Hell and Hydrogen

By the time Klaus Draeger, BMW’s manager of research and development, took the microphone at a Berlin hotel last fall, the assembled journalists’ bellies were full of mint juleps–and it all started to make sense. Maybe the world’s oil crisis and the threat of climate change could be sensibly addressed by using hydrogen as a transportation fuel. Draeger sketched the alluring vision of a future in which high-performance luxury cars burn hydrogen and emit mostly water vapor. The hydrogen could someday be provided by renewable sources of energy, he said, and nobody would have to make any sacrifices. And we journalists would get to drive the first such cars the following day.

In the context of the overall energy economy, a car like the BMW Hydrogen 7 would probably produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars available today. And changing this calculation would take multiple breakthroughs–which study after study has predicted will take decades, if they arrive at all.
In fact, the Hydrogen 7 and its hydrogen-fuel-cell cousins are, in many ways, simply flashy distractions produced by automakers who should be taking stronger immediate action to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of their cars. As of 2003, transportation emissions accounted for one-third of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Nobody has made this point more clearly than Joseph Romm does in Hell and High Water. Romm is an MIT-trained physicist who managed energy-efficiency programs in the U.S. Department of Energy during President Clinton’s administration and now runs a consultancy called the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions. His book provides an accurate summary of what is known about global warming and climate change, a sensible agenda for technology and policy, and a primer on how political disinformation has undermined climate science. In his view, the rhetoric of “technology breakthroughs”–including the emphasis by President Bush and some in the auto industry on a future hydrogen economy–provides little more than official cover for near-term inaction.

Technology Review