Pajamas Media on hydrogen

I don't often link to much less agree with anything from Pajamas Media but this jumped out at me and can't be emphasized enough.
THE HYDROGEN HOAX

“Hydrogen, after all, is “the most common element in the universe,” as Secretary Abraham pointed out. Since it is so plentiful, surely President Bush must be right when he promises it will be cheap. And when you use it, the waste product will be nothing but water—“environmental pollution will no longer be a concern.” Hydrogen will be abundant, cheap, and clean. Why settle for anything less?

Unfortunately, it’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age.”

“Hydrogen is only a source of energy if it can be taken in its pure form and reacted with another chemical, such as oxygen. But all the hydrogen on Earth, except that in hydrocarbons, has already been oxidized, so none of it is available as fuel. If you want to get plentiful unbound hydrogen, the closest place it can be found is on the surface of the Sun; mining this hydrogen supply would be quite a trick.

I have discussed the non-promise of hydrogen "fuel" here at MEJ in the past.

Sunday, September 11, 2005
Katrina, Global Warming and Peak Oil

Hydrogen: We should have known that if George W. Bush is talking about it it's not a good idea. The reality is hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy transfer medium. It does not occur naturally and has to be produced by by splitting water. It requires more energy to split the water than you get back when you burn it to create energy.

Monday, September 26, 2005
Don't buy the hydrogen spin

Make no mistake, when they talk about a hydrogen economy they are really talking about a nuclear economy. If you are alright with nukes then a hydrogen car is for you. If your not OK with nukes then hydrogen is not what will be powering your car.

To be honest there are groups like, The Phoenix Project Foundation, who think they have solutions.

Don't buy the hydrogen spin

I was listening to Thom Hartmann's local show in Portland Monday morning and he was excited that the auto industry had seen the light and was pushing a more aggressive action to cut US dependence on petroleum.

General Motors Corp.'s Washington spokesman, Chris Preuss, told the newspaper GM welcomes calls by other auto makers for more action on energy independence.

"We believe the US needs to begin aggressive energy policy moves away from petroleum toward hydrogen," Preuss was quoted as saying. "We should diversify our energy stocks away from foreign sources."

Don't let them fool you. As I explained a couple of weeks ago:

Hydrogen: We should have known that if George W. Bush is talking about it it's not a good idea. The reality is hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy transfer medium. It does not occur naturally and has to be produced by by splitting water. It requires more energy to split the water than you get back when you burn it to create energy.

Make no mistake, when they talk about a hydrogen economy they are really talking about a nuclear economy. If you are alright with nukes then a hydrogen car is for you. If your not OK with nukes then hydrogen is not what will be powering your car.

Katrina, Global Warming and Peak Oil

Katrina has upped the dialogue on the role of the federal government, global warming and peak oil. I'm not going to talk about the first and the second to are intertwined. While we have a lot of people telling us we must reduce the use of oil, one because the emissions are causing global warming and two because we are running out of it. I believe that carbon emissions are only a part of the global warming issue but they are still not a good thing. All but a very few now believe that we are approaching the end of oil. So what does that mean to you and I? No body is telling us. There are no substitutes for oil that will allow us to maintain out current life styles. Let's take a quick look at some of the alternatives that are mentioned.

Hydrogen: We should have known that if George W. Bush is talking about it it's not a good idea. The reality is hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy transfer medium. It does not occur naturally and has to be produced by by splitting water. It requires more energy to split the water than you get back when you burn it to create energy.

Solar: Electricity can be produced from sunlight with a photovoltaic cell. A photovoltaic cell is a semi-conductor device which means it made from a pure slice of a crystal of a semi-conductor like silicon. Like hydrogen silicon does not occur naturally and must be produced by splitting silica (quartz). This to requires a lot of energy. Even if a photovoltaic cell over it's lifetime produces more energy than it took to make it we are still dealing with a problem of scale. It would require square miles of land for a solar farm that would equal the output of a small thermal generating plant.

Ethanol: Like the photovoltaic cell ethanol requires energy to produce and requires square miles of land to grow the raw material, grain. In Brazil they are already clearing rain forests to grow grain for ethanol production.

Wind: Wind is certainly renewable but at the same time it takes up a lot of space and it's can't be counted on all the time. Can wind contribute? Yes. It is a substitute for thermal electricity generation?, No. The same can be said for geothermal, tide and wave generation.

The bottom line is our lifestyle is dependent on plentiful cheap oil. Without it we will have to give up our love affair and dependence on the automobile. Without it we will have to rethink our 3, 4 and 5 thousand square foot houses that have become common here on the west coast. With the price of natural gas and electricity due to skyrocket many are going to find out how expensive it is to heat them this winter. Forget 10 dollar toasters from China and apples from New Zealand; shipping costs will make those a thing of the past in the near future. Peak oil will solve one problem, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.

The politicians of neither party have told us this because we don't want to hear it. Politicians that tell us what we don't want to hear don't get elected even when it's true.

So what are we really going to be giving up? I couple of weeks ago I had a post over at Running Scared on The end of affluence as we know it where I wrote;

Kunstler describes the future as "the end of affluence". The old 70's hippy in me wonders if that's true. What has our "affluent" life style given us? More mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, broken families, living next to someone for years and not knowing them, mindless hours in front of a television set, the list goes on.

We can view the upcoming changes as an opportunity for a better life or we can view it as the end of the world. I vote for better life.