Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc
Damn what a troll . . . at 300 posts . . . most impressive.
As for the initial comments about short/long term, you probably need to read the actual article in Science instead of a Yahoo blurb. Since I no longer qualify for a student discount, I don't subscribe but if you care to read it at your local libe:
Rethinking Hydrogen Cars
David W. Keith and Alexander E. Farrell
Science 2003 July 18; 301: 315-316.
If I had to guess an energy and resources professor probably considers short term to be a generation and long term means 50+.
UCBerkley!What does that tell you?! Don't see any political agenda there? Raise the CAFE limits, eliminate SUV's, raise the gas tax. That's the dems & the greens party line.
Even an econ prof at MIT would tell you the gross expense of converting to a hydrogen economy greatly exceeds the cost of making more efficient internal combustion engines over any interval EXCEPT for a time horizon of centuries. You don't have to eliminate SUVs you just make ownership reflect the actual costs to the planet.
Hydrogen is a long term strategy, of course, since electric cars are a total failure. The short term strategy is to drill our abundant supply of domestic oil, eliminating the need for imported oil.
You will be dead and buried long before hydrogen vehicles constitute a significant portion of domestic vehicles. GMs EV1 was definitely a failure but hybrids are pretty much here to stay. All it takes is a little public policy push to create a revolution (increased gas taxes, increased CAFE (including reigning in light trucks, SUVS, and ALL cars), subsidies for true hybrids (end the BS credits for flex fuel vehicles that rarely see anything other than gas), advocacy/subsidies for clean diesel, subsidize ALL public transit that uses hybrid or LEV).
Your short term strategy is only appropriate on the time scale of the
Science article. It will take over a decade for significant domestic exploration, pipelines, and increased refinery capacity. In the near term, we need more efficient vehicles and real political leadership.