52 comments on Weekend Energy Listening: The H2 Economy vs the Electron Economy
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What an intimidating display of stupidity congenial to fossil fuel tax revenues, a seven-word phrase that now-a-days is abbreviated as "green". The first really wrong thing is this:
The suggestion that nature cannot absorb radioactive waste is false. Our year-2108 descendants will inherit lands in which, buried a kilometre deep or less, are 250 *billion* watts of radioactivity -- and this may include, halfway down or a little further, our radioactive legacy to them, now approaching 0.3 billion year-2108 watts, in sturdy containers.
Failure of those containers would present the same sort of threat of radioactive contamination of the land above as the threat from saltshakers sunk in the Titanic, should they break, of salting the oceans above. In other words, the containers' failure would be harmless; more shortly, they would be failsafe.
CO2 and its evil cousin CO are more of a problem. Both have actually harmed people, and carbon monoxide does so frequently enough that it probably will kill someone today. Dividing fossil fuel government revenues by the count of such fossil-fuel-related deaths yields a per-death revenue of a few tens of millions of dollars.
Nature's accustomed CO2 absorption mechanisms can be sped up by us, and the money cost of providing this help will be large in absolute terms, but not as large as the public revenues that are already associated with CO2 production, nor even as large as the above-linked subset of those revenues. Governments are collecting an ash-pickup fee that is plenty big enough to pay for the ash pickup, but spending it in other ways that government personnel find more pleasant.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
A little harsh and out of context.
He was applying the definition of sustainability as the Prussian's used it to our current energy production. Their time frame was 2 harvesting periods. Yours seems to be quite a bit longer.
Not too harsh and definitely not out of context.
If the author understands H2 energy and plug-in hybrids, he should not speak on subject which even most climate scientists do not understand. Doing so only casts shadow of doubt on his testimony.
CO2 and its evil cousin CO are more of a problem. Both have actually harmed people.
It should be noted, that CO2 probably saved today many lives, perhaps up to 7 billion, effectively anyone who needs to eat to survive. Out of the 3 substances most essential to daily life, namely O2, H2O, CO2, the CO2 is the most benign as harmful substance. While O2 is responsible for all fires and H2O for all floods and drownings, harms caused by CO2 are anecdotal.
Besides enabling daily activities ( by becoming our food), CO2 also saves lives by contributing to Greenhouse Effect, although such contribution is much smaller than from H2O and Oxygen. Unfortunately, no feasible increase in CO2 can increase GHE warming enough, so that cold deaths diminish to the level of heat deaths - or anywhere near.
And a message to the CO2 revenue collecting governments, wanna-be governments and irresponsible, greedy CO2 regulators:
--------------= HANDS OFF OUR AIR ! =---------------