Common sense at last...
Many of Zubrin's comments are spot-on and the rest are worth considering:
The hydrogen economy is just wishful thinking propogated by airhead green politicians and naive or brown-nosed engineers. At best it's a poor way of distributing and storing energy very temporarily. Would you tolerate a fuel tank that emptied itself as soon as it got warm?
We do need to distribute and store energy but I'd vote for an oil, like diesel, rather than an alchohol: easier to handle, higher energy density, less tempting to drink and more efficient to use in engines. An optimised diesel or HCCI engine is as efficient as a hydrogen fuel cell.
The only free source of energy we have is the sun and the only practical energy storage economy is the carbon cycle. Carbon and hydrocarbons are sunshine energy stored by plants. They're not poisonous in themselves, but pumping and digging up too much of yesterday's sunshine is causing our problems.
I don't know that the Saudi Royals are financing all terrorism but it's worth asking what they do with such mindbending amounts of cash when their religion bans them from earning interest from it. It certainly doesn't seem to be benefiting the average arab or muslim.!
That leaves only the question of where you get your energy from:- how do you trap the sun's energy and do you need nuclear. With so much of the world's surface being desert, including most of the world's oceans which are unproductive 'wet desert' the answer is pretty obvious.
As usual the probllem is political, but with the Kremlin now starting to flex it's 'oil muscles' we might have a burr under the backside of the US government that could cause action.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
