For the nominal fee of $50 per ticket, you too can settle in and listen to gas industry propaganda seemingly endorsed by these elected officials:
- Representative Thomas Golden |(D-Lowell) – Division Leader
- Senator Michael Barrett | Senate Chair, Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy
- Representative Jeffrey Roy | House Chair, Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy
Has anyone seen the report they’ll be discussing? Attempts by friends with background and influence to gain access to the report have failed. Attempts to get UMass Lowell to stop charging for this event have failed.
If it’s not common knowledge that the (blue) hydrogen push by energy companies is a way to keep using gas/methane, it should be common knowledge. What are these electeds doing agreeing to this panel sponsored by gas companies and with a $50 plus Evenbrite fee at a public college? As a friend pointed out, the price excludes many, including those neighbors of UMass Lowell who were most affected by the Merrimack gas explosions.
Here is one of my “friends”, making points:
It’s great to see this!
The aspect of all this that I find most interesting — and distressing — is my concern that this attempt by the fossil fuel dinosaurs to hijack hydrogen production threatens what should be a foundation of the world’s energy future.
The obvious and clean way to generate hydrogen is through electrolysis. The chemistry of this is straightforward and was taught in freshman chemistry classes while I was a student in the early 1970s.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element on earth, most commonly found in water, where two hydrogen molecules are bound to a single oxygen molecule. These bonds are broken by applying energy, often in the form of electrical current. The water molecule divides, releasing oxygen and hydrogen as gases. When hydrogen is oxidized (burned), it reverses this reaction, releases energy and produces water.
Incoming solar radiation is far and away the most abundant free-energy source on the planet.
The key for a sustainable hydrogen-fueled economy is to use solar energy to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen is then transported and used as a fuel. When it is burned, it releases energy (the solar energy used to electrolyze it) and water. It’s clean and carbon-free.
One quite viable way to think of this solar->hydrogen->water cycle is as a storage technology for excess solar energy. It is arguably for more straightforward (and therefore affordable) to “bank” excess solar energy as hydrogen than to create ever-more complex and potentially dangerous batteries.
Our government should be investing public funds in creating an infrastructure needed to build out this clean, sustainable, and renewable future. Public funds should NOT be used to perpetuate the fossil-fuel dinosaurs that have already done so much damage.
I’d like more info or nuance regarding Sen. Barrett, who has always struck me as the Senate’s “Mr. Environment”.