Articles by John McGrath

Fuel cells take a blow

Via Engineer-Poet, the European Fuel Cell Forum -- who you'd expect to be pro-fuel cell -- has dealt a major blow to the idea of fuel cell cars powered by hydrogen. Noting that hydrogen will, under any reasonable assumption, continue to be less efficient and more costly than electricity, the EFCF has decided to abandon the most prominent form of automotive fuel cell, the proton exchange membrane. They have not, however, abandoned fuel cells altogether:

Peak oil and politics

Last week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran part one of a two-part series on how Cuba survived without oil after the fall of the Soviet Union. (Not technically true -- there was oil, just far too little of it.) The next part runs this Sunday and has to do with the redefinition of Cuban medicine in the post-oil world. It's all very fascinating, and it's produced by one of our national treasures, David Suzuki.

“What if I just start snorting baking powder instead?”

Speaking of sequestration: The journal Science points out today that even if we can sequester carbon dioxide, it may have bad side effects -- like, say, poisoning our drinking water. Brilliant.

So the engineering problems for CO2 sequestration are immense, it won't work with existing plants, and even if it works some time in the indefinite future, it might still kill us all. So of course, this is a serious option being discussed by many in Canadian politics and punditry.

Your evening sunshine

This has me smiling: a California family that grows three tons of organic food a year -- on 1/10 of an acre.

I'm sharing this because a) what can I say, I think it's nifty, and b) it points out the problem with apocalyptic thinking.

Humans currently use various resources in horribly inefficient and destructive ways. But that's because of the specific way we prioritize inputs such as labor, capital, energy, etc. Change the priorities, you change the inputs.

In this case, the priority is expressed by the owner of the suburban farm: