Hydrogen Cars And Hot Air

by Joseph Romm - June 23rd, 2008 - The Guardian (London)

Would you buy a car that costs 10 times as much as a hybrid gasoline-electric one, like the Toyota Prius? What if I told you it had half the range of the hybrid? What if I told you most cities didn't have a single hydrogen fuelling station? Not interested yet? This should be the deal closer: what if I told you it wouldn't have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than the hybrid?

You don't think that the entire man is causing global warming religion is based on pure illusion? Biofuels and hydrogen are perfect examples of the hype.

Biofuels were based on a calculation that "assumed" there would be no cost in carbon footprint to grow the feedstock of the manufacturing process. However that ignored the reality that world food production was already increasing and that the prime target for new crop lands were rain forests. Take a huge chunk of the world's food production and divert it in to biofuels, and immediately, large swaths of our remaining rain forests were diverted into land to produce food to make up for the biofuel diversion.

Unintended consequences of this miscalculation? Starvation in some countries. An immediate CO2 surge for cutting down the rain forest and burning the residue. An ongoing reduction in CO2 consumption for the rain forest acres no longer covered by trees. A minor advantage in carbon footprint for the biofuels, so minor that it would take 100 years to show a positive result for the earth. However the immediate effect is a huge increase in CO2 in the short run. This is environmentally responsible?

So here we go again as the environmental religion starts its new propaganda war. Having fomented a stupid and disastrous biofuel idiocy on the world, environmentalists have found a new program that once again is meaningless posturing. Hydrogen cars have no advantage in carbon footprint and cost a fortune. As this article notes, they may never get down to $100,000 per car. Yet governments and politicians are touting them as the answer based on nothing but delusions about how great they will be for the economy. This new enthusiasm is primarily based on not being held accountable for their last disaster . . . biofuels. Sound like bait and switch?

How many times do these environmentalists get to prove they don't have a clue how to solve a problem they don't even understand before we stop listening to their lies and hype?