A foreseeable future
THEOLOGY. CLIMATE. SCIENCE. Where does water come from?
Water is precious and, out of my taps, it’s expensive. Of all the things that the poor cannot afford, water shouldn’t be one of them. But it is, in many, many places. The Italian fable character Pinocchio had to draw a hundred buckets of water a day from a well to pay for milk for his ill father. His ill friend, Lucignolo, who’d enticed Pinocchio to Toy Town, and been turned into an ass for his indolence, was dying and couldn’t do the work the farmer required of him. Reading Collodi’s tale is a far cry from watching the Disney cartoon.
And foreseeing the future was a gift not bestowed on Lucignolo. Or on us, even?
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, his only son.
No, I can’t prove it, although I do have proof. But people like mobs, and they like crowds to watch Dire Straits concerts, and they like lining The Mall to see King Charles, and they like bandwagons, so I thought I’d just tell you about this bandwagon, so you know there’s one more on it, if it ever gets to a critical density that you feel you want to hop aboard. There is always lots of critical density around.
I believe in water. Here’s what you can do with it:
cook with it
drink it
wash in it
wash with it
dilute other water-miscible things with it, but not everything
make electricity with it
water crops with it
make cement with it
keep engines cool with it
drive mills with it
fish on it
get salt from it
freeze it
drive engines with it
pollute it
Man has yet to come up with a substitute for water. Every synthetic fluid that he comes up with has a purpose: as a degreasing agent, as a solvent, as a high, as an anaesthetic, as a rain-repellent, as an anti-freeze, as a fuel, as an explosive, as a poison. But nothing man has created with his endless ingenuity can substitute for water. H2O.
We split water into its component gases – hydrogen and oxygen. I’ve done it myself, in a chemistry laboratory. You test for hydrogen with a match, and it goes poof. And you test for oxygen with a glowing splint, which bursts into a flame. They used to fill airships with hydrogen, and some of those also went poof.
Before electric cars came along, which, as every electric car owner knows, create zero pollution (a delusion that stems from the maxim out of sight, out of mind and is, at least in part, responsible for the capacity tariff), car-makers dreamed of a vehicle running on hydrogen made from water – and not going poof. Hydrogen is the most abundant stuff in the universe: the night sky is bedecked with little pinpoints of hydrogen, which we call stars. Up in the heavens, hydrogen burns as nuclear fission, like our sun does. But only H-bombs burn by nuclear fission on Earth, and, otherwise, as a fuel, hydrogen burns to produce basically what is made of it – water, plus a few nasty nitrogen oxides, but far less of a problem than the nasty contaminants left after burning oil.
The cost of producing hydrogen is fairly high, but it is said that new techniques, on top of the traditional electrolysis, will bring the cost down to about two dollars a kilo within a few years, and a few years more will halve that figure. Not including rampant inflation, of course.
So, just as man in 1825 told people that the smoke from steam engines just disappears, and oil & gas companies today say there’s enough of what they extract from the Earth to last for the foreseeable future, I wonder whether there is enough foresight to say whether the production and utilisation of vast quantities of hydrogen will one day see a shortage of water. Other than among the poor, that is.
With taxes on people collecting water from the sea, or collecting rain water in their butts. Water butts. With drinking water rationed, and maybe “thirst tests” to see whether people really need a sip of water. The way they had petrol rationing in the war and posters asking pointed questions like Is your journey really necessary? Is your sip really necessary? We had wartime restrictions in the pandemic, and it was the same question: Is your journey really necessary?
How far into the future is the foreseeable future? If we can foresee how much oil and gas we’ll have for the next so many years, how come we couldn’t foresee the climate change era we’re now in? Not going into, but in. Are we all a bit Lucignolo?
Anyhow, we can add one more use for water to our never-ending list: as a fuel source. It may be man’s ingenuity that invented soap, to wash in water, and the throw-away cup, to drink water, and electrolysis to make hydrogen out of water, but who is it that made water? Why is it that we cannot create another synthetic fluid that will do everything that water can do?
Well, maybe it’s because, if we could do that, we’d be God.
Electric cars and hydrogen cars both have the same problem - they need fuel input. You say that electric cars hide their dirty in the polluting electric generation plants (mostly true), but the same is true of hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen fuel requires energy for its making. That same energy from polluting generation plants. Until we build enough solar, wind, tidal, and other renewable sources of power, as well as the infrastructure to store and move that power around, we'll severely limit the amount of electricity or hydrogen that we can put into our cars that is truly "green".