By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
Daniel Hannan is the latest to fall for the hydrogen scam:
Never mind Huawei. A greater menace is posed by our looming dependence on China for electric cars. China makes 73 per cent (and rising) of the world’s electric vehicle batteries. It controls the production of the African rare-earth elements that go into each unit. As the West continues to decarbonise, there is a danger that China will become what Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia were in the late twentieth century: a capricious autocracy which, because it can switch off our energy supply, rests its boot upon our windpipe.
Britain no longer has to worry about dodgy Middle Eastern dictators. We are phasing out fossil fuels at breakneck speed. Coal will be banned from our power stations in 2024. The last gas heating system will be installed in 2025. Petrol, diesel and even hybrid cars will be gone by 2035. There is no point in arguing about whether ordering these bans was proportionate; we have made the decision, and industry is already adapting. How absurd it would be, though, to wean ourselves off spoiled Saudi princelings, merely to replace them with Beijing’s “appalling old waxworks”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/18/britain-can-lead-world-transmuting-water-fuel/
He is of course absolutely right about the dangers or relying on Chinese goodwill for dependence on batteries. Anybody with an ounce of common sense, however,would be beating the drum now to delay the suicidal move away from fossil fuels, at least until the hydrogen alternative had become well established.
And he gets it totally wrong when he claims Britain no longer has to worry about dodgy Middle Eastern dictators. Our consumption of oil and gas in fact has barely fallen in the last decade. The reason why we are no longer dependent on the Middle East is the abundant global supply from a variety of countries, thanks to the development of shale technology.
He claims that industry is already adapting, but the auto industry is adapting to electric car development. Are motor manufacturers going to write of tens of billions, dump electric technology and go for hydrogen instead? Of course not.
Similarly, we need to spend tens of billions upgrading the electricity grid in the next few years, if we are to be prepared for the mass uptake of EVs. Is this money also to be written off?
Nowhere is there any recognition by Hannan of the high cost of producing hydrogen, or the cost and difficulties involved in creating a distribution and storage network and adapting household appliances.
These apparently are just minor issues that must not stand in the way of the Great Green Revolution.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 19, 2020 at 10:18AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 