can we as a nation take the first damne step here and drive less gas guzzling cars? The nation as a whole turned to smaller cars in the late 70s but am i to assume we are to spoiled now?

If you are a soccer mom, you don't need a huge 4 wheel drive car. Get a station wagon. If i see another twit in their SUV slow down to a crawl so they can ease over a tiny bump in the road, i'm going to foam at the mouth.

sheeesh.

I bought a hybrid a few weeks ago, just before the sharp spike in gas prices. It's hard not to feel a bit smug when seeing the TV reports showing whiny FUV owners complaining about how expensive it is to fill their gas tanks. Self-righteousness is not a healthy emotion, I will admit, but it feels good.

What persuaded the government to make the Space Race a national priority was the pressing strategic need to prevent the Russians from controlling the high frontier. "Oil is an indulgence", "save the environment" and other perceived "soft" arguments don't have a high enough alarm quotient. Even occasional military action to protect oil sources is not seen as a dire problem. Fuel cells are the future. To get the government to mobilize as it did during the 50s/60s needs a similar national security argument.

As long as gasoline remains so cheap in the United States (usually significantly below $2/gallon), what's the point of going to fuel cells? Sure a viable gasoline alternative will eventually succeed, but probably not for 30-40 more years at the earliest (barring any sudden major technological advancement alternative technologies).

Edited by author 03-14-2003 03:25 PM
This article entirely misses the plot.

The future of power is about power, not about the minutia of which energy storage device will be fitted to cars. Fuel cells are good and fine, but not much use without one hell of a lot of extra electricity production. Hydrogen is expensive to make, store and use. And sure, we could spend a lot of time and money and probably crack those nuts, but the time and money would be much better spent on simply making more electricity.

Move all cars to hydrogen, a product that needs to be made from electricity pulled from the already taxed US grid and you'll have to build a whole hell of a lot more power plants. And the truth is, that NIMBY will largely prevent any new nuclear reactors, pebble bed or other wise, from being built in the US. So to move to fuel cells, we'll have to at least double the existing number of fossil fuel burning stacks. Mostly built out in the countryside, pumping the juice into the cities to make this hydrogen. So all we accomplish by quickly adopting hydrogen fuel cells is moving existing pollution from the cities and into the countryside, remote emissions at it's finest.

The author suggests spending 100 billion on fuel cells, a complete waste in my mind. However, I have long suggested spending that sort of cash on fusion power research. Because once you crack the fusion nut, the little matters of localized power storage for automobiles will mostly solve themselves. If electricity is as cheap as air and doesn't pollute, who's going to want to pay for petrochemicals? Sure, fusion may not be quite that cheap, but compared on an environmental cost and given the benefits of near total energy self sufficiency, fusion would be so very much more beneficial.

Solve the power problem and the free market will figure out the best way to get that power into cars.

These articles seem to assume hydrogren must be distributed through gas stations. If it comes in standardized tanks, could we be picking them up at supermarkets and convienence stores instead?

Interesting point, stevedekorte. Currently propane is distributed by a kind of hybrid of both methods: you can have your tank refilled from a pipe at (many) gas stations, or you can swap your empty tank for a full one at some lumberyards and large home and garden type stores (Home Depot, Walmart, K-Mart, etc.).

Hydrogen actually has a safety advantage over both propane and gasoline: at typically encountered temperatures, it's lighter than air. The big hazard with gasoline (vapors) and propane is that any leakage tends to flow downhill and accumulate, rather than rising and dissipating into the atmosphere.