A War Against Oil Two-fer

The War Against Oil has not yet commenced in earnest, thanks to continuing objections from the hydrocarbon industries.

Coal is a hydrocarbon. Oil is a hydrocarbon. Natural gas is a hydrocarbon. Ethanol is a hydrocarbon.

Even the cleanest hydrocarbon is only a way-station on the path to true victory, a hydrogen cycle which takes its energy from renewable sources like the Earth, the Sun, and the wind, then recycles that through fuel cells.

National security somehow hasn’t broken through.  Instead the response of elites has been to push harder for more oil drilling here, more coal extraction here, and (why not) nuclear power, whose waste never goes away.

So how about this for a reason to engage fully in the War Against Oil?

Water.

Georgia, where I live, is going through a 100-year drought which may, in fact, be just the start of a 1,000 year cycle, depending on what we do about it now. Keep burning oil, coal, and gas, you’ll turn Georgia into Arizona within a few decades.

Where can we get the water from?

Fuel cells.

The hydrogen cycle oxidizes hydrogen gas to produce hydrogen dioxide.
That’s the pollution. Another name for hydrogen dioxide is H2O. Water.
That’s right. Water is the pollution from "burning" hydrogen.

The more fuel cells you use, the more hydrogen you "burn," the more water you create.

The technical term for what we need at this point is hydrogen dioxide
sequestration. That means you make certain the water you produce from a
fuel cell gets back into the local water system. It doesn’t really need
treatment, but the sewer system is the easiest way to transport it back
to you in a usable form, with fluoride added for better dental health.

It’s important you take this seriously, because we’re also going to be
using fuel cells in cars. And without water sequestration, you’re going
to change climates, faster and in nastier ways, than you will by even
burning carbon.

If you let the water created in a car fuel cell just go into the air,
you add moisture to the air, and change its composition. Deserts became
forests, and normal water patterns are disrupted. So, just save it
until you re-fill, and dump it into the sewer when you do. That’s all I
ask of car makers.

Eventually, we’re going to get a new problem. Fuel cells deposit their
water where the people are, where they’re using energy. The more
people, the more water that’s produced.

What happens to Phoenix, to Las Vegas, when that happens? We need to
take care and find a path to the sea for all this excess water we’re
producing in our desert cities, or it will eventually become a problem.
We may also need to limit this water’s exposure to the local air, to
prevent the air  from moisturizing, and again, turning the desert into a rain
forest.

But that’s not a problem we really have to worry about too much now. Not with Atlanta dieing of thirst.

Just get some fuel cells, powered by geothermal power, instead of by
coal or gas. The geothermal energy here lies deeper than in the West,
and it’s a bit less reliable, but we can drill. Isn’t that what the oil
industry wants to do anyway, drill?

So get to work. Get to work now on this War Against Oil two-fer. Yours
for a limited time — the limits of Georgia’s water supply.