The War Against Oil is the greatest business opportunity of all time.
Everyone, from Nobel Laureate Al Gore on down, keeps addressing global warming as a problem demanding sacrifice. Their calls on government to act are couched in a way that make government appear the solution to this problem.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. Free enterprise is the solution to this problem. Government can create incentives for free enterprise to get to work on this, but in the end this is a problem business will solve, or which won’t get solved.
Right now there are immense opportunities in areas like efficiency, and such power sources as wind, solar and geothermal. All they need are assurances that their supply will meet with a good price. This is why I have suggested a "floor price" for energy, with those sources which produce carbon dioxide allowed to price below the floor, and below-floor prices on polluting forms taxed to reach it.
Still, there’s a lot of infrastructure which must be re-built or replaced, as supplies of alternate fuels start to become significant. Hydrogen, or ammonia, make great storage media for energy. Hydrogen could be piped through current gas pipelines, ammonia through oil lines. Their energy would be released in fuel cells, with water as the primary pollutant.
Right now car companies like Honda are getting ready for this new
age by creating "production ready" fuel cell-powered cars like the
Honda Clarity. It’s a standard sedan, whose primary message is this
won’t be a hard transition.
There are many problems with this car. For one, it’s too
complicated. For another, it’s too typical — I think mass-produced
hydrogen cars will also use GPS and computer-assisted steering. But
this might work well for government use, as a ferry for high-powered
government officials to get chauffeured to work in. Governments can
create small portions of infrastructure to handle these kinds of
vehicles, just as many transit systems already have put infrastructure
in place to handle buses powered by natural gas.
I don’t want to criticize the Clarity. I just doubt it will be a
huge seller, another Prius. We do need to build infrastructure to
support hydrogen, and right now that’s beyond the power of the ordinary
driver to conjure up. But it is a start, a market start.
And that’s what the hydrogen economy needs, a market start. The New York Times review of the Clarity complains about the lack of infrastructure for it, but that’s a chicken-and-egg question.
So chicken, meet egg.
