[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
One of the more dismaying and persistent responses to the change need of the climate crisis is that it will wreck the economy, the disruption too great and the end result woefully short of internal combustion performance.
It’s total hooey, what this answer represents is fear of the status quo being smashed apart, and oh yes abandoning gasoline, diesel and kerosene internal combustion certainly does that. In many good ways.
As a far-left radical in my F-150 with a #2 buzz cut all I demand is that the engines in our cars, planes, trains and ships be replaced with sustainable clean engines, the days of burning oil are over, forbidden. We still get to keep our marvelous transport means, just the engines change. Way out there, I know.
Especially for cars electric engines are fine, but the battery issue essentially negates plane application, and it isn’t practical for ships and trains, it scales too small. But hydrogen use is combustion, very powerful portable fuel that emits water upon use. Gasoline was the available fuel in our combustion history, we chose a disastrously wrong one, that’s all.
Replacing it with hydrogen or electricity means replacing all the existing equipment, eventually it’s going to wear out and happen anyway. The biggest challenge is building the infrastructure and storage capability for hydrogen, it all has to be installed everywhere from scratch.
If you didn’t know, hydrogen is completely sustainable and fairly difficult to produce and store while also requiring a lot of electricity. Wind, water and solar are clean sustainable sources of electricity, we’re presently at about 10% of our clean electricity capability.
The biggest losers are the engine manufacturers and the oil industry. For the workers in the engine industry I’m sorry, truly, capitalism has ripped worker lives in so many industries, I wish it didn’t have to be this way.
As for Exxon and British Petroleum, cry me a river. Most industries ripped under necessary change of course vanish, but there’s massive value in petrochemicals quite outside the insanity of burning them, you’ll be quite smaller but surviving nicely.
That’s the status quo element, the extremely powerful oil and gas industry that’s petrified of their demand going down. In economic terms still things flow along fine, demand and services just flow to the new hydrogen elements, not the old polluting ones.
Ford and Boeing won’t mind the zero-emission conversion if they get help, Airbus is proving right now that concept designs for hydrogen conversion are totally viable. No, things will never be the same as the good ol’ days of burning gasoline and kerosene (jet fuel) but they’ll be quite livable.
Zero-emission personal vehicles are comparatively expensive, the days of buying a cheap polluting clunker for $1,000 will be over. Less little people will be able to afford those incredible automobiles—absurdly expensive, requiring abhorrent amounts of pavement and concrete, while being horrifyingly dangerous.
The United States could finally build out a viable electric train system, since so many citizens make the rationale decision not to use those….those…automobiles. It’s a thought.
So this is what the far left radicals are demanding? Engine replacement with sustainable clean fuels? Oh my god! What does society get for this grand bargain of hippie glory?
Clean, pure air, always, the diseases of asthma and bronchitis vanish among our children. Wow we as humans can really see, many miles into the distance, and the night sky will finally come alive again. Free from worry we’re wrecking our biology, relived we are respecting the earth and other species. No more vast wealth and resources committed to that lovely region of the Earth, the Middle East.
How could this be so much to ask for so much in return? Please. We could really use Republican Party help on this, as conservatives (you know, to conserve) preservation of the Earth should be a perfectly natural fit for them, but as Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post has so aptly demonstrated the Republicans have degenerated into lying, slavering, ranting racists and autocrats, they’re barely qualified to tie their own shoes these days.
It is a shame, they’ll just get voted out, no rational American citizen looks at the climate crisis we’re in and the choices available and then decides lying denial and sneering hypocrisy is a viable human path. Adios, my dear polluting Republican cousins. Anytime you want to change and help conserve the Earth, all is forgiven.