Desperate For Energy Alternatives, Europe Pours Billions Into Hydrogen Research
With most of the EU on pins and needles waiting to see if Russia actually turns the gas back on after their maintenance shutdown of Nord Stream 1 this month, the European Commission has approved a 5.4 billion euro package for the research and development of hydrogen power.
Hydrogen is often wrongly hailed as the solution to “climate change” and carbon emissions (which are not a legitimate threat to the planet in any way, as shown by the NOAA’s own temperature data and the mere 1 DEGREE Celsius rise in world temps in the past century).
Hydrogen is a notoriously difficult technology to produce in terms of efficiency. For hydrogen to be completely green, it must be produced by electrolyzing water, which splits into the H2 and O that it is made of instead of producing extra carbon just like gasoline. Hydrogen fuel cells consistently prove to be substandard and lose 30% their energy in the process of splitting H2 from Oxygen, on top of the 26% energy loss from transporting the electrolyzing water.
Why is EU leadership continuing to pursue fairy tale technologies when they already have access to green energy production in the form of nuclear power? While nuclear power is often demonized by environmentalists, it is an actual “zero emissions” source that is already developed and waiting to be utilized. If they actually cared about an immediate reduction in carbon output, governments would stop wasting their time and tax dollars on terribly inefficient windmill farms and dream technologies like hydrogen and focus on “clean” energy sources that are already proven.
The primary downside to nuclear power is the cost, which is around $15 billion per plant. But the EU has already spent $232 billion from 2014 to 2020 on climate change initiatives that have apparently been useless because they are still spreading hysteria about global warming to this day. They could have built dozens of nuclear plants across Europe in that time and been done with it.
But, they won’t do that, because climate change movements are not about science, they are about ideology, and part of their ideology is about bringing down industry and undermining capitalism. Nuclear power doesn’t fit the image and works a little too well for industry, so, they ignore it.
In the meantime, individual European nations are starting to realize they are being set up for disaster in terms of their economies and their ability to provide heat in the colder months. Some are returning to trusty standbys like coal as questions about Russian gas supplies linger.
It appears that the EU is about to be humbled and they are going to have to relearn the nature of priorities. The biggest priority of all is survival, and almost no one in the population is going to care about carbon emissions or hydrogen power research in the midst of an energy crisis in the dead of winter.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 07/17/2022 – 08:45
Zero Hedge’s mission is to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public, to skeptically examine and, where necessary, attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become, to liberate oppressed knowledge, to provide analysis uninhibited by political constraint and to facilitate information’s unending quest for freedom. Visit https://www.zerohedge.com