Hey so I heard this on the radio this morning. I was so excited, hydrogen cars being sold to the public by 2010! This is great! There are currently only a handfull of hydrogen fuel pumps in the nation this one in D.C. is the first hydrogen pump at a commercial fuel station. The future is now. The answer to foreign fuel dependence is here! There is only one problem that this does not solve and that is pollution. Confused? read on my dear friend.

"The major unanswered questions about hydrogen are not whether you can run a car on it. They are, how do you make it? What is it going to cost? And what is going to be the public investment in infrastructure?" said David Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs at the Sierra Club. The Shell station on Benning Road NE is "devoid of economic reality. [Hydrogen power] doesn't exist in the real world except as a hugely subsidized example of something that the companies want you to see."

Hydrogen is a common element, but it has to be extracted from other sources in ways that can be environmentally damaging. The most common method for producing hydrogen involves burning natural gas, but with natural gas already in increasing demand and short supply, it's not practical to expect it to be a major source for powering vehicles, Hamilton said.

That leads to the next most common way to produce hydrogen: a method that involves burning coal. But that produces vast amounts of carbon dioxide, a "greenhouse gas" that's thought to contribute to global climate change.

I read this and my soaring thoughts plummeted. Is this really true? Is hydrogen gas still so bad for the environment? I'd imagine that it's got to be a lot better for it than what we have now, but how much better? It seems to me that the car and gas companies have only found a way to change the packaging. I was immediately struck by the idea of people protesting cow slaughter while enjoying a lovely meal at McDonalds the next day. Is this just a way to make the average consumer feel better about themselves without actually making any meaningful changes? I sincerely hope not. I hope that the genious Gas and Car minds find a way to produce hydrogen with replenishable and non-polluting resources, or that they find a new fuel that can be produced as an answer to these problems. And please oh please do this before Hydrogen becomes so ingrained in our economy making it just as adverse to change as the Gas is today. There is one other uplifting thought in this whole hydrogen powered future, however, sometime in the next century car fuel prices may actually return to sub $1.00 levels!