Many responses to yesterday’s post digging into Obama’s claims on the miniscule benefits of offshore drilling and energy efficient cars. The debate is getting a bit wonky for a campaign coverage blog; perhaps this is a matter for the guys at Planet Gore.
Arthur asks:
Re: “Claim 2: An investment of $250 billion five years ago would have produced an engine that didn’t require fossil fuels.”He also ignores the question of where does the hydrogen come from? Water? Massive amounts of electricity required. Cracked from methane (where most hydrogen is acquired nowadays). Massive amounts of CO2 released. And wouldn’t it be simpler just to run the cars on methane? Also, methane is a fossil fuel! So if your hydrogen comes from that then your engine IS running on fossil fuels. And if you get the electricity for your electrolysis from coal plants – same story.
This article looks at the problems with the “Hydrogen Economy” in more detail.
Several other readers wrote in with variations of the question, “where does the hydrogen come from?” Both from a production standpoint and a distribution standpoint, as Colin observes:
Another thing you should mention with respect to hydrogen cars. There’s no infrastructure for hydrogen. You can’t fill the darn thing up. There are no hydrogen pumps at gas stations. Unless there’s a hydrogen pump at least analogous to diesel pumps, hydrogen cars won’t work. That would take a massive infrastructure project on the scale of the interstate highway system to implement, and I haven’t heard anyone propose that.
Tim warns about the distance between building a prototype and actually getting them to showrooms in significant numbers:
Chrysler, for one, has introduced concept cars that, theoretically, get over 100 mpg. As a life long Jeep owner, I am excited about the Jeep Renegade.
The important thing, though, that your e-mailer neglects is that these are concept cars, not production models. We are nowhere near ready to mass produce such vehicles, they have a lot of bugs to be worked out.The second thing as that this development occurred without a massive, quarter trillion dollar government investment. Obama’s “plan,” such as it is, would more likely go towards creating a massive bureaucratic boondoggle than towards actually building any cars.
The fact of the matter is that the market works, as the Renegade and countless other vehicles – both in concept and actually on the market – prove. Obama’s statement really belies his own distrust of the market, and his natural instinct toward a centralized command economy.
Bobby makes another good point about who we want getting that oil out of the earth :
One other advantage of domestic drilling and exploration is the incredible amount of money that would be spent in America to develop those fields. It would be billions of dollars – that’s whether or not the fields actually start producing. I’m from Texas, and lots of our old oil millionaires were actually in the oilfield supply business. Those are great jobs, and it would ripple all the way though the economy in the areas near the drilling. Same thing for refinery construction – that’s a lot of money the oil companies will have to invest, and it’s gonna be a boom for wherever they spend it.
If they do produce, there are enormous tax revenues for some government somewhere (either the states or the federal government). I just cannot fathom why we would want to pass up those billions of dollars. America is going to spend that money on gas – but if we drill and produce here, we’d have a choice as to where that money ended up.
Finally, Blane made me laugh:
You are being entirely unfair to Mr. Obama. These 100 mpg cars do indeed exist, and they don’t require modification of hybrids, voiding warranties, or any of the expensive do-it-yourself conversions you claim.
Any car, in fact, can be made to get 100 mpg–all that is required is a good push.