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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bearcatbob who wrote (25380)	5/24/2004 10:55:23 PM
From: Rock_nj	Respond to of 81568

Fair enough. I do think hydrogen might be a bit overblown, but it's not as overblown as some people say. It's become a bit of a cliche to say hydrogen is overblown. The thing that's really appealing about hydrogen to me is that there are very clean ways of producing it. Even today, you could have solar cells on your roof that work all day to break your tap water down into hydrogen (via electrolysis), store it on-site, run your heating and electricity needs for the night on it via a hydrogen furnace and fuel cell for electricty, then fill up your fuel cell or hydrogen car in the morning and drive off to work. That's not really all that pie-in-the-sky. In fact, all the technology you'd need to do just that is currently available, but is still rather costly. Once the costs come down, and the price of oil continues to rise, there will be a day where we could really have a hydrogen economy. The end of the oil age is on the horizon. A rational national energy policy would be to persue something else in earnest like hydrogen. Wind is now cost competive with other forms of electricity production. As far as conserving enough energy to kick our ME oil habit. I believe the technology is also availble today to do just that. It's a matter of will and we certainly don't have that. A rational energy policy would have been to ensure after the first Gulf War that we never fight another war for oil, by making our economy so efficient that ME oil was essentially irrelevent. Perhaps that was a pipe dream in 1991 (but one worth persuing nontheless). But, now it can be done with existing and emerging technologies. However, we have no incentive to really do so. Do the oil and arms industry want us to persue such enlightened policies? Hell no. End their gravy train?!? I think not! All I can say is, I went on a job interview in 1996 and was literally laughed out of the room by the interviewer, an older gentlemen, when I showed him my writing sample regarding nanotechnology. He called it science fiction. He wanted to know why I was wasting my time with such nonsense. Well, if he's still alive today, I'm sure he'd be surprised to learn that nanotechnology is now mainstream science, HP has a huge nanotech research project, the Bush Admin just appropriated bIllions for nanotech research, and big players on Wall Street are calling it the next big technology. Just an example how in eight short years something can go from being pie-in-the-sky to mainstream. The same might happen to oil and hydrogen over the next decade. If we conversed in 2014, we might be talking about the peak of oil in the first decade of 2000 and how it's amazing how many non-oil choices we now have to heat and provide energy for our home and run our car. Look at how quickly the Internet emerged. When I was in high school in 1986, something like the Internet was certainly pie-in-the-sky. Certainly the technology was emerging, but noone imagined putting it all together in this fashion. The same could be said about some of the emerging alt.energy technologies, they will someday seem so routine, people will wonder why they were ever considered alternative or pie-in-the-sky.