For those who still wonder why gas costs 75 cents per quart (doesn't that sound better than $3 per gallon?) yet people keep buying it, media economist Robert Samuelson provides an apt explanation.
More to the point Samuelson analyzes the possibility that oil prices are inflated beyond their economic value, that we have an oil "bubble." Answer: maybe, but probably not a big one, and in any case, conservation and the development new resources are more sensible than hoping for prices to come down.
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Interestingly, Honda recently announced that it's first "fuel cell" hydrogen powered car should be out on the market in the next 3-4 years, and unlike major software companies automobile makers rarely miss their mark. Honda claims that their vehicle will perform at levels competitive with and even better than the average combustion engine. This vehicle will have a cruising range of 350 miles which means that it will be ok when fuel is not available on every street corner for it. The only problem that I see with this new technology is that it is many times cost prohibitive on the front end of the transaction. For instance, the my wife and I would like to lease (motto: throwing money down the toilet in order to decrease material attachment to the world) a hybrid, but a simple 4 door sedan fits into our penny pinching budget much more realistically. I hope that in the future as demand for alternative fuel powered vehicles increases, auto makers will work to keep their costs realistic for those of us not living in Indian Hill.
As you probably know, Bryan D, there's another problem with fuel cells: where do we get the hydrogen? And this is not an issue of having enough hydrogen stations like gasoline stations; it's an issue of making hydrogen. Because we don't have hydrogen wells or mines, we have to make it by separating it from other elements in compounds, usually water. That takes energy, which has to come from somewhere.
So hydrogen is really an energy storage means, not a source of energy. The only way it brings any improvement to our energy situation is if we first develop some other means of getting energy to get the hydrogen separated without using fossil fuels. Otherwise, we just expensively transfer energy from one form to another, yield the same tocic wastes as we would without the transfer.
I'm with you on the cost of the new technology. Much as I'd like a hybrid, it still takes more fuel savings than I can expect to make up the difference in price. A recent South Park suggests that hybrids are bought more for the "smug" factor than actual environmental and economic benefit. The threat of a great cloud of "smug" sweeping from the San Francisco Bay to Colorado was hilarious social satire.
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