RUSH: Emily in Cary, North Carolina, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine. Thank you.
CALLER: Great. It’s great to talk to you. I’m just calling because I finally have a reason to buy a hybrid. I’ve been waiting because I’ve been debating about it because I’m tired of the oil-rich countries, you know, becoming rich on the backs of Americans, so I’ve been wanting to buy something that, you know, would use less oil so we would in turn give more oil to, you know, Chavez or wherever, but now I have one because I just was thinking I might have to stop recycling or do something else, but now I feel comfortable about going out and getting one.
RUSH: Wait, I’m clueless here. Why does what I said about the Prius costing more to make than the Hummer make you now want to go buy it?
CALLER: Well, I just feel like now it’s more balanced like environmentally, you know, that I can not worry that I’m going to be in the same group as those buying it because of —
RUSH: Oh, in other words, you can go out and cause more environmental damage than if you had a Hummer, but get —
CALLER: Right, but not —
RUSH: — credit for saving the environment by having a hybrid?
CALLER: No, I don’t want to give money to the oil and the Middle East, so I want to use less oil.
RUSH: Yeah, well, all right, stand by.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I gotta talk you out of this, because you’re not going to be accomplishing anything. That’s the whole point of the story. You will not be accomplishing anything environmentally. You’ll not be accomplishing anything in terms of the less use of oil, and you’re going to be spending a lot more money than you would have to. This is actually quite curious. I thought I made it quite clear here that these hybrids are a joke. They’re a scam, and these do-gooder liberals? The hybrid is the magic car. Obama is called the ‘Magic Negro.’ The hybrid is the magic car. The liberals can go buy this car knowing nothing about it, and think they’re saving the environment and doing all these wonderful things, and of course ‘making a difference.’ Well, let me tell you about the difference that you are going to be making. ‘Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second.
‘This has dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg.’ So it’s not going to get as good gas mileage as everybody thought. ‘This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.’ Just go out there and buy a four cylinder little lawn mower and put some seats on it if you want to be ‘environmental safe.’ This is what’s really interesting about this: ‘Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers.’ (Laughing.) You just have to love this.
‘The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.’ The nickel mine where they get the nickel for the battery, is destroying the environment! ‘The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare. ‘The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,’ said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin… All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?’
It is. It’s the magic car. The author of the piece, Chris Demorro, says, ‘Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet. When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer,’ to drive and produce. ‘Through a study by CNW Marketing called ‘Dust to Dust,’ the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles — the expected lifespan of the Hybrid. The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.’ We’re not focusing on just the Prius. We have nothing against Toyota here. We’re just talking about hybrids here, and this (interruption). Well, the Hummer people could say, yes, ‘Save the environment, buy a Hummer,’ if they compared it to one of these hybrids.
Yeah. Don’t expect the environmentalist wackos to change their mind and go buy Hummers. They’re going to be busy circling the wagons here trying to defend their car. (Laughing.) The magic hybrid! (Laughing.) Every time I see one, I know it’s liberals in it. I’m tempted… I follow ’em down here, there’s a bunch of them down here where I live. You can spot these little things, and I feel like getting up real close and giving them an enema, you know, just tailgating ’em. But I don’t. I just know they’re liberals in there and they’re probably heading to the closest thing they probably can find down here to a commune to get their vegetables and paprika. (Laughing.) I just love this story. I love this almost as much as the cop on the plane in Boston whose wife didn’t care a whit while he was subduing a couple of unruly passengers.
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RUSH: Julia in Columbus, Ohio, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Well, thanks, Rush. I’m calling to defend the Prius. I have one, and I love it, and it gets great gas mileage.
RUSH: Well, if you’re happy, that’s cool. I’m not trying… All I’m trying to do here is say, if you want to buy one, if you want to drive around in it, fine. Look, I buy cars because I like them, and if you like it, more power to you, but don’t buy this notion you’re saving the planet, making a difference. You’re actually contributing to more pollution as it turns out, but if you don’t care about that (and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t), no big deal.
CALLER: Well, that’s true, and we don’t care about that. My husband and I also have a Ford F-150 and a Ford Explorer and a couple Harley-Davidsons. This thing was just too cute. We bought it used. It was in a wreck. (Giggles.)
RUSH: Wait a second. Something’s not computing here. You’ve got a Ford F-150 —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — and I don’t need to tell people in Rio Linda what that is. They go to the showrooms and look at them all the time. You’ve got a Ford Explorer and you’ve got a couple of Harley hawgs —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — and you’ve gone out and bought this cute little hybrid?
CALLER: Because it’s fun to drive. It’s cute as can be. It’s fun to scoot around town in. We didn’t buy it new. We bought it used. It had been wrecked. He likes to tinker with cars, and we’ve had a blast with it. It’s like going around in a golf cart. We love it.
RUSH: Well, now, that’s a great sales message. Great!
CALLER: (Giggles.)
RUSH: ‘It’s like driving around in a golf cart.’ All right, well, Julia, I love getting calls from happy people, especially when they’re causing environmental damage that they didn’t know that they were causing, because it’s not that big of a deal. It’s all a hoax, folks. It’s all a hoax.
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RUSH: All right, we got a update here on the magic car, the hybrid. The car that liberals go out and buy and makes them think they’re making a difference, a positive difference, protecting the environment, not polluting the planet, not causing global warming out there. This story, it’s been around for a while. I saw it on a website today. We had a little blurb on it in the Limbaugh Letter in our January issue about this smelt plant up there, the nickel planet that’s been totally destroyed by the getting of the nickel and the route that the nickel takes in order to become a battery. The upshot of the story is that a Toyota Prius, a hybrid, whatever, it costs three times as much for one-third the driving time than a Hummer. By the time you factor production costs and actual shipping costs and materials to assemble the whole thing and then the driving time and the life span of the car, the Prius, these hybrids, they do more environmental damage overall than a Hummer.
Well, one of the places this story appeared was the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom. We found this little letter last updated 9:34 a.m., May 9th, 2007. ‘It has come to our attention that a story originally published in the Mail on Sunday has apparently been misinterpreted by some of our readers. In order to prevent further misinterpretation, we have removed the article from our website. The following letter was published in the Mail on Sunday on May 13, 2007: Your article about the Inco nickel factory at Sudbury, Canada, wrongly implied that poisonous fumes from the factory had left the area looking like a lunar landscape because so many plants and trees had died,’ and it does. NASA’s using it to test moon rovers, Mars Rovers and so forth. (laughing). ‘You also sought to blame Toyota because the nickel is used, among countless other purposes, for making the Prius hybrid car batteries. In fact any damage occurred more than thirty years ago, long before the Prius was made. Since then, Inco has reduced sulphur dioxide emissions by more than 90 per cent and has helped to plant more than 11 million trees.’ Oh, good, carbon offsets. ‘The company has won praise from the Ontario Ministry of Environment and environmental groups. Sudbury has won several conservation awards and is a centre for eco-tourism.’ Just want to get all sides out there, ladies and gentlemen.
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RUSH: This is Robert in Santa Rosa, California. Hi, Robert, thanks for waiting. You’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Rush, thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: Hey, I’m a little confused about something and I’m hoping you can straighten me out. The question is, if I were to trade my 15-mile-per-gallon Jeep Cherokee in on a high bird, and then the dealer —
RUSH: That’s hybrid.
CALLER: Hybrid.
RUSH: Hybrid, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah, hybrid. I told you I was confused.
RUSH: Yeah, well… No. I didn’t want the audience to think there was a new car out there they haven’t heard of. The ‘High Bird.’
CALLER: I understand. I’m being facetious. Anyway any traded any Jeep Cherokee in my 15 mile per gallon Jeep Cherokee and then the dealer resold my 15 mile per gallon Jeep Cherokee, what good have I done for the environment?
RUSH: You’ve done diddly-squat, zilch, zero, nada.
CALLER: My point exactly. But there is a cure. Especially if you’re a Democrat, and you believe that the rich should pay their fair share. See, people like Arianna Huffington and Barack Obama —
RUSH: No, no, no. No, no, no! Wait, wait. Arianna Huffing-and-puffing-ton.
CALLER: Yeah, Huffing-and-puffing-ton, and Barack Obama, rather than trade their vehicles in, they should take them out to the wrecking yard and have them crushed so that they can’t harm our environment anymore.
RUSH: Well, the problem is if they did that, they wouldn’t have anything to drive.
CALLER: Yeah, but what about their high bird though?
RUSH: Ah, that’s just for show! You think you’re going to see Barack Obama show up someplace without a train of SUVs and suburbans? He needs security and so forth. They’re not going to be in these little high birds.
CALLER: Rush, that’s why you’re the man!
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: That’s why you’re the man!
RUSH: I mean, Laurie David gets in her high bird, drives it to the airport, and hops in her GV-50 that, you know (laughing).
CALLER: I knew you’d straighten me out, Rush. I knew you had the answer, but I just couldn’t come up with it myself.
RUSH: I tell you, I’m honored to have you place such confidence play in me.
CALLER: Ah, you’re my fearless leader. Maha Rushie!
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: You’re welcome.
RUSH: That’s Robert in Santa Rosa, California.