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Los Angeles City Employees To Drive Hydrogen Power
mace_15 writes "According this CNN article the mayor of Los Angeles has signed a lease with Honda to allow city employees to drive experimental hydrogen powered cars. The cars can reach speeds up to 93mph and Honda claims they have a range of 220 miles before refueling. More information on the car can be found here. Mercedes-Benz has a similar car."
What happens if one gets laid off and gets pissed? Having that much hydrogen in a car could sure put a dent in the LA skyline.
Don't mod this down if you think it might happen, follow the mod rules.
Medevo
Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is a storage medium. All this will do is lull people into a false sense of 'I'm green', when all that's going to happen is a redistribution of the pollutants. So instead of having cars pump out pollutants, power plants will.
...
The real long term solution is for people to stop being so damn energy intensive for every little thing. Walk. Bike. Relax.
But this won't happen until it's way too late. People won't change, they will want their comfort above all. This is why Max Planck said that for ideas to change, people must die. It's too bad the life expectancy is so long now.
And what will happen when every car is pumping out steam? Do people think smog just hangs around because it's smog, but water vapor will just float away immediately? When cities will be turned into saunas, we'll see
please enlighten me, i fail to see your logic, and please don't tell me you're thinking about tritium used to add some 'zip' to nuclear weapons...
Anyone remember those "fly-wheel" cars that were all the hype a few years ago, which involved having a big-ass flywheel spinning at 50k+ RPM mounted in the back of a car, well one of those could certainly do a lot more damage than a tank-full of hydrogen, and i don't remember anyone even mentioning what would happen if someone got into an accident and allowed a 55,000 RPM flywheel to take off down the sidewalk...
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Overall, hydrogen costs energy to produce. You can't just go dig it up out of the ground. You have to produce it somewhere, and then store it, transport it, and eventually burn it. By the time you do all that, you've used considerably more energy than just using the electricity, or heat, or whatever energy source you used to create the hydrogen.
That it takes more energy to produce the hydrogen, than is recovered from it is not new. This fact is true of any fuel source. We've just gotten used to having most of the work done for us.
If you want to see more effecient, cleaner burning engines on the road, you should start pressuring the auto manufacturers to bring over more of the small diesel engines that are running in Europe.
This still will not solve the problem of pollution. All it will do is give temporary relif. Diesel still pollutes, and also kicks out lots of soot, which is staring to be linked to developmental lung problems. This is the big advantage of Hydrogen fuel cells, they only directly produce water, which is usually linked to drinking and water-fights. As for the indirect effects, this is just a matter of working up the supply chain to create a cleaner source. For example:
We fixed the cars at this point, and the H2 stations would be much cleaner (no more fuel tanks leaking gasoline, just H2 which disapates in the atmosphere harmlessly.)
The delivery trucks that bring the H2 to the stations could be H2 powered themselves, so little pollution there.
The H2 producing factories would be the only thing left, and those could be solar powered. And unlike solar cars, they could be placed in areas that have very high amount of sunlight (Arizona is pretty empty, so is much of Nevada). And bigger usually means more efficent in power production.
In the end we have an end to end solution that is cleaner than what we currently have. It may not be as effiecent, but it is cleaner, and that is what we are after at the moment.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.