Senator John McCain on Monday proposed the creation of a $300 million prize for anyone who developed breakthrough car-battery technology and he recommended greater tax incentives for buyers of nonpolluting autos, saying that only a combination of increased oil production, conservation measures and ingenuity could ease the fuel crisis and slow global warming.
I don’t know the details, or how McCain will pay for it. What I do know is that it’s better in the hands of private industry. $300 million is a big incentive – a buck per citizen. I love X-Prize style ideas. Especially since it would probably cost the government about $300 billion to do it (probably a lowball estimate.)
I still hope the bastard loses, however.
srv
What happens when Japan or China win it?
LarryB
It’s a moot point since a Republican administration would never move on such an idea. GA hot air, that’s all it is.
Andrew
It’s a good idea if and only if the wording of the prize is written correctly. I don’t believe there will be much in the way of breakthroughs in battery technology. Lithium Polymer is probably about as good as we are going to get for some time. Any progress is going to be on the manufacturing side and not the science side.
I’m much more bullish on small ethanol/methanol fuel cells or super capacitors.
MattM
$300 million is probably a drop in the bucket of what said battery improvement would be worth (read the new Atlantic piece on the Chevy Volt). So the incentive is already there, reducing this to pure PR.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Why?
Dreggas
I will dig around for it but there is already a battery coming out that does just what the supposed point of this “prize” is. However no one would pay 60k for a compact car.
Andrew
Shorter John McCain: I have no idea about anything, especially energy policy. Here’s some money!
jrg
Honda generating almost $95 billion in revenue in fiscal 2007. If you really think that $300 million is going to make any kind of difference in the long term, you’re smoking crack.
Most of the technology we need, we already have. The problem is that gas is not expensive enough for these products to go mass market. That’s changing, and will continue to change.
This “X prize” is the worst kind of pandering. McCain just wants to look like he’s doing something, because he has no other plan to deal with the energy crisis.
xyzzy
What MattM said. Everyone already knows that they’re in for enormous payback if they can make a better battery, and billions in R&D are already being spent on the problem. McCain’s $300 mil suggestion is just political posturing, and it won’t change a thing.
Andrew
jrg,
It’s more a chicken/egg sort of thing. Lithium Polymer batteries would make plugin hybrids feasible for 90% of the drivers out there. Unfortunately they are expensive. They won’t stop being expensive until we ramp up production, but no one can sell a car with them until the production cost comes down.
Keith
There are more improvements to be had there. I read an article several months ago regarding a breakthough in that area where researchers were able to figure out a way to replace carbon nanotubes (they store lithium ions and is what A123 uses) with silicon, which should theoretically store the most ions of the various elemental possibilities. The problem with silicon has been that when the structures absorb ions and release them, they become brittle and break, but the new process got around the issue.
In terms of a lightweight battery, lithium is pretty darn good-to-great, but within that realm of battery, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
I would like to see a more in-depth definition of “leapfrog”, though. And I do hope this prize goes towards the first to bring the technology to mass market as opposed to creating it in a lab while planning its release in 2020.
Dreggas
Riddle me this Michael, what is the difference between the gov’t awarding a 300 million dollar prize for someone who comes up with the technology vs. taking the same 300 million and investing in the research to come up with the technology?
I mean seriously, this is what the whole idea is behind federal grants for scientific research, something this administration has made into a laughing stock given that they believe ID is “scientific” but under responsible administrations we made great gains in tech with public investment. Oh sure offering a 300 million prize is quite nice but given the investment required in just doing the research it would probably end up a wash.
Remember the point of the X-prize was not to help make anything better, it was a private offer of 10 million from a ridiculously rich individual to anyone who could come up with a spaceship that could be used for private space tourism. It was not really for solving a problem that is very real and faced by the entire country.
DFD
I am offering an X-prize to whomever brings me a tuna salad sandwich.
BFR
This sounds like a great idea – throw a bunch of money hoping technology will solve our problems but god forbid we spend another dime supporting Amtrak or public transit programs.
It reminds me of the Newt Gingrich proposal for the prize to whomever built a 100mpg car. Makes for a good press release but totally lacking in any thoughtfulness.
John Cole
The thing that most conservatives don’t want to admit is that government programs and government spending led to the devleopment of large numbers of the “innovations” that private corporations adopt for use.
The thing many liberals don’t want to admit is that much of that government spending is in the sphere of the defense budget.
Andrew
The difference is that with a prize you hope to con a bunch of people into spending something like $300 million each in a race to see who will recoup their costs.
This works well when it’s a bunch of rich, egocentric assholes racing each other around the world or into space and have money to burn, but not so much when it’s multinational corporations who have lots of risk assessors and are already hemorrhaging money.
Andrew
Keith,
There may be some more incremental improvements to be had past Lithium Polymer. The problem is we can’t even make those cheap yet, anything more exotic is also more expensive to produce. Battery/Capacitor technology is already good enough. The problem is that it’s not good enough at a price point that makes it effective.
Rick Taylor
Uhh, actually we’re quite happy to admit that, John. Just think if half of the money spent on defense was spent directly on research of alternative energy instead of hoping for spin offs.
Andrew
I know very few liberals who hate DARPA and DOE for funding basic research.
Those research budgets are a fraction of the production costs of boondoggles like the F-22 and ABM systems.
Stevenovitch
Seriously, send it off to private industry, I can’t remember the last time a publicly funded research team gave us anything useful, and as you all know, private industry never ever tries to monetize their R&D failures by lying to everyone about the results. Hell, even pharmaceutical companies never ever use R&D costs as an excuse to release drugs that end up killing people. /snark
Random Asshole
Please change the title. You left me with a disturbing mental image.
Big E
Why wait? just give it to Honda and have the hydrogen ‘gas stations’ set up everywhere, and ramp up production on their new hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle …… already waiting to go…
( and NO, I don’t work for Honda )
jake
Private industry, private funding.
McCane is full of shit once again but he’ll probably deny that he said any such thing in a couple of hours.
Xenos
Stupid gimmick.
srv
And WTF is this technology/science posting? Didn’t Tim F. get a PhD or something? How about some science?
wasabi gasp
Isn’t that less than the cost of one day in Iraq? Seems like small potatoes thrown at a tiny part of a huge problem. But, it mostly seems like a cheap ploy. Easily topped.
Lets just line up all the candidates in front of an auctioneer: “Three hundred million, now 4, now 4, will you give me 4? Four hundred million, now 5, now 5, will you give me 5?”
jrg
Which is why fleet vehicles (like the cars and trucks of the USPS) are such an important beachhead for these new technologies. Using the power of the government as a consumer makes a lot more sense than some sort of X-prize.
This is not a trip to the moon, the car market is well established. The incentives are already there (as has been pointed out).
southpaw
What MattM said.
If you save the world, I shall give you ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
HyperIon
the government could give me a tax break to encourage my purchase of said vehicle. but that would be wrong because
RSA
Didn’t we discuss the stupidity of prizes for research findings in a previous thread? Sure, it’s fine for some problems in mathematics and other areas that no one might work on otherwise (e.g., Fermat’s last theorem). Otherwise you’re offering to set aside a pot of money that might be paying for researchers’ time and saying, “Okay, you only get paid if you produce such and such a result.” I’d rather see $300 million going to specialized new programs in the NSF or DOE budgets.
Dreggas
The sickening thing is you can get a tax break for an SUV or Grotesquely large pickup truck….
Zifnab
I’m thinking about it and I’m horrified. Think of ethanol initiatives and hydrogen powered cars and liquefied coal and all the other alternative energy ideas that have basically flopped. Now think of all those bad ideas with $250 billion a year in earmarks and subsidies and dozens of Congressmen squealing like stuck pigs if you try to cut funding by a penny.
There are some situations in which smaller government really is better government. I’m all for government research grants and higher education funding within the bounds of reason. But the military budget is bat-shit insane and well past the scope of reason. Nothing should receive that much money. All it produces is epic amounts of waste.
Still, at the end of the day it isn’t about research but about leadership. Let’s assume McCain gets his $300 million dollar car battery. Who’s going to put it in my car? Ford? Chevy? GM? Are we going to have to ship the $300 million idea overseas so Toyota or BMW can make the car for us? Does the car battery come with a decent car chase, or do we get saddled with another tiny box on wheels tricked out with exploding Firestone tires and a cheap fiberglass frame?
You’ll have to forgive my incredulity.
Bloix
Prizes work to encourage invention for things that (a) don’t require heavy investment and instead require the concentrated intellectual power from one or a few individuals and (b) don’t appear to have any near-term financial payoff. If (a) doesn’t apply, no one will fund the competitors and you need grant funding. If (b) doesn’t apply, the market will provide the funding. In this case, neither (a) nor (b) apply.
Dreggas
Actually Zif, the fuel cell Idea is a good one, maybe they should take the 300 mil and open a ton of hydrogen fueling stations. One thing about it that did strike me though is I wonder what the effect on the planet would be if we were to replace every car on the planet with hydrogen powered ones that, as honda claims their’s does, emits nothing but water vapor.
The humidity levels would rise I am sure (see a so-cal freeway at rush hour with every car pumping out water vapor). I am wondering if that one would backfire as well.
Xenos
And water vapor is a greenhouse gas! Oh Noes!
Just Some Fuckhead
John McCain lost me completely when he phrased it as a “nefangled kind of leyden jar for the horseless carriage”.
Brachiator
$300 million wouldn’t even be a drop in the bucket toward the cost of establishing hydrogen fueling stations.
This is a great point. One of the stupidest beliefs of the magical alternative fuel crowd is that there is such a thing as a “clean” fuel. I don’t think that anyone has attempted to calculate the amount of water vapor that would be emitted by large numbers of vehicles during rush hour or the potential environmental impact.
Or whether large concentrations of water vapor auto exhaust would contribute to global warming. It always stops with “I like water. Water must therefore be clean.”
I’ve also heard some Cal Tech scientists claim that escaping hydrogen (from imperfect seals when fueling autos) could have devastating effects on the atmosphere.
Tom Ames
Anyone else see the contradiction in this? As in “we need increased oil production to help slow global warming”?
Dreamer
If memory serves there are some pretty good battery technologies already available, there’s no particular reason to pick that issues alone to offer a prize on. Well, there is, because he’s just pandering (battery = electric car = teh greenz). This will be as much detail as he’ll give on the ‘pledge’, he’ll re-use it until he is confident that the perception has formed. Just like on campaign reform and ethics.
As for public funding of technology research? A lot of useful R&D goes on with full or partial public funding, quite often a private company is allowed to take the technology and commercialise it at the end without having to pay a return on the grant. Medical research is a particularly big area, which is why it is laughable when the drug companies whine about their R&D costs and how they need to make a return on their investments…even as those are massively subsidised in the first place, while they generate profits.
Still, alternative fuel/cars are an interesting area to watch… very instructive. More often than not the ideas of interest to the industry (either car manufacturers or fuel companies) are pie-in-the-sky (long development time that gives them a reason to never implement it) or allow them to maintain total control (hydrogen). I say hydrogen because, unlike bio-fuels or electricity, it would require a centralised distribution system… funnily enough like we already have. The energy savings aren’t particulaly brilliant either, given the production, transport and energy efficiencies, you have to put in a lot more energy than you get out. Then there’s the storage issues, hydrogen is no more explosive than common methane, but it does have a nice little effect where it degrades its container…
Zifnab
Yeah, you joke about that. Then imagine every car in America putting out a fuckton of water vapor from engine tanks. If you told some scientist a 100 years ago that CO2 emissions would outrank mercury and sulfur as a serious environmental concern, he’d have laughed his ass off.
Cars, factories, lawn mowers, etc etc. What’s the old Benjamin Franklin quote? Everything in moderation, nothing to excess?
It’s fundamentally a good idea, but it has been handled abysmally in practice. Too much hype, not enough actual development of the idea. The car companies wanted to just roll out big ‘ole SUVs and line people up at hydrogen pumps. But the energy industry never got behind it. $300 million doesn’t give us the hydrogen collection or distribution system we’d need. We would need comprehensive reforms to replace one greenhouse gas emitting system with another.
I’m ultimately a big fan of battery powered cars that use solar, wind, and tidal power to generate the electricity needed. We’ve got an electrical grid in place that we can simply expand upon. We’ve got battery technology that has made a great deal of progress in the lab. All we need is an incentive to ditch our gas-chugging cars.
At this point, we’re over the cliff. Gas prices are rising and will continue rising for the foreseeable future. Hybrid and electric vehicles are growing in popularity. The industry is taking care of itself. We really don’t need government stepping in to throw money around.
What we do need is an incentive for people who wouldn’t be able to afford flipping out their old gas guzzlers to buy new efficient vehicles. But giving tax credits to fuel efficient cars just means sending all our money to China, India, and Japan.
What we truly, truly need is a responsible and reliable automotive industry. And to get one of those, we need to stop handling one of our flagship industries with kid gloves.
The Moar You Know
I’ll go one further than the Monkey: the notion that private enterprise is somehow better than the government at doing anything is absolute crap, promulgated by the same people who bought you “drown the government in the bathtub” – which was their end-goal all along.
I’ll give an example: People love citing Burt Rutan’s work with SpaceShipOne as being some sort of triumph of private enterprise, but it was nothing of the sort. Rutan would still be sitting on the ground without NACA’s pioneering work on supersonic flight and wing design, research no private enterprise could have ever done as it generated no revenue or profit.
Taking ideas and turning them into profit is the baliwick of private enterprise. Doing basic R&D is usually best left to someone who doesn’t have a profit target to meet.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Off topic, but Mark Green just pantsed Ron Christie on Hardball with Mike Barnicle concerning Obama’s and McCain’s “flip-flops.”
Green was a strong Hillary supporter but he just provided a clinic to Democrats on how to real off the issues he wanted to raise concerning McCain. Christie left the segment even more cross-eyed than usual.
Barnicle looked like enjoyed the mugging.
paradox
Nothing like politcs to cheer a guy up.
distributorcap
you gotta have a gimmick when you have NOTHING else
Dennis - SGMM
It takes X amount of energy to move your car down the road. X can be expressed in horsepower or kilowatts, it doesn’t matter. Take out gasoline and that energy still has to come from somewhere. Right now, the grid here in Southern California is straining because of a heat wave. The load from charging electric cars, even in off-peak hours, would black us out. Need more electricity and where will that come from?
4tehlulz
Because he’ll steal it for his next column.
Headache
They already have these kinds of ‘prizes’. They’re called SBIR programs. The kind of programs that get cut when small government conservatives get elected to office promising to cut government waste. And yes, many of them are awarded for programs relating to military research.
sidereal
No worries. Obama can make him Secretary of Prizes.
Tlaloc
Very true, of course saying that historically innovation has been driven by military projects is not the same as saying that it can only be driven by military spending. Any difficult technical issue we wanted to throw money at would generate similar results. Witness the space program. While conducted in part to show up the Soviets (or catch up at the beginning) it wasn’t not really military, and it resulted in huge dividends.
The internet may have come from DARPA but it didn’t have to.
As for Michael D’s contention that private industry will do a better job: uh yeah right. The X prize was a joke. The apollo program cost something like 135 billion in inflation adjusted dollars. For that cash they developed the technology and infrastructure to go to the moon and back repeatedly. The X prize of 10 million, 40 years later managed to get to orbit. Once. Whoopdee fucking doo.
When you are forty years behind Soviet technology I don’t think you get to brag a whole lot.
prufrock
Well, let’s try a back of the envelope calculation here. The Honda Clarity claims 270 miles per tank of hydrogen. It has a 4.1 kg tank. Let’s say that the average car travels 50 miles per day. That’s 6.4 kg of water exhaust per day. There are about 250 million cars in the US. If every one of them is replaced with a car that produces 6.4 kg of water per day, that would be about 5.84 billion kg of water vapor per year (call it one fuckton). That sounds like a lot.
Except…according to this , about 496,000 cubic kilometers of water evaporate from the Earth’s oceans per year. Doing the math (and I hope I’ve done it right), that gives us 4.96e+17 kg of water per year (or 8.49e+7 fucktons).
So, decry the fuel cell solution for other reasons. Mass transit still moves people much more efficiently. There is also the problem of generating all of the electricity needed to produce that hydrogen. Just don’t bring up the greenhouse gas argument. It just isn’t so.
John S.
Agreed.
In all things.
But ol’ Ben (or Poor Richard) lifted it from Aristotle.
Stanbio
I like the idea, I like the creativity, of course it sounds like he doesn’t have a real plan for what kind of new battery would get the prize and it sort of reeks of one of Kent Hovind’s “1 million for anyone that can prove evolution” prizes that can’t be won.
But I think the interesting part of all of this is that if Obama came up with a similar 300 million dollar prize idea, the news pundits would blast it as childish and unrealistic and wasteful spending.
Zifnab
Funny you should mention that.
grumpy realist
Uh, if I could add my 1+1 cents here….(used to run Sumitomo-3M’s Fuel Cell development program, am heavily involved in nanotech)
a) hydrogen is an absolute bitch to deal with. Hard to store, slips out of any crack, explosive, and when it burns, it’s a flame that’s hard to see.
b) anyone who thinks we’re going to “reuse” our present gasoline/gas distribution system to ship hydrogen around has to be on crack. The contamination from seals etc. would be ghastly–the system would have to be totally rebuilt from the ground up. Remember, we’re not dealing with ICEs here, that can tolerate a certain amount of contaminants. A fuel cell should be more considered to be akin to a battery, with the high chemical-potential ingredients being brought in from the outside, and the low chemical-potential results being carried away. Batteries don’t work very well with junk in them. Neither do fuel cells.
c) lithium-ion battery technology is almost available. Major problem is to stabilize the system so it can pass the nail gun test and not explode.
d) McCain is like usual, a day late and a dollar short. The obvious advantage of a better battery is so high that there are tons of research groups around the world working on this. (Including, yes, the DOE.)
ComputersRfun
Ben Franklin might want to take a more moderate approach to his moderation.
Water vapor is pretty normal part of the water cycle. The amount of water vapor produced by Hydrogen cars en mass is tiny compared to the amount produced by the pacific ocean in one afternoon.
So there’s basically just the question of if the amount we add will overload the current cycle, and if all that water vapor we make will fuck with our weather cycles… (water vapor = clouds).
Bottom line I suggest we put 1000 scientist in a room for 10 years to figure out what will happen. And then fifteen years after the fact when everything has gone horribly wrong they can say something like: “we didn’t know they’d actually need land to grow the corn for ethanol, we swear.”
Pshh.. predictions are far fortune tellers.
J. Michael Neal
Is it true that, if you put an infinite number of scientists in a room with an infinite number of calculators, that one of them will accidentally produce the works of Einstein?
ComputersRfun
Yes, and your chances increase tremendously if one of them is named Albert.
Zifnab
250 million cars * 6.4 kg water / day = 1.6 billion kg water / day. Assuming 5 driving days a week, that’s 260 driving days. 260 days / year * 1.6 billion kg water = 416 billion kg water / year (4.16e+8).
Assuming a temperature of 75 F or 24 Celsius the density of water vapor is .75 kg/m^3. Assuming 496,000 km^3, that gives us 496,000 * 1000^3 m^3 = 4.96e+14 m^3 * .75 kg / m^3 = 3.72e+14 kg water / year. So, not a big difference.
But, on the flip side, you have to acknowledge that this water
Then it helps to ask how much of that water builds and falls entirely over the ocean and blah blah blah… the point is I don’t think you can just wave away concerns by claiming a back of the envelope calculation. That 4.16e+8 kg / year only considers cars. If we had factories and power plants and god knows what else running on hydrogen cells… I don’t know.
I just know that CO2 seemed about as harmless you could ask for a while back, and yet here we are.
Kiran
All of you worrying about water vapor …
Methane (natural gas) is CH4:
When burned:
CH4 + 2 O2 = CO2 + 2 H2O
Octane (gasoline, sort of) is C8H18:
When burned:
C8H18 + 12.5 O2 = 8 CO2 + 9 H2O
You get water when you burn HYDROcarbons.
EMPY
Maybe the good Senator could get Chevron to dust off the battery patents they are sitting on and refusing to use. These are the batteries that were used in the Toyata RAV4 EV that were copied from GM’s EV1 program.
The battery is called the EV-95 NiMH invented by Stan and Iris Ovshinsky and purchased by GM in 1994 to meet California ZEV standards. Once those standards were dropped, GM dumped the patent to Texaco who was purchased by Chevron less than one week later. With patent in hand, all EV-95 production was stopped and no battery of it’s type is allowed to be produced in a capacity that will power a vehicle.
Oh, and those few Toyata RAV4 EV’s that run on this battery. They are still running strong with many having over 100,000 miles. Toyota made the mistake of actually selling them to customer, not leasing, so they couldn’t take them back and crush them like GM.
The technology has already been developed. Certain companies just don’t want anyone to have it.
Captain USA
Funny coincidence that all McCain’s “solutions” involve handing piles of money to rich people.
DougJ
Maybe someone has mentioned this but such an invention would be worth much more than 300 million dollars. Toyota or Honda would outbid the US government for sure.
And that’s just the kind of thing that makes us look weak to the terrorists.
John McCain magic battery plan ==== appeasement.
drag0n
Private industry invented the atom bomb and put men on the moon so of course they are better suited for this endeavour.
prufrock
Yeah, I actually meant Trillion. Oops.
prufrock
The link doesn’t say anything about cubic kilometers of water vapor. It says cubic kilometers of water. 496,000 cubic kilometers of water is 4.96e+17 kg of water. That’s nine orders of magnitude greater than the total amount of vapor caused by a hypothetical fuel cell car filled America postulated in either my example or yours. I call shenanigans on the whole idea of fuel cell cars contributing to global warming via tail pipe exhaust.
I would almost say that you are making a Gregg Easterbrook quality argument here, except that fucker would never use the words “I don’t know.” In the future, any static power source that used fuel cells would almost certainly be hooked up to a solar array. The excess energy generated by the solar array would be used to crack water drawn from a tank into hydrogen and oxygen. At night, the water vapor emitted by the fuel cell would be pumped right back into the tank that it was drawn from originally. Closed system, no emissions.
BTW, I did make another error. The Clarity would actually emit a little more than 36 kg of water vapor per tank, not 32. I forgot to add the hydrogen atoms to the atomic weight when I was doing the calculation.
jibeaux
Well, I admit it. The internets, for example. Does it justify the massive amounts of money that go to boondoggles, fraud, and waste, not to mention just the warped-ass spending priorities we have? Not to my mind. If we invested money in more peaceful enterprises, those would be the enterprises coming up with the innovations.
Andrew
Hydrogen is not a practical fuel.* It is a short term energy transport mechanism that is particularly inefficient.
* The one exception is in Iceland.
Zifnab
This still raises the question of why we’d want to put hydrogen burning engines in our cars when we can just use electric engines powered by closed-system fuel cells. Then you get zero emissions on your freeways as well as your power plants.
You’re also committing the sin of counting emissions from cars in the US against water vapor evaporation across the entire world. What about guys in India and China and Europe and Africa who will inevitably want cars of their own. A global population of 6 billion people and growing could command fleets of traffic one or two orders of magnitude greater than the 250 million American cars. No concentrate that traffic in a desert country like Egypt or Saudi Arabia. What does all that water vapor do to the local environment? I don’t know.
The only point in all of this is to say you can’t just wave your hands and declare “this emission is perfectly safe for real-zies” on the assumption that no one will come along and completely overdo it.
I mean, honestly, I’m betting Air Powered Cars are the real wave of the future anyway.
LarryB
It’s not as if the fuel cell community isn’t aware of this. There’s been quite a lot of research about direct alcohol fuel cells (try Googling “methanol fuel cell”). It looks like you can convert just about any liquid hydrocarbon into hydrogen with the right catalyst. IMO, if fuel cells ever go main stream, they will use one of these liquid fuels, not H2.
Dayv
It’s never fair to bring up Iceland in a discussion about global power solutions.
Just Some Fuckhead
I thought the whole “big money” interest in hydrogen fuel cell technology was to have a new chemical substance that could be controlled by a few large corporations and distributed for use in a manner similar to our current fueling station setup. In sort, same basic system as oil/gas, just new chemical gold.
prufrock
Except for venting the water vapor into the atmosphere, that’s essentially what the Clarity does. It doesn’t “burn” hydrogen at all. It is a fuel cell car. If they wanted to, they could vent the water vapor into another tank. Why don’t they do this now? Well, it would add weight (not a thing that engineers want when designing a fuel efficient vehicle), and because the exhaust is, well, water.
A two order of magnitude over my estimate still leaves us seven orders of magnitude less than the total yearly vaporization rate of the earth. It’s literally spit in the wind. Also, I used the US as an example because, as we are often reminded, we consume more resources than any nation on Earth.
As opposed to OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! As I stated before, there are good reasons to encourage the demise of the car culture that much of the modern world, and this country in particular clings to (if you want a real environmental disaster, imagine all of the resources both energy and material required to double the current number of automobiles, and build the infrastructure necessary to accommodate them). However, the idea that adding a small fraction of a percent of what mother nature pumps into atmosphere every day will lead to disaster is utter FUD.
LarryB
Maybe, although it’s not like big money isn’t invested in power generation and transmission (think G.E. and Enron).
I think it’s really more about power densities. (OK, I skipped physics in college, so be kind) Here’s a nifty chart that compares the volumetric energy densities in Watt/hours per liter of various fuel sources. At 9,700 Wh/l (watt-hours per liter), gasoline beats the crap out of gaseous hydrogen (450 Wh/l) and all current battery technologies. The only reason that people are talking about batteries and fuel cells at all is because liquid hydrocarbons are gonna be really expensive going forward.