Good thoughts… nothing is easy when it comes to trying to balance things out, but your Wired article is promoting a couple of fallacies:

1)Organics has little to do with emissions and more to do with health, sustainability of the land… and it is pretty well established that small scale, ‘beyond organic’ farming produces more calories per unit of land than conventional factory scale agriculture, the claims of the Wired article notwithstanding. If we want to feed the world, we really are better off giving up the factory farms and moving back to small ones.

2)”Farm the forests” has no basis in fact. That section of the Wired piece completely ignored the Carbon cycle, contribution of dying trees to soil health and fertility and a dozen other things that have to be considered…

3)New Prius vs. used Tercel: I think we call this comparing apples and oranges. The new Prius has perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 miles of life ahead of it. The 10 year old Tercel, maybe 15,000? You can really only compare used vs used or new vs new if you want to have a meaningful number to work with.

4)And about your aunt! The question is *not* Hybrid vs. conventional Highlander – it’s Highlander vs. Corolla. Unless she lives in a 200 inch per year snow zone, I have my doubts how much she really needs a Highlander. If she’s deciding between a Corolla (35-40 mpg) and a Prius (40-50 mpg) your logic holds up and she’s better off with the conventional Corolla. If she must have the Highlander for whatever reason, the controlling question should be whether her miles are going to be highway or city; as you will note, there is a substantial (50%)increase in city mpg for the hybrid model. But again, if all her miles are city miles, she doesn’t really need an SUV to go to the grocery store, does she?

Yes, they’re complicated questions, but we have to be careful of convenient answers that don’t necessarily hold up!

Ed