Honda Promises Jamie Lee Curtis A Clarity: "I Felt Like I Won an Oscar"
As if. Still the woman once awarded "the best breasts in Hollywood" nod by every hetrosexual male in America is over-the-moon in love with Honda's PR-mobile: the hydrogen fuel-cell-powered Clarity. "Our family is going to pay for the privilege of having the chance to show, by action, a car that is an alternative to gasoline," she told CBS News. Note: "is going to." Yes, CBS and Jamie Lee are hyping the Clarity before it's been delivered. And once again, the mainstream media is happy to talk about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as if the liquified gas in their tanks is made by zero-emissions pixies. Hello? It takes energy to make hydrogen. And that means CO2 and plenty of it (solar shmolar). While we await numerous opportunities to highlight this inconvenient truth, CBS points out the echt drawback to JLC's Clarity and its hy-powered ilk. "But the real problem with these cars is keeping them filled up – there are very few fueling stations. Even here in Southern California with the greatest concentratrion [sic] of stations, there are still fewer than 20. In the meantime, [Vasilios] Manousiouthakis makes do. His [hydrogen-powered Mercedes] car can only travel 80 miles on a tank of fuel, and the nearest hydrogen station is 10 miles from his home. On this day, the fuel pump is broken. With the nearest hydrogen station another 10 miles away, Manousiouthakis knows his car won't make it. "I need desperately fuel right now. I'm literally on fumes so I cannot get out," he says. It takes two men and a consultant on the phone to solve the problem. "It takes commitment," says Manousiouthakis. Or something.
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Um, do you have that vidcap from "Trading Places"? You know what I mean.
Loserboy: Microchips didn’t need massive government subsidies to get invented or widely adopted. Unlike alt-fuel boondoggles, the advantages of integrated circuits were legion. That's not true, not a word of it. The Minuteman missile program and the Apollo program paid for the early ramp up of microchips and mass production technology. Those were government programs. Massive, expensive ones. Government subsidies. The advantages of integrated circuits were theoretical, not widely understood, and, in some quarters, doubted. (Should we talk about other high technology that required massive government subsidies, like the internet?) When you leave energy policy in the hands of private corporations, you get E85. You like E85, right?
Not so fast, Faster. Government expenditures on practical applications such as military or infrastructure or even space exploration are not the same as "subsidies". There is a HUGE difference in the government going to a private company, or even working with a private company to build something useful, and giving a grant to a corporation, or subsidizing a particular behavior because it thinks it's good for the general welfare. The former often gets us useful stuff, as discussed, but the latter has a much lower return on investment. One can make a good argument that the former is necessary, but the latter just isn't. Sorry.