174
‘How to greenwash’: propane industry tries to rebrand fuel as renewable
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
174 points (98.3% liked)
World News
32317 readers
988 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Just be aware, hydrogen in almost all its presented formats is basically natural gas. 96% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels.
So whenever you see shit promoting hydrogen, read it as something promoting natural gas/ fossil fuels.
That's climate change denial rhetoric. Same was said about nearly everything until we started to build more wind and solar power. This is just a repeat of that tactic.
Its a simple fact, and your belligerent and ignorant promotion of a technology, which for all practice purposes, is a fossil fuel, is deeply immoral and a significant part of the problem.
Show me any meaningful production of hydrogen from non-fossil fuel sources and we can have a conversation. Until then, you are worse than a climate denialist and a significant part of the problem that the world currently faces.
Investing in hydrogen as a solution is the fossil fuel industries strategy for navigating how they'll still be able to keep doing BAU. Its a direct equivalent of clean coal or DAC. Imaginary technology that doesn't exist and wont at scale when we currently have all the technology we need, with a modicum of social change, do reduce most of the planets carbon impact to sustainable levels.
You are a deeply immoral and irresponsible person for the work that you do on behalf of promoting the farce of hydrogen as a solution for climate change.
Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?
Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.
Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.
As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.