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A Hydrogen-Based Economy
Glog writes "Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of Wired magazine have written an amazing article explaining why we need to transition to a hydrogen economy. Lots of info there, estimated cost and benefit ... very good solid reasoning for whatever floats your boat - national security, environment, super-duper-charged automobiles."
Here are some criticisms of the Hydrogen Economy...
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=1523
Hey, to all those who may either have kids or maybe you're a big kid yourself. I saw a cool science kit over at Frys that has a small refillable fuel cell used to run a little car included in the kit so you can have some fun learning about these guys. The fuel cell housing/wall itself is see-thru. It was $30 at the one here in Dallas. Not too bad. Might make a nice gift for the geek in your life.
An important thing to remember is that one big generator powered by hydrocarbons is much more efficiend than thousands of little ones (cars).
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Actually, I read an article about a year ago about how massive amounts of hydrogen were found along the Canada/US border. I'm not sure how long it would last if we were powering all of our cars with hydrogen, but clearly not ALL hydrogen has to be produced by splitting water molecules.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Okay, maybe I missed something here, and I'm certainly no physics major, but from what I understand, hydrogen is created through the process of electrolysis, where it an oxygen are seperated from water. Also, from what I understand, this is a fairly energy-intensive process.
:-)
So, the question is, where are we going to get the energy to create the hydrogen? From... oil burning electricity generating plants? That would kind of defeat the purpose of switching to hydrogen for our cars, wouldn't it? In fact, it would require more electricity to generate the hyrdogen, which would in require more oil! And if folks say, "build more nuclear plants for electricity generation", I'm sure that's going to go over really well with the environmentalists in California. They'll just love that idea.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hydrogen powered cars, but it seems like we're playing a shell game here, moving the oil from the cars to the electricity generation.
(If my assumptions about generation of hydrogen are wrong, someone please correct me!)
Why not skip the middle man and run our cars on natural gas? It is easier to convert to, safer, and many vehicles already do this. The US is the Saudia Arabia of natural gas
Free cell phone tracking
Hydrogen powered cars?
Dream on!
Let me break down the 5 areas that they say need R&D. I accept that these are the main problem areas. However, consider the alternative, of methanol powered fuel cells.
1. Solve the hydrogen fuel-tank problem.
However you do it, it's more difficult than storing gasoline. With methanol, it's eactly the same problem. Bush should devote $0 to this problem, and instead point to the current solutions for oil.
2. Encourage mass production of fuel cell vehicles.
This one is the same for methanol fuel cell vehicles. But wait! With methonal, the internal combustion engine is also a viable alternative. It's less efficent than a petrol IC engine, at current standard, but that's migigatable (I think petrol IC will probably slightly excel methanol IC). So, you can get methanol into vehicles sooner, meaning the total cost is spread over a longer time. The dual engine technology will assist adoption.
Additionally, methonal fuel cells, all solid state, are working in lab prototypes. This is about the same state as hydrogen fuel cells, so you'd not lose anything by going to methanol over hydrogen, and you'd gain a lot.
3. Convert the nation's fueling infrastructure to hydrogen.
Easier with methanol - it's the same type of problem as gasoline, so use the same type of solution - no real R&D needed here. That's a significant win over hydrogen, and equal with gasoline. The problem of supplying dual fuels is the same w.r.t. hydrogen or methanol.
4. Ramp up hydrogen production.
Methanol is more difficult to manufacture than hydrogen. But... there are two options. The first one, diret chemical synthesis from CO and H2 is very slightly more complex than direct hydrogen production. The other option, ferment it from celulose. All the waste wood / straw can be fermented into methanol. I don't know which would be cheaper - but I do know that it's not possible for one man to manufacture hydrogen on his ranch. A methanol still, on the other hand, is perfectly feasable. Spin that correctly, and there's capital there.
On the whole, however, it's 50/50 methanol / hydrogen.
5. Mount a public campaign to sell the hydrogen economy.
Hindenberg. Doesn't matter what actually happened, the helium industry spun it so well, that it's embeded in peoples minds that hydrogen is unsafe.
Methanol is methylated sprits. I don't think anyone thinks that's more dangerous than gasoline.
So, slight win for methanol, on the safty front.
Overall, I make that two noticable wins for methanol, two slight advantages, and one where it's 50/50.
Postscript: I use methanol, rather than ethanol because ethanol fuel cells are noticalby more difficult (== expensive), and producing methonal from biomass uses wood and other indigestable matter. Generating ethanol requires sugars, i.e. food.
What are really needed for a hydrogen society to work are superconducting materials that superconduct at temperatures achievable in places other than a lab. Wind and solar technology is fine. We could build windmills in remote, but windy places and solar panels in remote, but sunny places. The problem would be shipping that electricity to a hydrogen refinery. That's where superconducting materials would be needed. Then we could generate the power in remote places and ship it cross-country.
blah
Converting a 2-ton gasoline guzzling SUV into a 2-ton hydrogen guzzling SUV doesn't actually save you anything.
You don't find hydrogen lying around in the same way you find oil. Instead, you usually get hydrogen by adding energy to water. (In this respect, hydrogen acts as a carrier for the energy.) But the energy still has to come from somewhere; and the way our economy is currently rigged, that means burning oil.
There are opportunities for savings: you can insist that any plant which burns oil to make hydrogen must re-capture the carbon; that will have an impact on greenhouse gasses, and it is easier to build/maintain/police that equipment than similar equipment built into every automobile, but it also means that the price of hydrogen will be raised by that much.
But there will also be costs: think for a moment the cost of converting all gasoline engines to hydrogen ones, the cost of the infrastructure (fuel stations, repair facilities, industry skillset retraining) changeover, etc.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
While the author of this article makes some excellent points, and a very convincing case, how about this instead: Stop importing oil immediately, Allow the price of domestic oil to roughly quintuple (or whatever the market does with it), and let private industry come up with solutions.
I hate to be the voice of techno-libertarianism here, but it seems like what the author is proposing involves putting all our eggs in one basket. I'd rather see a bunch of different people attack the problem from their own angles, and let the market decide which is the best solution.
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
For all the good that comes of weaning ourselves off of oil, there is a price, and it's one that isn't mentioned very often.
Take a look at where we get our oil from. I'm not talking in terms of politics or culture: I'm talking in terms of economics. For many of the oil-producing nations of the world, oil is the only natural resource they have. The influx of money to those nations has allowed great things to be done in some of these nations. It has, admittedly, also fueled some dictatorships, but even in these cases, the standard of living has risen somewhat.
Take away that inflow of cash, and you utterly decimate the economies of these nations. That's what people forget: it's not just the oil companies that benefit from oil. What do you intend to do when you've plunged some rather large nations back into the poverty that oil had finally allowed them to escape? What do you think they will do? Will terrorism decrease, as the groups see themselves as being finally left alone, or will it increase, in revenge for ruining their economies?
It's a delicate game, politics. Each decision leads to others, and has consequences far greater than can usually be seen at the time the decision is made. This is one of them.
I'm perfectly fine with a fuel-cel-powered vehicle. Sign me up. I'll buy one today...IF you can answer some VERY important questions for me:
When I'm 50 miles from the nearest re-hydrogenating station and I run out of hydrogen, how am I going to get more hydrogen? I can't really hitchhike into town and borrow a gas can now, can I? Would I have to wait for a hydrogen tanker to come fill me up? Or would it be cheaper just to call a tow truck?
At any rate, I can imagine that a "hydrogen can" might be a lot heavier than one of those red plastic gas cans...
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
What's more, even with the best insulation, as much as 4 percent of the liquid evaporates daily, creating pressure that can only be relieved by bleeding off the vapor. As a result, a car left at the airport for two weeks would lose half its fuel. Scientists need to find a way to eliminate or utilize this boil-off.
In the long run, automobile fuel cells themselves might be tied to the grid, making it possible for vehicles to feed power into the system rather than simply consume energy. That is, electrical meters might run backward some of the time. Futurist Amory Lovins envisions a peer-to-peer energy network in which spot power is distributed to users from the nearest source, be it a utility station or a station wagon.
It seems to me that the peer-to-peer grid idea could possibly take care of the car sitting for long periods of time - just burn off some of that extra energy to provide for a more immediate need and credit the energy back to you.
It still doesn't necessarily solve the problem of being "out of gas", but it sure seems more palatable.
Hydrogen is pie in the sky for now.
Instead, we should concentrate on a few other things first, which are immediately achievable, and ultimately more useful, in both the short and long term.
First, we need to get the sulfur out of diesel fuel. I'm taking this first because it's a no-brainer, and the current policy is too little, much too late. US standards for diesel are lower than Europe's, which is why we can't have their terrific, new-generation diesel cars. The average small car can, and does (over there) get 40+ mpg, without hybrid technology. Look at the Jetta Diesel -- it easily beats the Civic Hybrid, with no high-tech fancy stuff. The thing is, that's not even the best of the breed. Plus, if we get the sulfur out of the diesel, we can also clean up our industrial diesel engines considerably, which are the second biggest source of pollution in many areas.
Second, we do need that high-tech fancy stuff -- hybrid cars are terrific. Designs like the Insight/Civic are simply a better way to build a car, for a variety of reasons -- improved electrical systems, etc. The thing is, we need a better internal combustion motor to begin with -- and that's a new-generation diesel. A Civic Hybrid seems great at 45 mpg, but a hypothetical Jetta Diesel Hybrid would probably top 60 mpg. And if you must, SUVs with 40 mpg city, 30 mpg hwy are feasible too.
Third, we need to invest in smart power grids, and distributed power systems. This would allow to hook their solar systems, windmills, natural gas microturbines and fuel cells, and even hybrid cars into the grid, with the meter able to run backward. This would encourage development of clean power systems by eliminating the barrier to becoming a producer. It would drive down costs because of increased supply, and result in a more robust system. It's more efficient because it cuts transmision losses. Distributed power is better than a centralized model in a time of crisis -- what happens if someone bombs Hoover Dam, or other regional facility? Distributed power is better for national security. All it takes is some new switching gear and a computer network to control it all -- why are we not doing this?
Finally, we need to make our whole society more efficient by reducing car-dependent real estate development. It's ridiculous that people accept 50 mile commutes as normal. People should live, work, and shop within a very few miles. Unfortunately, lack of planning or lousy planning and zoning prevents this in many American cities The real solution to oil dependence is getting people out of their cars. Much has been written on this. Do a search on "new urbanism" if you wish.
So there you go -- clean diesel, diesel hybrid cars, and distributed power; plus land use, urban planning, and transportation reform. These are the solutions we have available to us *right now.* There are no huge technical problems to overcome. Hydrogen has huge technical considerations, and even bigger socio-political-economic ones. Sweeping revolution is fun to think about, but never works out in the real world. I say we take the baby steps first.
For sure, the H-economy will come from fossil resources, but the great advantage is location location. Most likely, h-fuel would be made from natural gas, which is much more abundant here at home, ie, both US and Canada have abundant stores.
The economics of pruducing h-fuel any other way are not likely to pan out for a very long time. Likely not until we have vastly superior technology all around.
Point in short, let's get over the hype, realize that we have been using a dirty H-fuel system for decades plus, and that nothing really dramatic will happen.
At least, not just from h-cars.
Ironically the largest reserve of oil is not in Saudi Arabia or Iraq. It's actually north of the border. Yup, you heard it right. Canada has the largest oil reserves in the world in the so called "Alberta oil sands". It's actually oil that soaks the topsoil but its extraction is entirely possible albeit more expensive. It costs about $2.50 to extract a barrel of oil from a traditional oil field whilst it's around $14 to extract the same quantity of oil from Canada's tar sands. Hence they only ramp up production there when oil prices are above $20 a barrel or so.... So there you go, True North, cold, free and filthy rich.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
> The simplest option is gaseous hydrogen. The problem: It takes up a lot of room, so the gas must be compressed, but this requires a tank capable of withstanding high pressure. To carry enough fuel for 400 miles of travel, the tank would need to withstand 10,000 pounds per square inch - 50 times the pressure in a combustion engine's cylinders - and to keep it from bursting in an impact, it would need to tolerate 20,000 pounds per square inch. More research is needed to find materials strong enough to do the job yet light enough to carry and cheap enough to mass-produce.
Simpler than that, no hydrogen needed. If we could build tanks with a 20kpsi capability, we could simply run compressed air through a turbine-style engine and not burn any fuel at all.
Here
http://www.geomar.de/sci_dpmt/umwelt/gas_hydr/
also look at google.
" Formed under conditions of high pressure and low temperature, the gas hydrates slowly decompose when brought to the surface releasing methane gas and water. As an impressive demonstration of their natural gas content, these snow-white 'icecubes' are flamable. "
Unfortunately the small amount of extra power from their solar cells isn't going to be enough to generate an appeciable amount of fuel hydrogen...
Thats problem with adopting hydrogen as fuel--it takes too much energy to create it from water.
The only reason that this is a problem though is because the people looking at it aren't looking at it right. You see, instead of spending billions of dollars trying to reduce the cost of the hydrogen production process, we SHOULD be concentrating on what we already know how to do--simply reduce the cost of the large amounts of power needed in the process.
What's the best way to reduce the cost of electricity you ask? Simple. Harness the power of the atom. The trouble is, while a nuclear power plant is a clean and very powerful energy source when kept within safety guidelines, there are many environmentalists out there who fear the very minute possibility of a nuclear accident (of which only one of any real severity has ever happened, due entirely to the stupidity of the people who built and ran it).
But now we come to another problem; while one VERY good reason for adopting hydrogen power is self-sufficency, hydrogen power is also strongly supported by environmentalists. These very people who support hydrogen power in the interest of helping keep the environment clean are in essence kicking themselves in the face by opposing nuclear power, which is the simplest, cleanest way to produce bulk energy (which not only can make hydrogen power more feasible, thus reducing or eliminating oil dependency, but also by eliminating coal and gas dependency by making older power plants unneccessary).
The moral of the story? Nuclear power can solve all of our fossil fuel problems if only people will give it a real chance.
The SUV craze is about as ironic as you can get.
Here's why:
What do most Americans want in a car? Something that is big (which implies safety), roomy (which implies comfortable), and has a reasonable amount of power (which implies that it is easy to drive). Once upon a time, Americans bought large sedans to satisfy their auto buying needs. How many people owned full sized Chevy Impala's/Ford LTD's during the 1960's-1980's?
However, thanks to CAFE (Coporate Average Fuel Economy) Standards that our government has, you can no longer buy this type of car. To produce this car under CAFE standards, the automaker must produce a fair amount of smaller more fuel efficient cars, which most Americans hate and American auto makers tend to lose money on.
Therefore, in order to satisfy their customers and keep costs down, American auto makers have been trying to get around CAFE for years. One of the more humorous examples was the Cadillac Cimmarron, which was a Chevy Cavalier dressed up in Cadillac trim so Cadillac could make CAFE standards.
SUV's however, do not fall under the same CAFE standards as cars. They are considered trucks. CAFE standards are much lower for trucks than cars. To illustrate the absurdity of this law, a station wagon (car) which got 20 mpg would be worse under CAFE than an SUV that got 15mpg.
With SUV's American auto makers could give their customers big, roomy, cars and not run into trouble with the government. In other words, in trying to raise fuel economy standards, the government has only made them worse. If the market wants more fuel efficient cars, auto makers will provide them or suffer the consequences. If not, then the law hurts both customer and consumer.
(Not to mention that the lighter post CAFE cars are more dangerous. Because of this, and estimated 40,000 people have died because of CAFE. So I say, "No blood for oil - Repeal CAFE!")
This is correct, if we switch all teh internal combustion engines over to hydrogen, we'll still need energy to produce the hydrogen. And yes, at first a lot of that hydrogen might be produced by burning or refining petroleum fuel at plants and then shipping the hydrogen to refueling stations.
This does not mean that hydrogen is useless, or that we should deveop ethanol or methanol vehicles instead, or any of the other alternatives suggested.
Hydrogen is the simplest form in the series of energy carries we've been progressing along. We started out with wood, then moved to coal, then petroleum. Each of those is a hydrocarbon, and as we've progressed up the chain there's been more and more hydrogen and less and less carbon. Each step is more efficient at storing energy than the last, and hydrogen is that last step we can take before moving on to something complety different.
Although we can't find it naturally, hydrogen is relatively easy to produce given another source of energy, and as stated, it's very efficient at storing the energy you put into it. This means that hydrogen makes an ideal energy currency.
A long time ago, before there was money, people used barter to get what they needed. You might trade 1 goat for ten chickens. Some cultures eventually devolped a pseudo-currency where everything would be equated to a certain number of one thing, everything had a certain value in chickens for example. After awhile, minted currency was developed that turned this idea into an abstract form. The money was artifically produced and assigned a certain value, and by using this abstract currency people didn't have to carry chickens around anymore.
Petroleum is a pseudo-currency, like a chicken. We've all agreed that (for the most part) petroleum is the standard, and that's what we use to run our internal combustion engines. You can't toss a couple of logs in your gas tank and have your car work, and most cars aren't happy with having methanol poured in them without some adaptions being made.
Hydrogen actually carries the energy with it, which in some senses makes it a pseudo-currency, but the fact that it can be artifically produced using other sources of energy makes it more like a real currency in my opinion, which makes it very similar to electricity.
No one is particulary concerned that if we run out of coal our computers will stop working because there would be no more electricity. We'd build more hydropower plants and more nuclear power plants, and more people would install solar cells on their houses. There might be a period of changeover, but because electricity is an energy currency we'd be able to adapt quickly. If all of the sudden we ran out of oil however, most people are convinced (with good reason) that it would be a disaster)
However if all inernal combustion engines used hydrogen, another energy currency, then we could handle the issue in the same manner as a lack of coal. Other production methods would ramp up to meed the increased demand, and after a period of minor difficulty, everything would be back to normal.
Similarly, no one worries that if fusion power is developed into a workable form that their TV won't be compatible with it anymore. The electric grid is designed so that any source of power can be hooked in. Likewise, your car wouldn't care where the hydrogen came from. If you want to be extra green and produce your own hydrogen using methanol so you don't have to worry about the enviromental effects of petroleum being used, go ahead, your car won't notice.
Along with this increased versatility the centralized production would bring with it imporved efficiency. Petroleum based internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient, and efforts at improving fuel efficiency have only begun to address that. If the petroleum currently being used at cars was instead being refined into hydrogen at centralized plants, not only could more efficient methods of generating power be used at the refinery, but it would be much easier to deal with the polution at a single point source.
The most important point of hydrogen is the freedom it gives us from a single source of energy. Using hydrogen doesn't mean that we would necessarily stop using petroleum, but it would mean that we _could,_ and to some extent we wouldn't have to deal as much with the messiness inherent in petroleum internal combustion engines. Just like the existance of currency doesn't meant that you have to give up owning chickens, but it does mean that you can if you want, and you don't need to carry them with you when you go to the store anymore.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Can anybody tell me why we can't just run on an alcohol? If it's too weak, then why not add low levels of nitro[m]ethane to correct?
The alcohol can be readily created from crop surplus. Is nitromethane and other power boosters that expensive? Granted, the oil companies have nothing to gain from this. But the alcohol can be made from just about any half asses crop.
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
I think that electric cars can be very efficient and clean but a major problem exists. Imagine that everyone is using an electric car. Where do we get all the electricity? We are currently building new coal power plants just to keep with demand for electricity that does not include power consumption by milions of electric cars...
I like how all of these articles that demand a hydrogen economy use the threat of Middle Eastern extremism and terrorism as a reasoning for switching completely from fossil fuels to hydrogen. Do they really think that replacing all of the power plants around us with nuclear ones and then doubling them will make us safer? Or that any local initiative to build two or three new nuclear power plants at a time wouldn't be met with enormous local grass roots resistance?
Most of your facts as presented throughout this thread are, lets say "incomplete".
First: Large expensive semicustom stationary hydrocarbon to hydrogen convertors will always have at least twice the efficiency of small inexpensive mass-produced mobile hydrocarbon engines. Additionaly, inspection and maintainace of them will be far far far more efficent.
Second: The power densities that are possible using hydrogen are magnatudes greater then those possible with chemical batteries. This is taking into account the mechinisms used for storage.
Third: Electricity distribution is ridiculously wastfull. Even current leaky hydrogen transportation techniques would be better then anything possible with electricity.
Fourth: Something the artical completely miss is agricultural solutions. Agriculture produces a lot of wast. There are a number of cool techniques for converting this wast into hydrogen. The most well known being the steam reforming mentioned in the artical. But there are even cooler techniques. The nice thing about ag solutions, is that they do not increase atmospheric CO2 or water.
Let's say the article isn't puffing hydrogen station retooling and it costs $30k per station. Take the number of highway miles in the US and divide by 300. That's the number of hydrogen stations needed to ensure that you'll get from one fill station to the next if you decide to take a national trip. After some rough calculations that's about 650 filling stations at a cost of 19.5M USD. That's a far cry from the 5 Billion laid out in the article (0.39%). Yes, the article authors are right. It's easy to waste govt. money.
Most of the filling stations will switch over on their own once a skeleton infrastructure is put in. From the filling station owner's perspective, spending the 30k has to get him some measure of return. If he's the only fill station around for a hundred miles, he knows that every hydrogen car driving by will top off with him. If everybody's got a hydrogen pump, that pump needs to generate enough revenue to displace one of his gasoline pumps.
If he's going into a market with only 650 national competitors with maybe 1 or 2 local ones, it makes sense and people will start to go for it. As the number of hydrogen cars rises, more will switch over because while the number of competitors is rising, the number of hydrogen car visits is too.
Past a certain point, gasoline infrastructure will start to go away as we all get our stuff (lawn mowers, cars, generators) working on hydrogen. Eventually we'll have a few bitter old timers wailing about having to trek far to get some gasoline.
I don't have the numbers with me but it wasn't hard to show that it takes a lot of wind to generate a single GGE (gallon of gasoline equivalent) of hydrogen. However, considering the vast subsidies we pay for oil (not even counting military and environmental expenses), it seems clear that there is a lot of money to be made.
Regarding the "chicken and egg" problem of "who wants to buy a hydrogen car if there are no hydrogen stations" and "who wants to build hydrogen stations if there are no hydrogen cars", a strategy had occurred to me. Begin the program by providing energy to businesses and cities to run stuff other than cars. There's no reason you couldn't use hydrogen to generate the electricity used in a factory or city water plant. From the brief economic analysis I did it looked feasible to locate fuel cells at the desination (where the electricity is needed) and deliver & store the hydrogen there.
The customer could remain on the power grid to provide backup power in case there was a hydrogen deliver problem (it's new so there will be problems. If they have excess generating capacity there's no reason they couldn't sell power back into the grid.
Using hydrogen in this way would reduce the company's or city's pollution output and might make them eligible for pollution credits (if the US ever decides to join the Kyoto Protocol or something similar).
Selling hydrogen to individual customers with large demand and few & fixed locations would provide a simpler business model as hydrogen production is getting started. As such producers/distributors proliferate, setting up H2-gas stations will be more feasible.
If we don't do it soon in the US then Europe or someone else will do it first and we'll miss out on the economic advantages of controlling market direction.
Another DOE page
Hmm, that liberal mind of yours is in overdrive, I see.
Perhaps the reason for war is not a business decision, not strictly for oil, not religous, and not idiological... Maybe, just maybe, the intelligence community has information that we are not privy too. Maybe, just maybe, the president has access to intelligence that we don't. Maybe, just maybe, it is not in the long-term interest of world peace to let a violent dictator thas has attacked Iran and Kuwait and killed thousands of its own citizens keep weapons of mass destruction.
The economic and, more importantly, political cost of this war is huge. Bush has taken a huge hit in the polls and the United States' political capital in the world is all but spent, and then some. If Bush is spending that economic and political capital, there's a reason. And, despite the beliefs of cynical liberals who believe Bush is just interested in oil, that's simply not the most logical or realistic answer.
Why everyone thinks they must go beyond the stated goals to determine the "real motive" behind the president is beyond me. Cynical liberals and anti-oil fanatics will say I'm naive when in reality they are simply being illogical. When you do the math and analyze the situation there is really only one explanation for all the effort being made on Iraq: Saddam is a dangerous dictator which intelligence information indicates is a threat to the world and to the United States. No other explanation, regardless of how cynical you are, makes sense.
Personally I'm not 100% in favor of the war. I'm not convinced that it's necessary right now. But the last 12 years have shown us that Iraq is NOT going to disarm--after 12 years what good is another week, month or year? If they wanted to disarm, they would have. Accepting that logic the question is WHEN do you take action? We have hundreds of thousands of troops over there now which is costing big money to support. The economy doesn't want to improve until the Iraq question is resolved. And it's going to start getting hot next month and will remain hot for a good 6 months.
My assumption--and I don't believe it's naive--is that the president has information that we don't. I believe he is right in that Iraq does not plan to disarm--this is based on the last 12 years as well as their (in)action since November when 1441 was passed. If we know something about their capabilities and they're not going to disarm, the time to do the work is now. So it's not too hot, we don't have to keep paying to keep troops deployed, the economy can start recovering immediately, and we can finally let France resume its typical importance in world affairs--zero.
There are no hydrogen "free lunches" sitting out there waiting for us to take advantage of them. The problem is that most of the sources of hydrogen take more energy to get hydrogen from than they provide in energy output from burning the hydrogen (or reacting it in a fuel cell).
There are no free lunches waiting, but you can build a system to get free lunches. Sure, solar is expensivce to build, and low yield, but if you build enough of it, can that power used to extract hydrogen from water? Once you get it going, it's free. You put no energy in, you just use the sun. And you can augment the unstable solar enegergy from teh sun with traditional electricity from power plants.
As for the "free lunch" of the fossil fuels, its not free. We're not paying for it, though. The dinosaurs did. And you can be damn sure it took a lot more energy to get those fossil fuels where they are today then we will ever get out of them.
The trouble with fossil fuels is the circuit to create them is HUGE! It ges back millions of years to solar energy power plants, some plants being eaten, those animals dying, being compacted and cooked in the crust, and eventually drilled and pumped up by us. Just because the lunch was paid for millions of years ago doesn't mean it was free.
..yes 1.2 billion for reasearch to elad the world, and another 30 billion to Turkey to warmonger.
Priorities. Its funny, as we look to was with Iraq, how much more good could be accomplished with the money we are about to waste so Bush can go and play with his toys in his little sandbox.
Nice round numbers, all multiples of $5 billion, and all numbers that are well short of anything resembling a reasonable amount to start making a dent in the current system.
I googled up this recent article that says OPEC is producing 24.5 million barrels of oil a day. At $40 a barrel, that's $980 million a day spent on oil around the world. Let's say we take a quarter of that into the US (it's more, iirc). That's a quarter billion a day in oil alone, without touching infrastructure, etc.
$100 billion is going to "... shift the balance of power from foreign oil producers to US energy consumers within a decade"?? Forget it. "The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling"?? Get the ball rolling? The authors of this article want station owners to install something for which there's zero consumer demand -- and then only have the government subsidize enough to get the ball rolling?
How much is the government going to pay to give everyone a car that uses this new fuel? And once everyone's driving, what is the government going to do about all the other products that use petroleum? Cars in driveways are just the beginning, and filling stations aren't even that.
These numbers might sound big to us individually, but taken in context they are a drop in the bucket. If switching from oil to hydrogen was that easy, we'd've done it long ago.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
And how exactly is a country thousands of miles away with no intercontinental missiles and no ties to domestic terrorism a threat to the United States? Practically all of the world (except for Britain and the US) see no impetus to invade Iraq; are you saying that they are the ones that are delusional and that Dubya is the only one who is not? I think not. The US firmly believes in the concept of trial by jury -- it takes a majority decision to determine guilt. But Bush doesn't care what anyone else thinks. He wants to skip the jury and convict anyway. Why don't our country's internal values apply to how we conduct ourselves in world affairs? That's just sad.
Okay, let's assume that Bush & Co. know something we don't. I agree it's the only semi-logical explanation for what would otherwise be the most incomprehensible (or at least idiotic) behavior a US administration has ever displayed. I'll even go so far as to say that we can't know this information, for security reasons. But you can bet that the leaders of our allies would be made privy to this information; it is only logical that we would share any compelling information with them, if only to expedite matters.
So why are countries such as France, Germany, Russia, etc. not happily falling in line behind us? Simple, there is no compelling evidence of WMD. Without that, you're left with a weak and simultaneously dangerous argument that we must strike at a country which is not a threat to the US preemptively (historically unheard of) and without the once strong support of world public opinion (boy did we squander that), risking high numbers of civilian casualties, to ensure that they never can become a threat to us. Isn't that just a tad bit cart-before-the-horse? There's a word for it: aggressor. Like it or not, that defines US if we attack preemptively.
Even now, with all of the bad feelings flying around, I believe we could instantly gain the support of the world if we could show that a real threat existed and that war was absolutely necessary. I wouldn't hold your breath, unless inspections are given a legitimate chance.