Tim at The Future is Green point us to an article that claims the "hydrogen economy" may be even further in the future than recently thought. This is a problem since the White House has put all of its eggs in the hydrogen basket, and Congress has bitten and provided big R&D money to hydrogen research at the expense of energy conservation and hybrid technology. Among the difficulties that have to be overcome: the need for platinum for fuel cells, and the perceived need for a new generation of nuclear reactors to produce hydrogen. Dan Becker of the Sierra Club sums up the larger problem nicely: "We don't object to using R&D to do either basic research or research into something that may be in the distance,... What we object to is failing to do something now and using the R&D as a shield against doing something responsible today."
Technorati tags: hydrogen, fuel efficiency
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