Stephen Harding wrote:
Regnirps wrote:
Stephen Harding wrote:
That's pretty typical of American thinking. But increasingly, we're going to
find that car is making demands on us that we aren't going to like. In some
areas, that's already the case.
snip
You must be at a University. Faculty? Grad student? I know a Stanford physicist
Former UMass/Amherst computer science dept programmer. Now part-timer and
self-employed technical writer and programmer. [Anyone looking to hire a tech
writer??]
you should talk to. This has been his field for the last 30 years. For
instance, he can give you The Five Reasons Commuter Lanes Don't Work and how
traffic engineers know how to fix most of the problems if the politicians would
let them. There is no looming catastrophe and we are not running out of
resources.
I pretty much agree with that, although I'm skeptical of politically limited
solutions to traffic problems.
Oil will run out probably sometime in the next 100 years, but by the time it
does, I suspect fuel cell technology running on straight H2 (rather than the
initial gasoline) will be meeting energy needs for centuries to come.
snip
I have refrained from participating in this discussion before, but I
certainly have some doubts about your remark about H2.
I know H2 has some wonderful advantages. If you allow it to react with
oxygen in a fuel cell you get electricity and water. Zer pollution.
Fantastic! Also, you can store far more energy by using it to dissociate
water into O2 and H2 than by storing it in a battery for instance.
Great! However, the big question that very few people seem to be able to
answer (myself included) is where the energy to make the H2 should come
from? I'm sure you're aware that H2 is not something you can dig up
from the ground. Perhaps our hope should lie with nuclear fusion, though
that's not without its own problems either.
In my opinion H2 not the answer to a possible energy/environmental
crisis. Focussing on H2 is just replacing one problem with another.
Regards,
Ralph Savelsberg
SMH