To be fair, the cars we destroyed were those with notably lousy gas mileage. And I'm sure the cars were recycled (in the "traditional" sense of being melted for scrap, etc.) And the replacements were required to have significantly better mileage than the ones that were disposed of.

I'm not a huge fan of hybrid cars. It's neat technology, but I imagine that the majority of the fuel efficiency comes from having the engine turn off when it is not needed to provide acceleration. I expect that history will eventually see them as having been a stopgap measure. That said, I assumed that lithium batteries are highly recyclable. Maybe I'm wrong.

You also won't get any argument from me that a significant portion of the "green" movement is hypocritical and uncritical. If it sounds "green", it must be. So, uh, yeah. I guess I kinda agree with you there. Except I think that it made enough sense to try to get rid of the cars with the lousy mileage. And they needn't have been replaced with hybrid cars, but merely cars with better mileage. There was also an economic benefit to prompting money to be moved around through those purchases, but that's another story.