This report was first published on Culture Change as a draft two years ago. A revision appeared in various publications, helping to burst the hydrogen bubble as promoted by George W. Bush, Jeremy Rifkin and Arnold Schwartzenegger. You are looking at the very latest edition. - JL

The energy-literate scoff at perpetual motion, free energy, and cold fusion, but what about the hydrogen economy? Before we invest trillions of dollars, let’s take a hydrogen car out for a spin. You will discover that hydrogen is the least likely of all the alternative energies to solve our transportation problems. Hydrogen uses more energy than you get out of it. The only winners in the hydrogen scam are large auto companies receiving billions of dollars via the FreedomCAR Initiative to build hydrogen vehicles.

Most importantly perhaps, the real problem that needs to be solved is how to build hydrogen trucks, so we can plant, harvest, and deliver food and other goods. However, hydrogen trucks are completely impractical, as we shall see in this report.

Much of what follows is based on the excellent Oxfam analysis of the complexities involved in Cuba and its food production reforms.

When you read articles that promise renewable energy, go to the library and pore over old Popular Science and Scientific American magazines. You’ll see a lot of Gee-Whiz contraptions that never materialized.

The only information you can trust on matters of science and engineering are peer-reviewed articles in respected journals. And even then you have to be a bit skeptical. For example, the Farrell Science paper on ethanol had to resort to the results of three non-peer-reviewed USDA sponsored papers to come up with a very tiny favorable positive net energy result for ethanol (half of the papers cited).