Hydrogen Cars

Listening to battery enthusiasts wax poetic about the Tesla recently - - and seeing a few of them appearing on the streets of west Los Angeles - - I began thinking about the old Tony Curtis film "The Great Race" (remember every time he smiled, there was a shiny sparkle of superiority that gleamed from his teeth?). The roads and Holiday Inns have improved dramatically since the period depicted in the movie, but the idea of testing the claims of exciting new technology at the dawn of a new transportation age is very much the same. So let's have a 21^st Century "Great Race" and pit the Tesla against the other electric car on the market today, the Honda Clarity.

The Tesla is an electric sports car powered by batteries, while the Clarity is an electric sedan powered by hydrogen (a fuel cell converts the hydrogen to electricity). The range of each is rated by USEPA-approved testing at about 230 miles. The similarities end there however - - the Tesla is the fastest production car ever built at zero to 60 mph, giving the little hot rod a distinct advantage that would seem to make a race with a Clarity anything but "great". Or would it?

In 1984, Al Gore held a hearing in Congress about global warming and urged his colleagues to do something about it. As we now know, he was ridiculed and largely ignored for the best part of two decades before being vindicated with a Nobel Prize and an Oscar (oh yeah, and another Congressional hearing, at which he was taken far more seriously).

I've been an environmental advocate for the same couple of decades, always suspecting that my friends raised an eyebrow or two over my predictions and admonitions about sustainability (my family, however, was not subtle about raising their eyebrows). I worked for the day when thinking "green" would be a normal part of everyday life. Well, just as Al Gore's day(s) arrived in 2007, my days arrived this week.

First, I turned on a Los Angeles Laker game and found the entire team wearing "NBA Green Week" tee shirts. The NBA.com website lists dozens of things anyone can do to live more sustainably (and save money in the process!). When a major sports league feels that all they need to say is "green" and that it's a good color for their brand, our time has come.

 As Washington and Wall Street dicker over a financial rescue plan, everyone is missing the real opportunity to fix the problem. Some see the variously proposed plans as bailouts of dumb borrowers and dumber lenders, while others view it as a chance to restore liquidity to the marketplace so we can all have access to credit again, whether it's for student loans or to finance the acquisition of industrial machinery.

But when the "Great Depression" struck America more than 70 years ago, we didn't just make more money available and hope people would borrow it to jump start the economy. President Roosevelt put us back to work, building bridges, highways, schools, and water projects. All of that infrastructure has served us well over the years, although at the time it must have looked like a lot of pork barrel spending designed to keep workers off of street corners and out of soup kitchens. What if we could do something like that again, but this time, make it a build-out that had fantastic economic, environmental, and social return on the invested capital?

In 2003, President Bush spoke about hydrogen cars in his State of the Union address. Shortly thereafter, the American Petroleum Institute (API) warned that building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure that could reach all Americans would cost $140 billion. Although I'm sure the API had no reason to use scare tactics and biased estimates (well, OK, maybe I'm not THAT sure), let's assume that's an accurate figure.