Hydrogen fuel cell breakthrough....babysteps into the future
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/08/29/umit.ART_ART_08-29-08_A4_2QB5T1Q.html?sid=101
The cheap bio-fuel converter is born……
The problem with hydrogen fuel cell implementation has always been the cost of fitting out every service station with the equipment necessary to make it a viable economic option. But like any emerging science and technology, need spurs financing for research and that research often has interesting, unforeseen results. Call it the technological gestalt moment when need and market forces bridge the gap, the “Rubicon” between the inefficient first models and the discovery of new models that become steadily more efficient and viable. The moment the possible mutates into the probable. The giant leap forward. Like with automobiles when Henry Ford made them efficient, affordable and prevalent in American society. There was “before”, and there was “after”. The in-between, the gestalt moment was mass production methods….and financing.
That’s what the article cited above is. The future being born in the present. A defining moment in history that future generations will recall in broad stroke, though not in the details presented here!
I’m not especially Green in my outlook, but I am frugal so I compliment myself and others in knowing the difference between a good deal and a bad deal…..and oil is looking progressively like a worse and worse deal. Not only is it a long chain carbon as decomposed animal and plant matter (like human beings) but when its broken for processing or burnt for combustion, it s resulting parts resemble fragmentary parts of our own long chain carbon strands in our genetic code. We breath it in car and truck exhaust (which goes right into our bloodstreams like the oxygen its designed to actually process). We are exposed to it daily in the plastics we use. When we microwave those plastics to heat our lunches at work, the microwave process releases trace dioxin into the lunch we eat…….just a verifiable scientific fact.
So our bodies try to accommodate these accumulating trace substances over 40-50 years. That’s what thousands of generations of successful evolution and biological mechanics has selected for our survival as a species. But oil in this quantity has only been part of our environment in these huge concentrations for little more than the last hundred years, or 4-5 human generations….. Only now, it integrates fragmentary copies of our own DNA, and unlike a computer program to de-frag our genetic hard drive, it stays and causes uncontrolled cell mutation, which is commonly known as cancer….which is big business these days.
Of course, cigarettes have only been around for less than 100 years too and the tobacco companies call them “nicotine delivery devices” in their own internal memos and research. I worked on that suit and vetted those docs. It’s a verifiable fact too. In unison, what a witches brew for cancer to thrive and diversify….so maybe water as exhaust is preferable to broken carbon chains? Hopefully, I’ll live to see the decline of cancer incidence. I hope so.