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I'd forgotten about Bush boosting solar energy spending.
He also took a lot of flak for pushing hydrogen, and a $1.2 billion hydrogen car program.
Admittedly, his hydrogen vision includes a lot of hydrogen derived from fossil fuels, but that's not as bad as it seems. It's kind of like an infrastructure version of the Prius. If you think about it, hybrid cars are a fairly bad deal. Two drive systems -- extra complexity, extra weight, etc.
But -- they do use and cause to be improved many components of an electric car, including an electric car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, which would include hydrogen produced by renewable means.
Of course, if the countryside is detroyed and criss-crossed with oil pipelines you can only get out to see on the 11 days of the year when temperatures remain in safe ranges, then it won't matter...
Free speech? Yeah, I've heard of that. Have you?
by dinotrac on Thu Mar 20, 2008 at 07:44:40 PM PDT
[ Parent ]
Bush could have gotten the auto makers to implement the hybrid technology developed and paid for by the Clinton-era gov/corp hybrid billion $$$ project but instead decided to fund yet another gov/corp billion $$$ project to develop hydrogen.
The object is not to get new technology into the marketplace but to get billions of $$$ into the pockets of corporations. This view, I believe, is not cynicism but the way things actually work in this imperfect world. It is one reason why I do not look for big solutions.
PS: Any idea to transform our car culture is going to take at least a decade to play out as it takes that long for the existing vehicle fleet now on the road to turn over. Problem is we may not have a decade to make that change if the recent statements by climate change scientists are to be believed.
Solar is civil defense. Video of my small scale solar experiments at http://solarray.blogspot.com/2006/03/solar-video.html
by gmoke on Thu Mar 20, 2008 at 08:44:56 PM PDT
>Bush could have gotten the auto makers to implement the hybrid technology developed and paid for by the Clinton-era gov/corp hybrid billion
If government has a role in this kind of thing -- and I'm convinced that it does, it should not be promoting something that the auto-makers have demonstrated they are quite capable of doing -- especially something that is no more than a stopgap technology anyway.
Toyota and Honda have been selling hybrids for years. Ford is selling hybrids, GM is juming in.
Hydrogen may or may not get it's kinks worked out, but it has the potential to be fossil-fuel free.
by dinotrac on Fri Mar 21, 2008 at 05:25:01 AM PDT
wide narrow
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