Articles by Joseph Romm

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed

The ChiPs are down for the hydrogen highway cul de sac -- literally. The future Ponches and Jons of the California Highway Patrol won't be policing the hydrogen highway.

The false hope of a hydrogen economy is on its death bed. This dream was embraced and elevated by President Bush, who said in his January 2003 State of the Union address:

With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free.

I have explained at length many times why the first car of child born in 2003 -- or the last car, for that matter -- will not be a hydrogen fuel cell car, most notably in my best selling book, The Hype About Hydrogen [Note to a picky semantic people: The book was not a best seller, but it was the best-selling of all of my books]. Maybe my best (and certainly my most widely read) paper available online [PDF] is "The car and fuel of the future," published by Energy Policy back in 2005. It is still worth reading if you want to understand why plug in hybrids, not hydrogen fuel cell cars, are the car of the (near) future.

The last vestiges of a hydrogen economy are collapsing. First, we had Honda's new FCX Clarity, which the company optimistically billed as "the world's first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production." If so, the Clarity has demonstrated to the world how distant the whole enterprise is (see here, here and here).

Now Greenwire ($ub. req'd) has a long story on the collapse of another one of the few remaining pieces of the dream, "Has Schwarzenegger's hydrogen highway gone bust?" excerpted below:

Pickens: 'You don't want to turn it over to the greenies'

The billionaire oilman and Swift-boat-smear funder T. Boone Pickens is a hard man for anyone to like these days.

His traditional political allies -- rabid conservatives, fossil fuel companies -- could not possibly be more opposed to his current agenda of pushing clean energy, especially a massive ramp up of wind power (see here and here).

Yet he really doesn't try that hard to reach out to progressives who might be his allies, as indicated by the headline quote from his talk at the Mayflower Hotel ballroom in DC yesterday, reported in "The Beautiful Wind of T. Boone Pickens," by snarky Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Still, his general lack of interest in a progressive agenda should be a surprise to no one (see here).

I do take exception with Milbank's brief foray into energy policy:

But while there are quibbles over the particulars, parts of the Pickens Plan are -- or should be -- uncontroversial: a new transmission grid to move renewable power, better energy efficiency, and using natural gas as a "bridge" fuel to power trucks and fleet vehicles until alternatives become more plentiful.

I don't see why using natural gas as a transportation fuel on the scale Pickens wants "should be uncontroversial."

What is the most unsustainable piece of junk you own?

An unusually unsustainable device that I own (see below).

I'm hoping to expand on the Ponzi scheme discussion in my next Salon piece. So I'm gathering examples of unsustainability at every scale.

In asking what is the most unsustainable piece of crap junk you own, I wasn't really thinking private jet or Hummer, not that I think any of you own that uber-unsustainable stuff.

Nor was I thinking of an electric dryer, since most people (in this country) own that laborsaving device. But that does get us closer to the key question, though: How many of the 10 billion people on the planet post-2050 will be using large amounts of electricity for things that are easily done without electricity -- once we have moved beyond desperation and are actually in the midst of the climate catastrophe.

By junk I was thinking of something closer to a relatively superfluous device that symbolizes the Ponzi scheme we have created. What comes to mind at the moderate cost level is a leaf blower and even a Segway (sorry, Dean Kamen -- your genius is really needed urgently for sustainability, not for electrifying human walking, even if many people find some value in that). I don't own either of those, but I do own a treadmill and a 50-inch flat panel TV (but hey it is Energy Star), which are close to what I have in mind in this post.

And I'd also be interested in hearing about any of the truly pointless low-cost stuff you have, like an electric pencil sharpener. Indeed, what really got me thinking about all this yesterday was my use of a gadget (pictured above) whose pointlessness and unsustainability simply staggers the imagination:

MIT's uber-hypocritical anti-scientific scientist went from denial to defamation

As an alum, I was happily surprised when a few weeks ago a senior MIT professor directed me to major study by a dozen leading experts associated with their Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change that made clear MIT had joined the climate realists.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just doubled its previous (2003) projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C. Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm. Human civilization as we know it could not survive such warming, such concentrations (see likely impacts here).

But there is one MIT professor who has remained blind to the remarkable strengthening of our understanding of climate science in the past 2 years -- Richard Lindzen. A general debunking of Lindzen's popular disinformation tracts can be found on RealClimate here.

At the Heartland conference of climate-change deniers that began Sunday in New York, however, Lindzen went from denial to defamation as he smeared the reputation of one of the greatest living climate scientists, Wallace Broecker.

Before discussing that indefensible and hypocritical smear, it is worth noting that the Heartland conference is so extreme that even "moderate" deniers, like John Christy won't go, as Andy Revkin reports:

John R. Christy ... said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for "guilt by association."

Now when a guy who has been as wrong for as long as Christy has (see here) is afraid his reputation will be harmed by attending your conference, you are way, way out there!

And indeed, Lindzen chose to abandon what little is left of his professional reputation, as the astonishing report on the conference from Examiner.com makes clear: