And the future means...more bondage to Big Oil?

This morning I read about Honda's new hydrogen-fueled car. It's very shiny, and if you live in parts of California, you might be able to lease one for $600 a month. Yikes! I wasn't all that thrilled to read that a tank of hydrogen would only get you about 270 miles. Now my little Civic will go about 400 miles on a tank of gasoline, and the Prius can go more than 500. So right off the bat it's not sounding like such a great deal.

I tried to find out then how much a tank of hydrogen will cost, anyhow. I couldn't find anyone who would say exactly (perhaps I just didn't look long and hard enough?), but I did find a Shell FAQ web page that said this:

How much does hydrogen cost compared to petrol at the present moment?
This is comparing apples and pears. There is no existing commercial market for hydrogen yet. However we have publicly stated that we expect a tank of hydrogen ultimately will get you as far as the same tank filled with petrol for about the same costs.

Hmm...more expensive car that has to have all sorts of high-tech features to keep it from blowing up in an accident (only another way to say lots of stuff that's going to need maintenance, in my mind)...and it's going to cost about the same as gas...and require more fill-ups than an economy car...doesn't sound like such a great deal to me yet.

I have to admit that I am cynical about the whole Hydrogen Economy thing. From what I've seen. Hydrogen is as yet expensive to produce, and although we might one day be able to plug a hydrogen generator into our rooftop solar panels, it would seem to make more sense to just plug an electric car's battery into the solar panel directly.

I think I have a tendency to believe what they said in the film Who Killed the Electric Car--that the Hydrogen Fuel Cell thing isn't the best idea, or the best technology. It's just a way to keep us coming back to them--to keep us paying them for fuel. Over and over and over again. Automobile manufacturers also have something at stake--electric cars typically require very little maintenance, and as also pointed out in that movie, car dealerships make more money from service than from car sales.

I heard the other day that 60% of Americans believe that if we could just drill more (like in ANWR), the price of gas would drop. But if the problem were just that the cost of production for oil is going up, then the oil companies wouldn't be making these huge profits. Of course if the price of oil goes up, the cost of gas will go up. But it doesn't logically follow that profits will automatically increase astronomically as a result. They don't call it Big Oil without cause--the few oil companies there are left after all the mergers and acquisitions are clearly colluding to keep the price of oil up. Given what has happened to the cost of oil since the invasion of Iraq, I am inclined to believe Greg Palast when he said that the war in Iraq wasn't about cheap access to oil--it was about controlling the supply of oil so that the price would go up. There is a reason that we have anti-trust laws on the books. Monopolies are bad for everybody except the people who run them.

As for the car thing...well, I'm still waiting for that plug-in hybrid.

Links:
A different way of looking at this development (and how I found out about it!)
Honda website--New Hydrogen-Fueled Car
Shell's FAQ site
Greg Palast about the Cost of Oil
Plug-In America