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Posted January 30, 2003
Most of us who despise the current president share a working theory about the man: he may not be very smart, but that doesn't mean he lacks wily charms (despite the counter-evidence of our knee-jerk revulsion), or (more importantly) that his friends and colleagues are not both clever and dangerous. So, given the sharpness of his cohorts, when Bush presents a speech to Congress, we expect the thing to have been gone over by multiple handlers wiser than he, and we expect it to be polished, to lack the numbskull touches that he gives to his extemporaneous comments.
But lo and behold, there were corkers in the State of the Union Address. Perhaps Bush's friends aren't so smart after all. For example, when proposing more than a billion dollars to be thrown at the idea of a hydrogen-powered car, our president said this:
A simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes.
I've been following this utopian vision of hydrogen power since I was a kid, and I understand the appeal of burning hydrogen to produce, as exhaust, water. But at the risk of striking a pedantic pose, I must insist: the water produced is indeed exhaust, by definition, and since hot, it is steam, a vapor. That is, fumes, Mr. President.
Now, I am not a chemist. I have no special knowledge. But I can read, and I understand the basic properties of the most common, everyday elements. And in all my reading, the water droplets
that sometimes appear in descriptions of the after-effects of hydrogen burning must be understood as condensation, not as the initial exhaust from the chemical reaction of rapid oxidation of hydrogen. And most descriptions of hydrogen cars state the truth as I've stated it here, that the exhaust of a hydrogen-powered car is steam.
Some will no doubt excuse the president for his misstatement, and characterize it as a poetic
or rhetorical
hyperbole. I won't. It seems to me just an inelegant and inaccurate flub, something someone who doesn't know the first thing about hydrogen might say to others who don't care, really, about accuracy or precision. I gather that most people didn't wince when they heard Bush lapse into error.
And this won't be the first time that the general public forgives a politician an inanity while I express dismay. Worse yet, the president also lies, and lies through his teeth, and the country forgives him that, too, as they did our previous president. The lies are much more dangerous than this inanity, of course. But as I mark the lies (as I did in a recent column), I also feel compelled to mark the inanities, too.
Both the lies and the inanities are rhetorical devices, of course, intended to make more persuasive shaky cases for bad policy: war in the case of the most recent lies, and a research boondoggle in the case of the fumes
inanity.
But still, couldn't his smart friends have rephrased the president's short foray into chemistry, to make it accurate? Wouldn't a rewrite like this have worked?
A simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing as exhaust not pollution, but simple steam, water.
But perhaps they figured that the more accurate they were, the more likely people would turn to science, and then to the reasons why hydrogen is such a poor source of energy. Unlike petroleum, there are no cheap sources of hydrogen on our planet. Most of the hydrogen is already oxidized, in the world's impure water supplies, requiring expensive investments of energy to liberate that lightest of atoms so we can oxidize it again when and where we want it oxidized. Even if a car were made to burn hydrogen efficiently, the hydrogen production and distribution system would be far less efficient, and far, far more costly than our current source of energy.
As it is, the president's silly phrasing reminds me of something one of my nuttier friends once said to me: that he disapproved of nuclear energy because it actually destroyed matter, and, as a Buddhist, he was against destruction.
My friend's level of scientific understanding is echoed, sans the Buddha, in our current president's multi-million dollar rathole investment. This should not please us. Americans should be alarmed to learn that the president is, on the subject of hydrogen (as on much else), all wet.
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