@lovendures there are no words for this insanity. 5 minutes into the news and I'm reduced to single syllable words.
@lovendures wow. You can't spell "Wyoming" without "omg". If there are any sane states left, they should counter-sue WY for polluting the air and water with their coal products. Just like people sued Big Tobacco for selling cancer sticks. If WY is so worried about losing jobs, maybe they should start building windmills, or find another way to make a living- some way that doesn't involve poisoning the rest of us.
@lovendures. Some states are saner than others, but I’m pretty sure all states have their own anti-vaxxer, flat earther, conspiracy theorist fringe. It’s absurd. I want to wake up from this bad dream.
Does anyone see hydrogen fuel taking off in the future?
I get this feeling that the big oil companies are going to move to hydrogen as their next big thing because I just see there being no way that they as going to roll over and give way to electric vehicles. So what I'm saying is, I wouldn't be surprised if they see hydrogen as their new oil that they can make $$$ from.
Perhaps we will also see hydrogen fueled Aircraft as one way to cut aviation emissions?
Last I heard, I think Saudi Arabia were investing quite heavily into Hydrogen as well.
It will be interesting to see how successful and practical ii will be to implement, if they do indeed push to go down the hydrogen route.
@luminous Hydrogen technology has a lot of problems to overcome before it becomes a truly viable and common fuel. Basically you can get hydrogen one of two ways: 1) by breaking down hydrocarbons (requiring a lot of energy and producing carbon dioxide as a byproduct) or by 2) electrolysis of water (H2O). Option #1 is kind of pointless as an alternative to fossil fuels because it uses fossil fuels and produces greenhouse emissions. Option #2 can be relatively clean, depending on where you get the energy to split the water into H2 and O2. Photoelectric cells are probably the cleanest way to accomplish this but cost and scaling up involve a lot of technological hurdles. Then you have the problem of storing the hydrogen, which is very flammable and extremely volatile. But for some applications, hydrogen may be more practical than using photocells directly or as electicity stored in batteries.
I'm not up on the latest in the field but it is my feeling that we have more mature "green" technologies already available: e.g., wind, solar, tidal power, etc.,that can be more widely applied than hydrogen and that just need legal and economic boosts to take over. (This is not a psychic call, just a moderately informed opinion.) All in all though, where energy is concerned there is no "free lunch", meaning there's going to be an environmental, social and/or economic cost to anything we can come up with.
@luminous I wondered about the viability of hydrogen fuel many years ago and thought it had been discarded. So glad you asked.
@ana I am impressed with your knowledge. This is not the first time I've wondered, "What does that woman do for a living and/or what is her training that she's so technologically literate?"
When I focus on the climate crisis, I see first a shift in the human psyche and I actually see the Greek myth of Psyche, goddess of the soul, unfolding. In the myth, Psyche is a beautiful young mortal woman, the youngest of four sisters, who must accomplish four difficult tasks to succeed.
Her journey is fraught with rivals' jealously and treachery, just as ours is fraught with the greedy fossil fuel profiteers and their sycophants. But her goodness inspires earthly creatures including insects, the River God, and Zeus in the form of an eagle, to help her. She fails the final task but is rescued and made immortal.
She reminds me of the youngest member of Congress, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and the youngest queen of sustainability, Greta Thunberg.
I realize this story is not the technological fix people had in mind, but I before will be relying on the technological fix, we first must evolve in heart and hands (@Michelle, I'm thinking of you) and that, like Psyche, who was the youngest daughter in her family, some very young women are going to lead the way. :-)
I'm going to take a big step out on the woo tree and propose that free energy technology will play a major role in the decades to come. We've had visions here and there that point to an unconventional energy source like free energy. And Nikola Tesla had free energy figured out more than a century ago. J.P. Morgan shut down Tesla's projects not because of a problem with the technology, but because he figured that if he couldn't meter the energy produced by Tesla's contraptions, then they shouldn't be invested in.
Before these technological advances can flourish, however, I agree with Jeanne; we must first spiritually evolve.
@coyote I have one foot in the woo-tree or I wouldn't be here. I was not aware of Tesla's "free energy" ideas so I looked into it. I cannot find anything detailed about it from reputable sources, only that it was supposed to involve tapping into the charged particles in the atmosphere. And evidently Tesla started out by simply theorizing that the charged particles could be use to *transmit* electricity wirelessly, but then took it a step further and postulated that the charge differential between particles in the upper atmosphere could be used as an actual *source* of electric power. Sort of like capturing lightning, but in a more controlled way. I talked about it with my son. He's a 3rd year EE student and has an interest in Tesla, but he was not familiar with the concept either. After discussing it for a while we concluded that while such a thing might be possible in theory, getting it scaled up to make enough electricity to make the infrastructure (giant towers and such) economically feasible would be a difficult task. But perhaps possible (and very cool). I haven't read Tesla's notes and not being a physicist or an electrical engineer, I probably wouldn't understand them anyway, so I will not make any judgement.
Anyhow, regardless --- supposing this was done, it would not really be "free" energy. The tools and mechanisms to capture the energy would have a monetary cost, and surely there would be safety issues and environmental costs to pay, just as there are with solar, wind, tidal power, etc.
And one other thing about "free" energy: Back in the day, one of my professors said it was probably a good thing that free, infinite power was not available because it would just allow people to totally exploit and destroy all the resources of Earth. That idea stuck with me. Perhaps we do not have infinite free energy because we're not wise enough to handle it.
@luminous I wondered about the viability of hydrogen fuel many years ago and thought it had been discarded. So glad you asked.
@ana I am impressed with your knowledge. This is not the first time I've wondered, "What does that woman do for a living and/or what is her training that she's so technologically literate?"
Well- I have advanced degrees in a couple different scientific fields, work at a university, read a lot of random stuff, and several of my family members are engineers.