, it will become immediately obvious that the pollution and environmental degradation created to produce new vehicles, be they cars or trucks, will overwhelm any environmental gains made by the us using these vehicles in the Bay Area.

Consider the energy and environmental degradation produced by mining iron ore, mining aluminum ore, mining chrome ore, growing and harvesting rubber and extracting and refining oil and then converting it into plastics. Then add in the energy consumed and pollution created by the myriad manufacturing processes required to produce a new vehicle. By outsourcing our manufacturing of vehicles and their many component parts to third world countries such as China, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. we can easily turn a blind eye to the environmental degradation which we are creating there. Humans need to stop over-reproducing if they want to stop their environmental destruction of the Earth.

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