Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The crisis doesn’t undermine fossil fuels’ material benefits—it spotlights why they remain indispensable and why pretending otherwise is a luxury we can no longer afford. Pragmatic abundance, not ideological phase-outs, is the path to security and prosperity.
The crisis doesn’t undermine fossil fuels’ material benefits—it spotlights why they remain indispensable and why pretending otherwise is a luxury we can no longer afford. Pragmatic abundance, not ideological phase-outs, is the path to security and prosperity.
Recent calls for a more realistic shift from “decarbonization” to “low carbon” suggest that discomfort with ideology-driven climate policy is finally beginning to surface in public debate. For years, climate discussions in many countries have been dominated by abstract targets, slogans, and numerical commitments. Yet behind these lofty ideals lies a deeper and more practical question:
Have we come to understand energy far too narrowly?
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026 have made that question impossible to ignore.
Today, under the banner of decarbonization, energy is often treated as if it were synonymous with electricity. Public discussion tends to focus on how to generate electricity without carbon emissions, how quickly electric vehicles can replace conventional cars, or how far renewable electricity from wind turbines and solar panels can expand. These are important questions, but they are not the whole picture. From the perspective of a chemical engineer, reducing the energy debate to electricity alone is equivalent to seeing only half of civilization.
Fossil fuels are not merely inputs for electricity generation. They are also indispensable raw materials for the modern industrial world. In addition to supporting transportation systems, more than 6,000 products that sustain daily life—including clothing, medical equipment, fertilizers, plastics, synthetic fibers, housing materials, detergents, packaging, and countless industrial components—owe their existence to the material benefits of fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas are not simply burned; they are transformed into the feedstocks from which modern life is built.
This distinction is crucial. When policymakers and activists speak as though the problem can be solved simply by replacing fossil-fuel-based power generation with renewable electricity, they overlook the material foundation of modern civilization. Electricity alone cannot replace the petrochemical chains that support medicine, sanitation, food production, logistics, communication devices, transportation, and housing. Even a society that succeeds in electrifying much of its transport and power system would still face the question of how to secure the immense range of materials now derived from fossil resources.
That is why the petrochemical industry deserves far more attention than it usually receives in climate discussions. Fossil-fuel feedstocks are processed into basic petrochemical products such as ethylene and propylene, which then branch out into thousands of derivative products. This vast network of transformation supports not only clothing, food, transportation, and housing, but also the medical and sanitary systems upon which public health depends. In every sense, it forms part of the very fabric of modern civilization.
Once we understand this, it becomes obvious that a disruption in fossil-fuel supply would mean far more than higher gasoline prices or temporary pressure on power generation. If supplies were seriously interrupted, the consequences would reach into nearly every corner of daily life. The clothes we wear, the medicines we take, the smartphones we use, the fertilizers that sustain agriculture, and even the containers and packaging that transport food and medical goods would all be affected by shortages of raw materials.
The modern world is not merely powered by fossil fuels; it is materially structured by them. This is why recent tensions in the Strait of Hormuz have such profound significance.
The issue is not limited to geopolitics, tanker traffic, or fluctuations in energy prices. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most critical chokepoints in the global energy system, and instability there exposes just how vulnerable advanced societies remain. When supply routes are threatened, what is at stake is not only energy security in the narrow sense, but also the continuity of the material systems that sustain ordinary life.
In the spring of 2026, the gap between ideology and reality became visible all at once. Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, together with the stark reminder that some countries, such as Japan, rely on finite imported fossil-fuel supplies measured in days, were not merely statistics.
They were a warning about the fragility of everyday life itself. Numbers like these may appear dry and technical, but behind them lies a simple truth: if supply chains are strained for long enough, the effects will be felt not only in fuel markets but across the full range of goods on which modern society depends.
What had long been obscured under the rhetoric of decarbonization was suddenly illuminated by crisis. The “thickness of civilization” became visible again. By this I mean the dense, interconnected, and often invisible material network that supports human well-being: industrial chemistry, manufacturing, transportation, sanitation, communications, healthcare, agriculture, and construction. These are not marginal or optional features of modern life. They are its substance. And this crisis revealed that more than 6,000 products essential to daily life could be placed at risk at the same time.
None of this means that environmental problems should be ignored, or that societies should abandon efforts to reduce waste, improve efficiency, and pursue cleaner technologies. But it does mean that energy policy must begin from a more honest understanding of reality. A civilization cannot be sustained on slogans. Nor can policymakers responsibly design the future while pretending that fossil fuels are nothing more than a dirty legacy to be discarded. They are also part of the material infrastructure of life as we know it.
The real challenge, therefore, is not to deny this dependence, but to manage it wisely. A mature energy policy should aim not at simplistic moral purity, but at resilience, prudence, and realism. It should ask how societies can preserve the quality of life, maintain stable supply chains, reduce unnecessary waste, and use limited resources intelligently. It should also recognize that technological transition takes time, and that forcing change without regard for material realities can produce shortages, instability, and needless harm.
To face reality is not an act of resignation. On the contrary, it is the most sincere and forward-looking course of action. It means acknowledging the tension between ideals and practical necessity, while continuing to take steady and responsible steps. From that starting point, we can begin to redesign energy policy in a way that is both sustainable and humane—one that respects the environment without forgetting the material foundations of civilization itself.
Ronald Stein, P.E. is a CO2 Coalition engineer, energy consultant, speaker, author of books and articles on energy literacy, environmental policy, and human rights, and Founder of PTS Advance, a California based company.
What’s New!
The CO2 Coalition has released its new episode of the Climate DebriefPodcast featuring Jim Steele. Watch the full video on YouTube here!
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is one of cinema’s most enduring classics, a sentimental yet profound exploration of how one person’s contributions ripple through a community. The story’s alternate timeline, where George Bailey never existed, paints a grim picture of what life would be like without his sacrifices. Inspired by this tale, let’s imagine an alternate reality of a different sort—a world where fossil fuels never existed. Could we, like George’s Bedford Falls, find ourselves in a global Pottersville?
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is one of cinema’s most enduring classics, a sentimental yet profound exploration of how one person’s contributions ripple through a community. The story’s alternate timeline, where George Bailey never existed, paints a grim picture of what life would be like without his sacrifices. Inspired by this tale, let’s imagine an alternate reality of a different sort—a world where fossil fuels never existed. Could we, like George’s Bedford Falls, find ourselves in a global Pottersville? Let’s explore how the absence of fossil fuels might affect the very fabric of our lives, from economic systems to daily conveniences, and why this thought experiment is crucial in evaluating the ongoing calls to abandon these energy sources.
Scene 1: Transportation Without Fossil Fuels
One of the most visible impacts of fossil fuels is their role in modern transportation. Cars, planes, and ships—all powered by gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel—would vanish in a world without fossil fuels. In this alternate reality, instead of hopping into a car to visit friends or family for the holidays, travel would require far more time and effort. Trains, powered by steam or early versions of electricity, would exist but at limited capacity. Without affordable energy-dense fuels like gasoline, only the wealthiest could afford the luxury of travel.
Imagine Bedford Falls, now a sprawling Pottersville, devoid of the bustling roadways filled with cars. Residents would likely still rely on horses and carts to navigate dirt roads. A trip to neighboring communities for essential goods would take days instead of hours. Consider George Bailey’s iconic scene running through town to save the Building and Loan—here, he’d be slogging through muddy paths, unable to reach the townsfolk in time.
Scene 2: Industry and Employment
In the real Bedford Falls, George Bailey helps provide affordable housing through the Building and Loan. In our fossil-fuel-free world, affordable housing itself would be a nearly impossible dream. Industrial processes—construction materials like cement, steel, and glass—are all heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Without them, the scope of construction would revert to pre-industrial techniques: wood, stone, and limited quantities of brick.
Manufacturing jobs, which underpin much of the middle-class prosperity of George’s America, would never have existed. Instead of large factories producing goods for regional or global markets, small workshops might churn out handmade products—slowly and expensively. Bedford Falls residents, unable to afford manufactured goods, would rely on self-sufficiency or barter. The hard-won prosperity George fights for in his community would be replaced by subsistence-level living.
Scene 3: Agriculture and Food Supply
The impact on agriculture is another glaring area of transformation. Modern agriculture depends on machinery powered by fossil fuels and fertilizers synthesized from natural gas. In a world without these advancements, farming would be labor-intensive, with productivity akin to 18th-century subsistence farming.
George’s Bedford Falls grocer, Gower’s, might be stocked with a meager selection of locally grown vegetables and grains. Exotic imports like bananas or coffee, enabled by fossil-fuel-powered shipping, would be nonexistent. Seasonal shortages would be a grim reality, and even slight droughts or floods could result in famine. For the people of Bedford Falls, food security would teeter on the edge of disaster, and George Bailey might find himself not at the Building and Loan but toiling on a small farm to keep his family fed.
Scene 4: Healthcare and Medicine
George Bailey’s alternate reality without fossil fuels would also strip away much of modern healthcare. Consider this: medical equipment, transportation for emergency care, and pharmaceutical production are all deeply reliant on fossil fuels. Everything from life-saving antibiotics to syringes and IV bags requires petrochemical derivatives.
In our imagined world, Dr. Campbell in Bedford Falls wouldn’t have the resources to provide much beyond rudimentary care. The polio vaccine, dependent on sophisticated manufacturing and distribution chains, wouldn’t exist. The mortality rate for childbirth, infections, and injuries would soar. Clarence the angel might find George’s absence compounded by the deaths of friends and family who, in the real timeline, would have been saved by modern medicine.
Scene 5: Daily Life Without Modern Conveniences
Let’s zoom in on a typical day in Bedford Falls. Without fossil fuels, there would be no central heating from oil or natural gas. Residents would chop firewood or rely on coal (itself a limited resource in this hypothetical scenario). Electricity, if available at all, would come from hydro or early wind power, resulting in a patchy and unreliable grid.
The Baileys’ family home would be lit by candles or kerosene lamps, with George struggling to read financial ledgers after dark. Mary’s cooking might be done over a wood-burning stove, with meals taking hours to prepare. Refrigeration, an unsung hero of modern life, wouldn’t exist, forcing people to salt, smoke, or can food to preserve it—a time-consuming and imperfect solution.
Imagine Bedford Falls’ residents bundled in multiple layers during the winter, huddling together for warmth. Without fossil fuels, their standard of living would regress to pre-industrial levels, where mere survival consumed most of their time and energy.
Scene 6: Education and Communication
Education, the backbone of a thriving community, would also suffer. Without cheap and reliable energy, schools would be dimly lit, unheated, and sparsely equipped. Children might need to contribute to farm work or family businesses instead of attending school regularly. Advanced subjects like chemistry or engineering would be nearly impossible to teach without modern tools and materials.
Communication would revert to handwritten letters delivered by horseback. News would travel slowly, and international correspondence would be a rare luxury. Bedford Falls’ residents, cut off from the wider world, would live isolated lives, unable to benefit from shared knowledge or cultural exchange.
Scene 7: Environmental Irony
Advocates for abandoning fossil fuels often highlight their environmental toll. Yet, in a world without them, we’d see a different kind of environmental degradation. Without synthetic fertilizers, agricultural expansion would devour vast tracts of forest to meet basic food needs. Heating with wood would result in widespread deforestation, and rudimentary industries might still pollute waterways without modern environmental regulations.
Ironically, while fossil fuels have undeniable environmental costs, their absence wouldn’t guarantee a pristine Earth. Instead, we’d face the paradox of localized environmental destruction on an immense scale, driven by humanity’s desperate attempts to compensate for the loss of energy-dense fuels.
The Ripple Effect
Like George Bailey’s absence in Bedford Falls, the absence of fossil fuels ripples outward, reshaping every facet of human life. The conveniences and advancements we take for granted today—from air travel to advanced medicine—rest on the foundation of abundant, affordable energy. Dismissing this reality, as many climate policies implicitly do, risks plunging modern societies into an energy poverty akin to George’s grim alternate timeline.
While it’s fashionable to dream of a future powered by renewables, these energy sources face fundamental limitations. Wind and solar are intermittent, land-intensive, and reliant on fossil-fueled supply chains for their manufacture, transport, and installation. Imagining a world without fossil fuels isn’t just a hypothetical exercise—it’s a warning against the hubris of dismantling systems without fully understanding the consequences.
Conclusion: Remembering Our George Bailey
In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey realizes that his sacrifices and hard work were not in vain—they built a community that thrived because of him. Similarly, fossil fuels have been the “George Bailey” of the modern world, powering our transition from subsistence to abundance.
As we confront the challenges of energy policy and climate change, we should take a lesson from Bedford Falls. Instead of demonizing the energy sources that built our world, we should seek balanced solutions that preserve the benefits of modernity while addressing genuine environmental concerns. A world without fossil fuels might look idyllic in the abstract, but in practice, it would resemble a dystopian Pottersville—harsh, impoverished, and unrecognizably bleak.
Fossil fuels, like George Bailey, are far from perfect, but without them, our modern “wonderful life” would never have come to be.
The July Fourth week will be energetic coming and going. The celebration is another reminder that modern life revolves activities that naturally emit the “gas of life”—carbon dioxide.
Peak demand? No, just the opposite. Record driving, flying, and cruising; Record grilling; Record fireworks.
The July Fourth week will be energetic coming and going. The celebration is another reminder that modern life revolves activities that naturally emit the “gas of life”—carbon dioxide.
Peak demand? No, just the opposite. Record driving, flying, and cruising; Record grilling; Record fireworks.
Driving
“Nearly 71 Million People Expected to Travel over July 4th Week,” the American Automobile Association predicts. “This year’s extended Independence Day forecast exceeds pre-pandemic numbers, sets new record.” Here is the full story:
AAA projects a record 60.6 million people will travel by car over Independence Day week – that’s an additional 2.8 million travelers compared to last year. This year’s number also surpasses 2019 when 55.3 million people traveled by car over July 4th week….
Affordability? Still strong despite Biden’s best efforts to reduce oil supplies.
Gas prices are lower than last year when the national average was $3.53. Pump prices will likely continue going down leading up to Independence Day. At that point, they will likely level off and remain relatively stable until after Labor Day, similar to last year. An important caveat is hurricane season – underway now – which could affect gas prices should a storm negatively impact Gulf Coast oil production and refining centers.
Flying
AAA also commented on other modes of transportation.
The number of air travelers is also expected to set a new record. AAA projects 5.74 million people will fly to their July 4th destinations. That’s an increase of nearly 7% compared to last year and a 12% increase over 2019. AAA booking data shows domestic airfare is 2% cheaper this Independence Day week compared to last year, and the average price for a domestic roundtrip ticket is $800.
Other Transportation
“More than 4.6 million people are expected to travel by other modes of transportation, including buses, cruises, and trains,” AAA notes. “This category is seeing an increase of 9% compared to last year, but this year’s number is shy of 2019’s figure of 4.79 million.”
The newest luxury transportation is by ship. AAA reports:
Cruising continues its remarkable post-pandemic comeback. This time of year, Alaska cruises are in high demand, making Seattle and Anchorage top domestic destinations. Cruise travelers are also finding deals this summer. With new ships coming onto the market – and going for a premium – some cruise lines have been offering targeted discounts to fill older inventory for remaining cabins.
Grilling
Grilling has seen significant growth in the United States in recent years,” AI summarizes, “with the outdoor cooking industry’s revenue growing to $6.1 billion in 2021, a 14% increase from the previous year.”
According to the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association (HPBA), 80% of U.S. homeowners owned a grill or smoker in 2023, up from 64% in 2019. NPD reports that U.S. consumers purchased more than 21 million grills and smokers between July 2020 and 2022, with 27% of new grill owners citing cooking more at home during COVID as the reason for their purchase.
The North American barbecue grill market is projected to reach $3.2 billion by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.7% from 2022 to 2028. Market trends for electric products are expected to grow at a 5.3% annual rate between 2023 and 2032, driven by the growing interest in home cooking as a hobby or leisure activity.
Fireworks
It’s boomtime with fireworks, with July Fourth being the “big day.” The American Pyrotechnics Association reports:
We expect a banner year for fireworks sales. Despite inflationary pressures, ocean shipping rates have declined since the height of the supply chain crisis during COVID-19, making consumer fireworks more affordable this year by 5-10%.
“Our member companies are reporting strong consumer fireworks sales numbers, and we predict revenues could exceed $2.4 billion for the 2024 fireworks season,” said Julie L. Heckman, Executive Director of the APA.
Forth of July fireworks at Long Beach, California.; Shutterstock ID 112578440
As a reality check for those pursuing net-zero emissions, wind and solar do different things than crude oil. Unreliable renewables, like wind turbines and solar panels, only generate occasional electricity but manufacture no products for society.
The elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is that crude oil is the foundation of our materialistic society as it is the basis of all products and fuels demanded by the 8 billion on this planet.
As a reality check for those pursuing net-zero emissions, wind and solar do different things than crude oil. Unreliable renewables, like wind turbines and solar panels, only generate occasional electricity but manufacture no products for society.
Crude oil is virtually never used to generate electricity but, when manufactured into petrochemicals, is the basis for virtually all the products that did not exist before the 1800s being used at these infrastructures like transportation, airports, hospitals, medical equipment, appliances, electronics, telecommunications, communications systems, space programs, heating and ventilating, and militaries.
Most importantly, today, there is a lost reality that the primary usage of crude oil is NOT for the generation of electricity but to manufacture derivatives and fuels, which are the ingredients of everything needed by economies and lifestyles to exist and prosper.
Energy realism requires that the legislators, policymakers, and media that demonstrate pervasive ignorance about crude oil usage understand the staggering scale of the decarbonization movement. In fact, all the parts and components for wind, solar, and nuclear are made with oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil! Thus, ridding the world of oil will eliminate wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro!
We’ve become a very materialistic society over the last 200 years, and the world has populated from 1 to 8 billion because of all the products and different fuels for jets, ships, trucks, cars, military, and the space program that did not exist before the 1800s.
> If the world governments want to rid the earth of crude oil usage, what’s the backup source that can manufacture refrigerators, tires, asphalt, X-ray machines, iPhones, air conditioners, and the other 6,000 products that wind and solar CANNOT manufacture?
> Crude oil use is essential to human flourishing for the foreseeable future. The pursuit of “net zero by 2050, without first identifying the crude oil replacement, would be one of the most destructive developments in human history.
> Everything that needs electricity to function is made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, such as iPhones, Defibrillators, televisions, X-ray equipment, etc.!
> Without crude oil, there would be nothing that needs electricity!
> Net-zero pledges can potentially worsen climate inequities. For example, wealthy countries, which include some of the largest historical polluters, can fund offset projects outside their borders while continuing to pollute at home.
> In turn, developing nations, which are some of the most vulnerable to and least responsible for the climate crisis, are expected to take much more costly climate actions like transitioning to renewables and electrifying transit.
> Until a crude oil replacement is identified, the world cannot do without crude oil, which is the basis of our materialistic “products” society.
World leaders continue experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that they believe will eliminate the use of the crude oil that made society achieve so much in a few centuries. Without those products made from the petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, the policymakers must be imagining no jets, ships, defense, or space programs!
Over the last 200 years, after the discovery of crude oil, the world populated from 1 to 8 billion. Today, all the electricity generation options available, such as wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear, hydro, coal, and natural gas, are all dependent on the products and components manufactured from crude oil to be able to generate electricity.
Looking back at the history of the petroleum industry, it illustrates that the black cruddy looking crude oil was virtually useless unless it could be manufactured (refineries) into oil derivatives that are now the basis of chemical products, such as plastics, solvents, and medications, that are essential for supporting modern lifestyles. The more than 6,000 products that are based on oil are being used for the health and well-being of humanity and the generation of electricity did not exist a few short centuries ago.
Today, we have more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraft, and more than 50,000 military aircraft that use the fuels manufactured from crude oil. The fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of jets moving people and products, the merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space programs are also dependent on what can be manufactured from crude oil.
For aircraft and ships, just like that, for the diverse options for the generation of electricity, they all utilize parts and components made from the oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil.
Without crude oil, there can be no electricity. All the parts to generate electricity, and all the components needed to use electricity, are all made from the oil derivatives manufactured from raw crude oil. In the pre-1800s, before crude oil, humanity had no electricity.
From this quick refresher on energy literacy, further conversations are needed to discuss the difference between just ELECTRICITY from renewables and the PRODUCTS that are the basis of society’s materialistic world.
At that pressure, the energy that one gets out of one litre of hydrogen is one sixth of the energy one gets out of one litre of gasoline. The Hydrogen Crusade is exorbitant because the costs are unbearable and unsustainable, a ruinous drain on our energy resources.
Those promoting hydrogen as a substitute for carbon fuels are blind to the physical and economic facts, as well as miscontruing CO2 as some kind of demon gas boiling the planet. Thus their crusade is absurd, exorbitant and pointless.
Hydrogen Replacing Carbon Fuels Is Absurd
The absurdity is explained by Sabine Hossenfelder in the video below: Hydrogen Won’t Save Us. Here’s Why. For those who prefer reading, I provide a transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.
Today I want to talk about something light. Hydrogen. Hydrogen is one of the currently most popular alternatives to fossil fuel in transport. Many companies and nations have put money into it.
In 2021, the number of hydrogen-fueled passenger cars bought in the UK was 12. Does that sound like a booming business? Not exactly. Indeed, a report from the British Science and Technology Committee that just appeared last month warned that “we do not believe that [hydrogen] will be the panacea to our problems that might sometimes be inferred from the hopes placed on it”.
Ouch. So what’s the deal with hydrogen? Hope or hype? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Hydrogen Basics
Hydrogen is the first element of the periodic table. If you mix it with oxygen and put fire to the mixture you get water. This reaction releases energy, so if you do it under controlled conditions, you can drive a motor or turbine with it. The only exhaust you get is pure water, no carbon dioxide, no nitrogen oxides, no particulates, no radioactive waste, no chopped-up birds. It’s really difficult to complain about pure water.
But let’s not give up that easily, certainly we can find something to complain about. For example, hydrogen is a gas that, at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature, takes up a lot of volume, and it’s somewhat impractical to drag a zeppelin behind your car. That’s why to store and transport hydrogen, one compresses it by putting it under a lot of pressure. Typically, that’s something like 700 bar, or about 700 times atmospheric pressure.
At that pressure, the energy that one gets out of one litre of hydrogen is one sixth of the energy one gets out of one litre of gasoline.
This means if you power a car with hydrogen, one needs more litres of hydrogen than one needs litres of gasoline to cover the same distance. But litres are a measure of volume. The amount of energy you get out of hydrogen per mass is about twice as high as what you get from gasoline. Then again, since the hydrogen must be kept under high pressure hydrogen tanks tend to be heavy compared to gasoline tanks. When everything is said and done, hydrogen-powered cars end up being somewhat heavier than gasoline-powered ones, but it’s not such a big difference.
Okay, but how do you get the energy out of the hydrogen? The technology for this isn’t new, it’s been around for more than 200 years. The first hydrogen fuel cell was developed by William Grove in 1839 but it was only in the 1960s that two engineers at General Electric proposed a smart way to go about it. They developed what’s now called a Proton Exchange Membrane. Those keep the hydrogen and oxygen largely separate and allow chemical reactions only at the membrane. That way it’s much easier to control the reaction which also makes the system safer.
Those hydrogen fuel cells were then further developed by NASA. One of the first uses was on the Gemini spacecraft, which was launched in the mid-1960s. They were later also used on the Apollo spacecraft that carried astronauts to the moon and for the space shuttle. The International Space Station uses hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity and also to produce drinking water for the astronauts on board.
The Hydrogen Market
So, hydrogen fuel cells have been around for a long time, but they’ve never been particularly popular. One of the reasons has certainly been that there was simply no need for them, because fossil fuels are considerably more convenient. Unfortunately, they have side-effects, which is why companies like Hyundai and Toyota have been selling hydrogen-fuelled cars for about a decade. BMW, Ford, and other automobile giants have plans for hydrogen cars, and some governments are looking at hydrogen to power their transit systems, for example Scotland and Germany.
The UK with its measly 12 sales in 2021, I admit, is a particularly sad example. For one thing, that’s only passenger cars. They also put about 50 hydrogen-powered busses on the road. And globally the market doesn’t look quite as dire. In total, about 16 thousand hydrogen powered cars were sold in 2021, about three thousand 500 of those in the US. The total number of new cars sold in 2021 was about 67 million, so at the moment it’s about one in four thousand new cars that’s hydrogen powered. It’s a small market, but it’s an existing market.
Some plans are extremely ambitious. For example, in May last year, the European Union rolled out a strategy called REPowerEU, with the goal of replacing up to 50 billion cubic meters per year of imported Russian gas with hydrogen. This’d mean replacing almost 10 percent of the EU’s total gas consumption with hydrogen power. That’s substantial.
It’s not only Europe. Many other countries are also investing in hydrogen production facilities, that includes Japan, Canada, Egypt, China, and the United States. For example, in March last year, the company Green Hydrogen International unveiled plans to create a plant in Texas that’ll use 60 Gigawatt of electricity from solar and wind to produce 2 point 5 billion kilograms hydrogen per year. It’ll be called Hydrogen City. And Individual companies are investing in it, too. Microsoft, for example, wants to use hydrogen fuel cells as climate-friendly backup generators for their data centres. As you see, hydrogen is booming. But.
The Colors Of Hydrogen
The first “but” that might spring to your mind is: But where does the hydrogen come from? Now, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Indeed, three quarters of all normal matter in the universe is hydrogen, but you normally can’t buy it in the supermarket. So where do you get it? Naturally occurring geological deposits of pure hydrogen are rare on Earth. Most of the hydrogen we have is bound, either in water or in methane. And this is where the problem begins. Because you have to break those chemical bonds to get the hydrogen and that requires energy.
Hydrogen is therefore not really a source of energy, but a storage system. You use energy to create it in its pure form, transport it, and then you release this energy elsewhere.
How environmentally friendly this is depends strongly on where the hydrogen comes from. To keep track of this, scientists are using a color scale. You all know this, but this is YouTube, so I have to say this anyway: The hydrogen itself has always the same color, which is transparent. This color scale is just a way of keeping track of the production method.
On this color scale, the rare, naturally occurring hydrogen is white. Hydrogen obtained from water using coal or lignite has the colors black or brown, respectively. Its production emits carbon dioxide and methane; both are greenhouse gases. Grey hydrogen is derived from methane and water; this also produces carbon dioxide and usually some of the methane escapes.
At the moment, almost all hydrogen is produced in one of those ways by using fossil fuels. According to the World Energy Council, in 2019 more than 95 percent of the hydrogen worldwide was assigned one of those colors, black, brown, or grey. This releases about 830 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. That’s 2 percent of the total global emissions and about the same as air traffic.
But there are more colors on the hydrogen rainbow. Next there is blue. Like grey hydrogen, blue hydrogen is made from methane, but the carbon dioxide is stored underground and does not escape into the atmosphere. This method is currently only used for1 percent of hydrogen production, but it could be expanded. The industry association Hydrogen Council has touted blue hydrogen as a climate-friendly initiative. It’s not entirely irrelevant, so let me mention that this council was created by the oil and gas industry. Many of its members have a financial interest in switching from natural gas to hydrogen produced from natural gas.
So maybe one shouldn’t take their argument that blue hydrogen is climate-friendly for granted. Hasn’t someone looked into this? Well, since you asked, in 2021, two American researchers calculated the amount of greenhouse gases released by grey and blue hydrogen technology. They not only took carbon dioxide into account, but also methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas. To make comparisons easier, the greenhouse effect from methane is usually converted to a carbon dioxide equivalent, which is the amount of carbon dioxide that would have the same effect.
They came to the conclusion that grey hydrogen has a carbon dioxide equivalent of about 550 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour and blue only slightly less, 486 grams. That’s about the same as the emissions you get from using natural gas directly to generate electricity. Part of the reason blue hydrogen performs so poorly is that not all the carbon dioxide from hydrogen production is captured and stored. Another reason is that the process of storing the carbon dioxide also requires energy and leads to carbon dioxide emissions. The authors estimate that under the most favourable conditions, it might be possible to reduce those emissions to around 200 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour by using renewable energy sources. So blue hydrogen doesn’t help much with climate protection.
Then there is green hydrogen, which is produced from water using renewable energy. Again that sounds good, and again, it’s not that simple. According to a calculation by researchers from Australia, greenhouse gas emissions from green hydrogen produced with solar energy are ideally about a quarter of those from grey hydrogen. Under realistic conditions, however, they find that emissions are comparable, particularly due to fluctuations in solar radiation that make hydrogen production inefficient. There is neither data nor any study for hydrogen production from wind but you expect this method to suffer even more from fluctuations because wind is far less reliable than sunlight.
And since these methods are inefficient, they are also expensive. Indeed, producing hydrogen with solar and wind is pretty much the most expensive way you can do it, according to a review in 2019. Now maybe those costs will go down a bit as the technology improves. But seeing that the biggest problem is that energy input fluctuates I doubt it’ll become economically competitive with the “dirty” hydrogen. This problem can be fixed by using nuclear power to generate hydrogen which has been assigned the colors pink and purple. A few projects for this are underway but it’s early days and nuclear power isn’t exactly popular.
OK, so we have seen that it isn’t all that clear whether hydrogen is climate friendly, and also, it’sexpensive. And this is only the production cost. It doesn’t include the entire infrastructure that’d be necessary to fuel a fleet of hydrogen cars. Remember you have to keep the stuff at several hundred bars and you can’t just use a normal gas station for that.
Water Supply
Let’s move on to the next problem that might come to your mind: where do we get the water from? From a distance, the world has no shortage of water, but freshwater can be scarce in certain regions of the planet. According to estimates from researchers at the University of Delaware, however, water supply issues probably won’t stand in the way of a hydrogen economy. They looked at a scenario in which we replace 18 percent of fossil fuels with hydrogen, and found that this would require about 2 percent of the amount of freshwater that’s currently used for irrigation.
Watch out, this figure has a logarithmic scale. You also see on this figure that using fossil fuels requires freshwater too, for cooling, mining, hydraulic fracturing, and refining, and it’s currently actually more than the projection for hydrogen. That’s 2 percent on the global average, but in some regions the fraction can be higher. For example, estimates for Australia are that you’d need about 4% of the water amount used for irrigation. So that seems a manageable amount, but it’s something to take into account if you want to make this work.
The Cold Start Problem
Another problem with water is that it can freeze. This is why you shouldn’t leave the beer in the car in the winter. And it’s also why hydrogen fuel cells like it warm. If the temperature drops more than a few degrees below zero, the water that the fuel cells create at start will freeze immediately, which swiftly degrades the membranes and tubes. It’s known as the “Cold Start” problem of hydrogen fuel cell. And, no, you can’t just pour antifreeze into it, remember the water is created in the fuel cell. So, you’ll either have to stay in California or keep your car warm. The solution that manufacturers pursue at the moment is pre-heating systems.
Rare Metal Shortages
But the biggest problem for a hydrogen economy may be making those proton exchange membranes to begin with. It’s not because it’s so difficult, but because they’re made of platinum and iridium. Platinum you may have heard of, it’s an expensive noble metal that’s also used for jewellery. The reason it’s expensive is that it’s rare. Iridium is also a noble metal. It’s so rare that most people have never heard of it. Both of those metals are difficult to replace with anything else in the hydrogen fuel cells.
That’s a problem because it means that the entire hydrogen economy hinges on the availability of those two metals. There’s only so much of those in the world and they are only in very specific geological formations. Almost all the platinum and iridium supply comes from only three countries: South Africa, Russia, and Zimbabwe, and colonies have gone out of fashion recently. China, which has invested heavily in hydrogen technology is already feeling the consequences.
And we’ve only just barely begun with building the hydrogen economy. This issue has been highlighted recently in reports from various international organizations including the International Energy Agency and the World Bank. According to the business consulting group Wood Mackenzie, the increased demand for platinum might be manageable in the near future, but it looks like by 2030 demand for iridium will be several times higher than the supply. I don’t know much about trade, but I think this isn’t good.
It’s possible to make fuel cells somewhat more efficient and decrease the demand for those rare metals. But this situation isn’t going to change and iridium isn’t going to move to the US even if you ask it really nicely.
Have we learned nothing from the Hindenburg Disaster?
Hydrogen Embrittlement
One final problem that’s worth mentioning is that hydrogen is just nasty to deal with. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. If you squeeze it into a tank, it’ll creep into the walls of the tank. That destroys the chemical structure of the material and makes it brittle. It’s called “hydrogen embrittlement”. For this reason, hydrogen tanks must be thick and specially coated, which makes them both heavy and expensive. Like the cold start problem, this one’s basic chemistry and isn’t going to go away. And the need to keep the hydrogen under pressure makes the stuff inconvenient to handle. The city of Wiesbaden in Germany, for example, recently retired its six new hydrogen powered buses because the filling station broke down, sinking a few million Euro.
Summary
In summary, hydrogen production at the moment has a high carbon footprint because it’s almost exclusively done using fossil fuels. Reducing the carbon footprint of hydrogen production seems difficult according to estimates, but at the moment there’s basically no real-world data. Hydrogen produced by wind and solar will almost certainly not be economically competitive with that derived from fossil fuels but using nuclear power might be an option. Building infrastructure for a transport-system based on hydrogen would eat up a lot of money. It seems that rare metal supply for hydrogen fuel cells is going to become a problem in the near future which won’t help making the technology affordable. Keeping hydrogen stored and under pressure adds to the cost and makes those systems heavy which isn’t great for transport. And finally, hydrogen-powered cars don’t like cold temperatures.
So. Well, it seems to me that the British Science and Technology committee is right. A hydrogen economy isn’t a panacea for climate change. Indeed, the French have a similar committee that likewise concluded “l’hydrogène n’est pas une solution miracle”. I must admit that I was considerably more upbeat about hydrogen before I started working on this video. How about you? Did you learn something new? Did you change your mind? Let us know in the comments.
Summation: The Hydrogen Crusade is absurd because hydrogen is not an energy source, but a storage system, and natural properties and scarcities will not be suspended for the sake of human ambitions.
The White House has awarded $7 billion dollars of tax money for the first seven U.S. hydrogen hubs. They say it will leverage $43 billion in private money. Yet, the rules only require a 50/50 match. We are far more likely to see a $7 billion private money match. Why put more of your own money at risk than you have to?
It is risky because green hydrogen costs at least five times more to produce than the methane reforming method, which makes 95% today. That is $5 versus $1. All of the regional hydrogen infrastructure will need to be built, and the future hydrogen demand will need to be created and incentivized. Because green hydrogen still costs more. Even with upfront and downstream aggressive subsidies.
Because it is tax money we don’t have, it is added to our unprecedented $33 trillion dollar national debt. We are at an inflection point where interest payments are more than our national defense budget. Debt interest is projected to be more than a trillion dollars by the end of the decade. And the Rich Men North of Richmond just keep spending.
It costs $5 or more to produce green hydrogen through hydrolysis. Which takes super heating, electrocuting, super chilling, and compression. Then additional costs for storage and transportation before it is used somewhere.
And it needs 53 times more water than hydrogen made. Not a good idea in dry California, which is awarded $1 billion in giveaway hub money.
All of this takes lots of full-time energy. Not the part-time unpredictable electricity wind and solar make. Let’s not talk about our stressed national grid with regular blackout and shortage notices. Or the fact that 60% of the electricity made for the grid comes from coal and natural gas.
Paying for full-time and part-time generation, and thousands of miles of transmission wires will at least triple our electric rates in no time.
This hurts the poor the most, because they use the biggest amount of their budgets on energy costs. Stressing their lives, hurting their ability to live independently. All of this, while Biden and the democrats blather about climate justice and social justice.
We are doing all this subsidizing to stop the addition of the super plant food CO2.
That is greening our earth, regrowing forests the size of France, and increasing crop yields and harvests around the world. To supposedly stop the warming of the planet that started naturally in 1850. As if we can.
The Rich Men North of Richmond are going to waste 100s of billions on green taxpayer giveaways on top of the $9.5 billion upfront hydrogen give away.
Throwing money at a climate emergency that doesn’t really exist is part of Bidenomics. Fueling inflation by spending money we don’t have, fueling high interest rates by fueling inflation.Making it difficult and expensive to harvest the fossil fuels that supply 80% of our energy. And sending 100s of billions, if not trillions, to our main rival and biggest threat, totalitarian, communist China is the Biden way.
Wind, solar, batteries, and soon EVs made in China with forced labor, low-cost coal electricity and little environmental protections.
China burns more than half of the world’s 8.5 billion tons of coal used annually and is building hundreds of coal plants that last 50 to 75 years. I am sure they intend to use them for a few decades or 75 years.
For those that think CO2 emissions are important, China emits more than the U.S. and all the other industrialized nations combined. Including India, which is no slouch when it comes to using coal for power, getting even a larger percentage of their energy from coal than China.
We need to end this crazy fantasy of a centrally forced transition to hydrogen, wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles. It isn’t working and is making everything more costly. Because energy is in everything we eat, buy, use, consume, even Netflix and AI.
Summation: The Hydrogen Crusade is exorbitant because the costs are unbearable and unsustainable, a ruinous drain on our energy resources.
Hydrogen Replacing Carbon Fuels Is Pointless
The greatest insanity is that all of this crusade is unecessary. The delusional premise of the Hossenfelder video is that we and the planet need saving from CO2. When in fact throughout history, atmospheric CO2 changes lag Temperature changes on all time scales; from last month’s observations to ice cores showing climate changes over thousands and millions of years. Nothing in nature can be the cause of an effect if it occurs afterward. A thorough debate on this issue occured recently at Dr. Judith Curry’s website Climate Etc. on the topic Causality and climate. My synopsis is below.
I recommend the discussion thread at climate etc. (on going) as a tutorial for the competing paradigms regarding the CO2 cycle. I gained clarity from the lead author (a frequent and constructive participant) as well others on the core misunderstanding that has plagued such discussions for decades. Some comments are below in italics with my bolds.
First, note that the paper had a narrowly defined scope: to demonstrate from available data that changes in atmospheric CO2 lag rather than lead temperature changes. Because the authors recognized that this finding is contrary to IPCC consensus climate science, appendices were supplied to counter the expected objections crediting human CO2 emissions from hydrocarbons as the main, or sole source of rising CO2 since the Little Ice Age (LIA). As Koutsoyiannis explained in a summary comment near the end:
Demetris Koutsoyiannis September 29, 2023 at 4:54 pm
I think I have rebutted all the different critiques ON MY PAPERS. I am not going to reply to critiques on any other issues related to the issue of climate. Please make your critiques SPECIFIC, by quoting phrases in my papers that you think are incorrect. And before it, please read the papers.
For example you say:
> And that would be the cause of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere?
If you read the paper you will see that we write (p. 17): *What is the cause of the modern increase in temperature? Apparently, this question is much more difficult to reply to, as we can no longer attribute everything to any single agent. We do not claim to have the answer to this question, whose study is far beyond the article’s scope. Neither do we believe that mainstream climatic theory, which is focused upon human CO2 emissions as the main cause and regards everything else as feedback of the single main cause, can explain what happened on Earth for 4.5 billion years of changing climate.*
We have proposed a necessary condition for causality, which is time precedence of the cause over the effect. I hope you accept that necessary condition, am I wrong? We make our inference based on this necessary condition. Your numbers make no reference of time succession. When you find a way to test whether the direction in time is reversed, that will be great. But for now, all this looks to me an unproven conjecture. I hope you can excuse me that, being a Greek, I have to stick to Aristotelian logic.
You also say:
> While there is an elephant in the room, human emissions that released twice as much CO2 as measured in the atmosphere…
If this is the elephant, what is (copying from our paper, p. 25), *a total global increase in the respiration rate of ΔR = 31.6 Gt C/year. This rate, which is a result of natural processes, is 3.4 times greater than the CO2 emission by fossil fuel combustion (9.4 Gt C /year including cement production)*.
My Comment: The confounding issue in all this was identified as the mistaken analogy treating CO2 fluxes as though they are cash transactions between bank accounts. Within that notion, a natural source/sink must net out intakes and releases. Yet as others commented, geobiologists know that both absorption and release can be increasing or can be decreasing. The source/sinks function dynamically, not statically as assumed by the analogy.
What It Means: CO2 flows through Dynamic Reservoirs
The other puzzle piece is described by Ed Berry following his peer-reviewed paper Nature Controls the CO2 Increase II. A summary comment ties his analysis into the above discussion. Early in the thread the point was made that all CO2 sources are involved in supporting the level of atmospheric concentration at any point in time. Ed Berry made this point in this way.
He explained that when you look at the flow of carbon dioxide—”flow” meaning the carbon moving from one carbon reservoir to another, i.e., through photosynthesis, the eating of plants, and back out through respiration—a 140 ppm constant level requires a continual inflow of 40 ppm per year of carbon dioxide, because, according to the IPCC, carbon dioxide has a turnover time of 3.5 years (meaning carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for about 3 1/2 years). 140 ppm divided by 3.5 is 40 ppm CO2.
“A level of 280 ppm is twice that—80 ppm of inflow. Now, we’re saying that the inflow of human carbon dioxide is one-third of the total. Even IPCC data says, ‘No, human carbon dioxide inflow is about 5 percent to 7 percent of the total carbon dioxide inflow into the atmosphere,’” he said.
[Today’s level of nearly 420 ppm means that 120 ppm of inflow is required annually, or 120 +2 ppm if it is to increase as it has been. Where does 122 ppm of CO2 come from? Well, let’s say we can count on 6 ppm of FF CO2 (5%) and the other 116 being non-human emissions.]
Summation: The Hydrogen Crusade is pointless because our carbon emissions do not determine either atmospheric CO2 or the Earth’s temperatures.
In today’s world, environmental concerns have become paramount, prompting businesses in America and Europe to seek revolutionary solutions that are both environmentally friendly and economically viable. In a competitive analysis, it is essential to consider fuel conditioners alongside biodiesel, which is known for burning cleaner than regular diesel.
In today’s world, environmental concerns have become paramount, prompting businesses in America and Europe to seek revolutionary solutions that are both environmentally friendly and economically viable. In a competitive analysis, it is essential to consider fuel conditioners alongside biodiesel, which is known for burning cleaner than regular diesel.
The average consumption of diesel fuel in the United States amounted to around 3.85 million barrels per day in June 2023.
While biodiesel offers environmental benefits, diesel fuel conditioners provide a drop-in solution that requires no change in infrastructure and can make a significant difference in bio-diesel emissions as well. This immediate and impactful option sets fuel conditioners apart.
One such solution gaining attention is diesel fuel conditioners, which have shown an impressive 99 percent reduction in particulate emissions. This remarkable feat sets fuel conditioners apart as a priority solution that demands attention and action.
Not only do fuel conditioners demonstrate a higher level of environmental responsibility compared to traditional diesel, but they also lead to tangible cost savings and enable businesses to make considerable progress with benefits to the environment and the business bottom line.
The benefits of fuel conditioners extend beyond just environmental stewardship. By emulsifying the fuel and sequestering water in the tank, they resolve a major problem in combustion. The burning off of water with fuel results in improved combustion efficiency and reduced emissions. Moreover, fuel conditioners include detergents that eliminate soot and buildup on fuel injectors, enabling the fuel spray to be burned more completely, further enhancing efficiency, and reducing emissions.
One of the key advantages of fuel conditioners is their non-flammable nature, offering an added layer of safety during transportation and storage. Additionally, the value of emulsification in the fuel conditioning process improves lubricity, performance, and maintenance, resulting in a high return on investment for businesses.
Ever since the introduction of the Model T by Henry Ford, human ingenuity and technological advances have resulted in more efficient and cleaner usages of the fuels needed for transportation. Embracing fuel conditioners can drive us towards a cleaner, more sustainable future.
For businesses in need of environmental improvement solutions and those looking to improve their bottom-line profitability, considering SulNOx Eco, or other diesel fuel conditioners, can be a game-changing decision. Embracing such advanced fuel conditioners can drive us towards a cleaner, more sustainable future.
With the recent successes of the fuel conditioner human ingenuity and technological advances are continuing to benefit the environment and the economy. The time has come to acknowledge the significance of fuel conditioners as a disruptive technology that can revolutionize the transportation industry.
In conclusion, diesel fuel conditioners provide a powerful solution for the transportation industry, delivering improvements to the environment and businesses bottom line.
Ronald Stein is an engineer, senior policy advisor on energy literacy for CFACT, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations.”
NYT: ‘Climate change’ May Make Summer Vacation A Thing of the Past!
NYT warns of “scorching heat…fires, floods, tornadoes and hail storms”- August 5, 2023: “This year, everything from scorching heat to fires, floods, tornadoes and hail storms driven by climate change have disrupted the plans of travelers around the world. A summer getaway remains a powerful desire, but it’s at a tipping point…For decades, science has confirmed that unabated climate change will cause more misery, more hardship and cost millions of lives in the years to come. We’re getting a taste of the results this summer. Our relationship to travel has reached a tipping point. What happens when we can’t just vacation through it?”
Climate Depot comment: Despite the NYT’s carefully crafted narrative, tourists do not seem to care about climate change!NYT laments: “Despite all the crises, global arrivals — the total number of tourists who cross a border — are projected to be up 30 percent from last year, according to the EconomistIntelligence Unit,…And tourism is big business. The sector’s growth outperformed global gross domestic product growth by more than 40 percent in 2019, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.”
Climate Depot comment: The New York Times persists in its climate storytelling and suggests people will face “tough decisions” and cope by “perhaps choosing” to stay home and huddle around the air conditioner.
NYT: “Tragic headlines and statistics are prompting hard looks at the nature of tourism: who benefits and who gets to participate. More people will find themselves confronting personal and increasingly tough decisions — and, like Ms. Barber, perhaps choosing a less appealing but more comfortable option: ‘We just all stayed home and huddled in a room with the air-conditioner on,’ she said.”
You can’t escape the orange. That’s what travelers this summer have been reckoning with — swaths of tangerine, traffic cone and burnt sienna on maps indicating record high temperatures around the globe. Four concurrent heat domes from the southern United States to East Asia descended on millions — Phoenix residents enduring 31 days of 110-degree-plus temperatures. Italians in more than a dozen cities under extreme weather warnings. And in South Korea, at least 125 people were hospitalized for heat-related conditions at the World Scout Jamboree.
As the summer travel engine kicked into high gear this year, it wasn’t just the scorching heat affecting carefully laid plans. There were also fires, floods, tornadoes and hail storms. Eight inches of rainfall left parts of Vermont coping with catastrophic floods. Tens of thousands of people, including thousands of tourists, had to evacuate islands in Greece because of wildfires. (Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Wednesday offered a free weeklong stay in 2024 to those travelers affected — in spring or fall.) The popular music festival Awakenings canceled a date in the Netherlands because of concern over hail, lightning and thunderstorms.
Increasingly dangerous weather now hits classic summer destinations, with conditions growing more erratic, expensive and deadly. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States has experienced four climate disasters since May, each causing over a billion dollars in damages. The National Park Service estimates that more visitors have died of heat-related causes since June than do in an average year. The indirect toll is almost certainly higher: A recent study found that summer heat waves killed 61,000 people in Europe last year.
But even if the idea of a summer getaway remains culturally resilient, is it still practical? Where to go is certainly less obvious — you can’t hide from reality when reality is 100-degree seawater, or a raging wildfire.
For decades, science has confirmed that unabated climate change will cause more misery, more hardship and cost millions of lives in the years to come. We’re getting a taste of the results this summer. Our relationship to travel has reached a tipping point. What happens when we can’t just vacation through it?
Strong demand, migrating patterns
Despite all the crises, global arrivals — the total number of tourists who cross a border — are projected to be up 30 percent from last year, according to the EconomistIntelligence Unit, a research division of the media company. The World Tourism Organization reports that travel to Europe is now at 90 percent of prepandemic levels.
And tourism is big business. The sector’s growth outperformed global gross domestic product growth by more than 40 percent in 2019, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. That same year it employed 333 million people worldwide — equivalent to one in 10 jobs — and accounted for more than 10 percent of the global economy.
In the absence of national or unified support, planning may fall to corporations with pockets deep enough to marshal resources at scale. “Disney is sort of a poster child for a really good way to handle large numbers of people effectively,” said Daniel Scott, a professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo, in Canada. He suggested that the business model of globalized tourism may start to mimic the integrated resorts typified by Disney, where a single entity owns the infrastructure and controls visitor experiences with greater predictability.
It’s impossible to know where we go from here. But the cognitive dissonance of summer travel in a warming world is catching up to us. Tragic headlines and statistics are prompting hard looks at the nature of tourism: who benefits and who gets to participate. More people will find themselves confronting personal and increasingly tough decisions — and, like Ms. Barber, perhaps choosing a less appealing but more comfortable option: “We just all stayed home and huddled in a room with the air-conditioner on,” she said.
Lauren Sloss and Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.
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Related Links:
2021 New York Times: ‘Summer Travel Is Back. Earth Can’t Handle It.’ – By Farhad Manjoo – “To cruise or not to cruise? To safari or stay put?…Tens of millions of jobs and trillionsof dollars in economic activity are riding on its return to normality. But that would be a mistake. Tourism should not return to anything like its old, profligate normal. The pandemic has presented the world with an opportunity to reset how we tour this planet, and we should reach for it.”
CNN July 27, 2023 commentary by University College London Emeritus Prof. Bill McGuire: “Maybe we should take a lesson from the pandemic, when staycations were pretty much enforced…Vacations need to return to their roots, or at least move in that direction. In particular, holidays abroad need to be decoupled from flying, which means — as far as Europe is concerned — train, car or coach.
The familiarity and convenience of being close to home can bring its own contentment, comfort and well-being…What’s more, we’ll be able sunbathe in the warm glow of knowing we have slashed the size of our carbon footprint — making us part of the solution rather than the problem.”
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July 2023: ‘Is This the End of Summer Vacation?’ – By Andrew Moseman – “In a climate changed world, though, summer is swiftly being rebranded as a time of compounding calamity…The ocean is boiling, and as the world suffers through heat wave after heat wave — adding up to the hottest year on record — it is, quite simply, unpleasant to be outside…Given the increased risk of climate events with the potential to disrupt flights or highways, travelers will need a Plan B or C for how to spend summer vacation…Should we give up on the summer vacation fantasy? The question is not to be considered lightly.”
They’re going after your freedom of movement; they’re going after private car ownership, they’re going after everything it means to be a free person and turning it over to the administrative state.”
Marc Morano comment on banning short airline flights: “You were warned! This is what a climate lockdown looks like. This is what the Great Reset looks like. The climate agenda demands you give up airline travel, car travel, cheap reliable energy, and plentiful food. Net Zero goals are now dictating vehicle shortages to force more people into mass transit.
They’re going after your freedom of movement; they’re going after private car ownership, they’re going after everything it means to be a free person and turning it over to the administrative state.”
France has banned domestic short-haul flights where train alternatives exist, in a bid to cut carbon emissions.
The law came into force two years after lawmakers had voted to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.
The ban all but rules out air travel between Paris and cities including Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, while connecting flights are unaffected.
Critics have described the latest measures as “symbolic bans”.
Laurent Donceel, interim head of industry group Airlines for Europe (A4E), told the AFP news agency that “banning these trips will only have minimal effects” on CO2 output.
He added that governments should instead support “real and significant solutions” to the issue.
Airlines around the world have been severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with website Flightradar24 reporting that the number of flights last year was down almost 42% from 2019.
The French government had faced calls to introduce even stricter rules.
France’s Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which was created by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and included 150 members of the public, had proposed scrapping plane journeys where train journeys of under four hours existed.
But this was reduced to two-and-a-half hours after objections from some regions, as well as the airline Air France-KLM.
French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir had earlier called on lawmakers to retain the four-hour limit.
“On average, the plane emits 77 times more CO2 per passenger than the train on these routes, even though the train is cheaper and the time lost is limited to 40 minutes,” it said.
It also called for “safeguards that [French national railway] SNCF will not seize the opportunity to artificially inflate its prices or degrade the quality of rail service”.
The idea for the ban originally came from a Citizens’ Assembly.
France’s ban on short-haul domestic flights comes into force 23 May.
Under a government decree, any journeys that are possible in less than two-and-a-half hours by train cannot be taken as a flight.
France is also cracking down on the use of private jets for short journeys in a bid to make transport greener and fairer for the population.
Transport minister Clément Beaune said the country could no longer tolerate the super rich using private planes while the public are making cutbacks to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.
Which flights are now banned in France?
The law will mostly rule out air trips between Paris Orly airport and regional hubs such as Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux.
Critics have noted that the cutoff point is shy of the roughly three hours it takes to travel from Paris to the Mediterranean port city Marseille by high-speed rail.
As rail services improve, more routes could be added such as those between Paris Charles de Gaulle and Lyon and Rennes as well as journeys between Lyon and Marseille. They currently don’t meet the criteria for the ban because trains to airports in Paris and Lyon don’t allow passengers to arrive early in the morning or late in the evening.
Connecting flights are unaffected by the new law.
Train services must meet certain conditions to replace flights
The new law specifies that train services on the same route must be frequent, timely and well-connected enough to meet the needs of passengers who would otherwise travel by air – and able to absorb the increase in passenger numbers.
In October 2021, Greenpeace demanded an EU-wide ban on any flights where the rail journey would take under six hours.
So how do you persuade people to take trains and coaches over planes? Well, one way is through banning short-haul flights outright, especially when there are valid bus or train alternatives. And that’s a route that several European countries have already taken – but could more follow suit?
A couple of years ago, a poll found that 62 percent of Europeans would support a ban on short-haul flights. In other words, banning them might not just be a good, environmentally-friendly policy. It could also be pretty popular.
Bloomberg News: Airlines must have enough emissions allowances to cover every metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere on flights starting and ending in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland. … That is effectively going to double their carbon costs over just three years. … Over the next three decades, aviation has to transform itself from a polluting industry — planes are responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions — to a net-zero one. …
Meanwhile, China is still planning to expand its network of airports from 241 (at the end of 2020) to 450 by 2035.
Via Net Zero Watch: “Airlines face an expensive and challenging few decades ahead as climate compliance laws get stricter. … It’s the new reality for flying as airlines face a huge decarbonization challenge and tightening climate-compliance laws… Airlines must have enough emissions allowances to cover every metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere on flights starting and ending in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland.”
“Are we going to have to give up flying to save the planet? Many climate campaigners have been saying so for years, but now Sustainable Aviation – a trade body which represents the UK aviation industry – seems to agree, at least in the case of less well-off passengers.”
The UK aviation industry seems to have nodded along with the idea that some passengers are going to be priced out of the air…Today, it has published a ‘road map’ showing how the industry intends to decarbonise, in order to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – in line with the government’s self-imposed, legally-binding target. It proposes that 14 per cent of emissions cuts will come from ‘demand reduction’ – i.e. potential passengers being put off flying by a rise in the price of airline tickets…The UK aviation industry seems to have nodded along with the idea that some passengers are going to be priced out of the air in order for Britain to reach its net zero target.
WaPo: A report suggests a novel way of curbing climate pollution from air travel: A global tax on people who fly the most, with the proceeds going toward research and development into sustainable aviation fuels…The report from the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation recommends a frequent flier tax that starts on the second flight each person takes per year, at a rate of $9. It would then steadily increase, reaching $177 for the 20th flight in a single year. … Although the authors didn’t attempt to include private jet travel, due to a lack of data, Zheng said that including a similar tax for those using private jets could further shift the burden to the world’s wealthiest consumers. …
The Great Car Reset has arrived: Our transportation system is being intentionally collapsed; (and our freedom of movement is being stripped away) EVs to be forced upon YOU without a vote!
CNN: The US Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to release strict new proposed federal emissions standards for light-duty vehicles that, if implemented, would move the US car market decisively toward electric vehicles over the next decade. The EPA is considering emissions standards that could make up to two-thirds of new passenger vehicles sold in the US electric by 2032, according to a source familiar with the proposal. If implemented, the new greenhouse gas performance standards would start for light-duty vehicles that are model year 2027 and gradually increase through model year 2032. By 2032, the rules would ensure that 64% to 67% of all new-car sales in the US would be electric vehicles, according to the source
Marc Morano: “This is the planned rationing of vehicles. The planned rationing of American cars. That’s the only way this plan makes sense … the only result is going to be shortages of cars and a completely altered used car market. You can look to Cuba to find out what it’s like to have a raging used car market because that’s what we’re looking at here. And you can look to old East Germany. East Germany had their famed Trabant car, where people would have to get on waiting lists for years to get one and that’s what we’re faced with here when the government is going to mandate you can only buy a new electric car. … An Australian bank is announcing it’s not going to give financing for loans to anyone buying a gas-powered car. The World Bank has now announced it wants to set a timetable to stop the funding for — even at the automaker level for gas-powered cars. The powers that be, the corporate world, the bankers, the governments, academia — they’ve decided that gas-powered cars are over and they’re putting all the forces into play to end it without our say in it.
.@EIAgov: “We project that the total electric vehicle share―including BEVs and PHEVs―of on-road LDV stock grows from less than 1% in 2021 to 9% in 2050…” https://t.co/Utd4KZHnB4
(CNN) — The US Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to release strict new proposed federal emissions standards for light-duty vehicles that, if implemented, would move the US car market decisively toward electric vehicles over the next decade.
The EPA is considering emissions standards that could make up to two-thirds of new passenger vehicles sold in the US electric by 2032, according to a source familiar with the proposal.
If implemented, the new greenhouse gas performance standards would start for light-duty vehicles that are model year 2027 and gradually increase through model year 2032.
By 2032, the rules would ensure that 64% to 67% of all new-car sales in the US would be electric vehicles, according to the source.
The EPA’s proposal, which was first reported by The New York Times, comes after California air regulators voted last year to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 and set interim targets to phase these cars out.
EPA spokesperson Tim Carroll did not comment on the specifics of the proposal but said the agency is working on developing new standards “to accelerate the transition to a zero-emissions transportation future, protecting people and the planet,” as directed by a previous executive order from President Joe Biden.
“Once the interagency review process is completed, the proposals will be signed, published in the Federal Register, and made available for public review and comment,” Carroll said.
The new rules could come as soon as Wednesday.
The EPA proposal is a monumental step toward zero-emissions vehicles, coming as the US tries to keep up with other countries racing toward EV adoption, one expert told CNN.
“I believe it’s pretty doable,” said Margo Oge, chair of the International Council on Clean Transportation and a former Obama EPA official. “The industry is there. Europe is ahead of the US, China is ahead of Europe, and these companies are global companies.”
Oge noted that in the US, California is already proposing 70% new zero-emissions vehicle sales by 2030 and other states are planning to adopt California’s rules – meaning much of the US car industry will be transitioning ahead of any proposed federal rule.
Still, the EPA’s proposal takes a different approach from California’s policy. Whereas California is mandating car companies sell a certain percentage of electric vehicles, the EPA would gradually raise greenhouse gas emissions standards to increasingly stringent levels from 2027 to 2032, pushing the industry toward electric vehicles to meet those high standards.
The EPA rule would ensure that the rest of the country and the US car industry would follow California’s lead, Oge said.
Biden has made electrifying the cars that Americans drive a key part of his climate goals. In 2021, the president set a new target that half of all vehicles sold in the US by 2030 would be battery electric, fuel-cell electric or plug-in hybrid.
The US Treasury Department is set to release rules for new federal electric vehicle tax credits on April 18. While these tax credits are complex and could take time for consumers to take full advantage of, experts hope they will help accelerate the transition to EVs in the US.
“Given the industry, the [Inflation Reduction Act] and what companies are doing globally, I just don’t see this number as being out of reach,” Oge said.
The proposed EPA rules will go through a lengthy public comment process and could be changed before they are finalized.
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