Energy and Journalistic Integrity

But seriously, guys, things like this make me so frustrated. If you can't spot what is making mad within the first 20 seconds, then you need to review your high school physics. If you never took high school physics, then you should have. You can't live in the 21st century and critically judge technology and science issues without a real understanding of basic physics.

If you still haven’t figured it out, the second law of thermodynamics claims, loosely speaking, that you can’t get something from nothing. Anyone who claims water as a fuel source is either lying or ignorant. Similar for the claims that hydrogen fuel cell technology is a solution to the energy shortage. Hydrogen fuel cells are NOT energy sources, they are energy storage units. It’s like saying buying a wallet will solve my money shortage problems. Doesn’t make any sense, does it?

So back to the story. The impending energy crisis is looming closer and closer, but we are still ages away from implementing an industrial scale real alternative energy source. There are people hard at work that are dedicating their lives to doing the real science to try to make our future possible. But it’ll be hard work. And adjusting to a post cheap oil economy is going to be very painful. And Americans are still in denial that the end of cheap oil is here.

More on that later, but the thing is that I read these types of news stories all the time, pseudoscientific drivel that makes ridiculous claims being reported as science. And the real problem is that it gives people who can’t see through their BS hope. And hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can make us think we’re safe when we’re teetering on the brink of disaster.

Now more than ever Americans need to hear that there is no magical bullet fix to our energy problems. ANWAR isn’t a fix, it’s a band-aid applied to a missing limb. Corn ethanol isn’t even that. Like I discussed earlier, Hydrogen fuel cells aren’t even an attempt at a solution. The solution ISN’T in waving a magical technological wand that makes it go away, but a larger more comprehensive societal change. And that’s why this story makes me mad.

P.S. I have added a list to the side of articles that I want to write here in the future. It seems every time I write one of these, I think of three more topics to cover. The topics are ranked roughly by what priority they are to write.