Hydrogen for power

Hydrogen we are told is the miracle fuel.  You see, when it burns, you don't get any nasty carbon dioxide.  All you get is lovely clean water.

However . . .

ll those of you who are older than a certain pre-computer age, you will remember the spirit duplicator.  Without going into the technicalities, you put what you wanted to print into the duplicator, wound the handle, and out came some damp pages with fuzzy violet writing on them.  I say, writing, because you could hand write on them.

I mention this, because in my year 9 Chemistry exam we were given our papers, but before we could get started, a very embarrassed Chemistry teacher announced that

"Question 4 is not very clear.  It should read "What is a fuel?". 

What a swizz!  It clearly said "What is a Fuck?"  This rapidly went round the classroom producing "fucks" all over the place.

The following week, the marked papers came back.  Question 4 had not been done very well at all.  Our teacher said that a fuel was something that could be changed to something else and give out heat.

None of us seem to have learned much at all since that day, but the sad fact is, that if you want to produce energy, you nearly always have to use fuel, and that fuel heats up the planet.

If you take a glass of water, you have zillions of atoms of oxygen joined on to two zillion atoms of hydrogen.  You need quite a lot of energy to separate them into the separate gases, molecules of oxygen and molecules of hydrogen.

You separate the two gases, and then you burn your one zillion hydrogen molecules (two zillion hydrogen atoms) in oxygen to form water and heat.

Hydrogen is a fuel, and far from being the wonder of the century, we are still fucked up.  Big time.

So what can we do?  Well, there are just too many people on the planet.  We could kill off the baby boomers, but as a boomer, I have to tell you I would resent that solution.

We need to grow plants which will remove carbon dioxide from the planet, NOT provide food and NOT provide forest fires.

Make everything out of wood, preferably hand made.  Grow pond weed followed by water lilies, and rhubarb, (we don't want forest fires!) and gradually we could work up to vast areas of rice, which could be used for thatching.  This would tire people out until they were too shagged out (see question 4) to do anything except sleep until sunrise. 

With fewer people, who knows, maybe the planet will have a chance.